Cultural references, filtered

I was sitting outside Nutcracker rehearsals yesterday. Another dad was sitting with his son and younger daughter, who took classes there but wasn’t in the Nutcracker. At one point the studio door opened and the music spilled out, and she exclaimed, “Barbie In the Nutcracker!” A pause, and then, “I never get to dance to Barbie In The Nutcracker music….”
Well, I’m sure Tchaikovsky, P.I., would be, at the least, confused to find that a child of the Aughts thinks his most famous work was produced for, or possibly by, an 11-inch plastic doll with a serious shoe fetish. Popular culture used to be a doorway to “higher” culture, and I think some of that has been lost, especially in cartoons of today. Shows like “Rocky & Bullwinkle” and their subsets were loaded with references to historical events and the arts that formed the basis of my understanding. I had seen some form of the Mona Lisa in cartoons dozens of times before I ever saw a picture of the real thing. There was an entire arc of Bullwinkle that featured “The Ruby Yacht of Omar Kayam” — believe me, it was YEARS before that meant anything. Bugs Bunny, with less wit and success, did a few historical cartoons as well. Nowadays there is a little bit of that again in shows like Spongebob Squarepants and The PowerPuff Girls, but that’s after a very long drought.
So, if a little girl thinks that the Nutcracker music (which can be just as brain-sticky as “Holly Jolly Christmas”) came from a highly annoying computer-animated feature that has almost nothing to do with the original Nutcracker story, that’s fine. Someday she’ll discover the original and it will already be full of associations for her.