I get these questions a lot, so I’m answering it here and including it in the FAQ:
Is Lunatics a “children’s cartoon”?
Is Lunatics okay for kids to watch?
(TL;DR version: “NO” and “PROBABLY, but with some qualifications”)
Apparently in the USA, animation still has the stigma of being targeted only at children. As an animation fan, I had thought that after the “anime invasion” of the 1990s and 2000s that we’d be past this, but I still get asked, so here’s my response:
Lunaticsis NOT “just for kids” nor even primarily for kids. The main target audience is adults, and some of the humor (and drama) will probably require an adult perspective to fully understand.
However, this is not to say that it’s not appropriate for kids — we’d like the show to be accessible to all ages. We won’t dumb down any plots for this purpose, but there will be plenty of material that kids will understand as well as anyone else, and of course we do present Georgiana Lerner’s point of view along with the others in order to put things into a child’s perspective. And a lot of what we’re talking about is pretty universal.
So hopefully the stories won’t go “over the heads” of children so much that they can’t enjoy it.
As for whether it is appropriate for children in terms of “mature content”, that’s likely to be a matter of some debate. Some parents are very sensitive to things that we don’t consider important (or appropriate) to shelter children from. So let me be a little more detailed:
- VIOLENCE: Almost NONE. This is primarily a story about family life and so there’s a really very low “body count”, especially for the science-fiction genre. We do have some instances of people not being very nice to each other, and there is just ONE violent, accidental death in Season 1, and it’s not a main character who dies.
- SEXUALITY: We have adult characters who act like adults. No. REALLY like adults. There are two stable marriages here with people who never cheat on their spouses and remain in love with each other. We also have some single people — one who dates and one who doesn’t. Some of the minor characters are divorced or living separately from spouses (“military marriages”) or in other situations. Adults have sexual relationships, and we’re not hiding that.
- IMITATIVE BEHAVIOR: Sorry. There’s probably a lot of this. Some of the things Tim gets up to are probably not good things to emulate. Hopefully this will be clear to most audiences, but we’re not censoring it.
- ALCOHOL & DRUGS: Again, we have adults. Adults do some of these things. Our principal characters don’t use drugs most people consider “illicit”. They do consume some alcohol, though not to excess. Other characters may have different sensibilities, and we won’t be censoring this to “protect” the audience.
- LANGUAGE: Adults cuss sometimes. In our show, the main adults are parents themselves and have the habit of trying not to cuss in front of their children. However, they may do so when they think their children aren’t listening or when they are very stressed. We’re not going to censor this, either, because we feel it would detract from the realism (and sometimes the humor). However, these are not the kind of people who use harsh language all the time. Other characters may be less careful, according to their personality and environment. (Okay, look: there’s an occasional “F-bomb” in the dialog in later episodes, but this doesn’t happen often).
Also, regarding the language specifically, there is a neat solution, which we are probably going to use:
The original soundtrack for Lunatics will be “true language”. This means, for example, that if a Russian character speaks to another Russian character, that dialog will be voiced in Russian and we’ll add subtitles for English-speaking viewers. This already creates a problem for some younger viewers (and dyslexic adults) who may be uncomfortable keeping up with subtitles.
So, we are probably going to also record “English-only” versions of those scenes. These will be included on a second soundtrack. And while we’re at it, we’ll probably tone down any offensive language on that track so that it’s truly “all audiences”. I’m hoping this will satisfy any parents who are uncomfortable with their kids hearing this kind of language — and I don’t want kids to not be able to see the show just because of this issue.
We are not, however, going to pretend that what is obviously vodka on screen is “mineral water” as some anime dubs have done!
Adults who don’t want to have the dialog “watered down” can listen to the “true language” track — I think this is a neat way to serve both audiences.
Other language dubs should be similarly “single-language”, and I’d recommend they follow the same pattern. There’s probably going to be one in Spanish, contributed as a “fan dub” by an allied project that we’re already in contact with. I don’t know about other languages yet.
With the possible exception of language, there won’t be anything here that wouldn’t have been aired on network TV over the last 20 years or so, and certainly nothing that would violate cable TV standards. If you let your kids watch Star Trek or Buffy the Vampire Slayer then they’ve probably already seen worse than they’ll see in Lunatics. So, IN MY OPINION, it’s pretty kid safe.
