In Honor of A Nightmare on Elm Street remake

The upcoming feature film remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street is indicative of a number of things, including a) a creatively bankrupt entertainment industry that has exhausted its resources of shock and irony long beyond their shelf life, and b) a receptive audience that doesn't really seem to care. But upon hearing about this, I remembered a show called 'Freddy's Nightmares,' which I was too young to watch in its original run but caught a few amusing clips of on youtube a while back.

The intro can be viewed here.

The show was produced when both the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchises were at the zenith of their popularity, going at a rate of about a film a year for each. Unlike those however, 'Freddy's Nightmares' was aired on television and aimed at children in an environment where it is well-known that parents have a great deal less control, and that there are no theater ushers preventing entry for kids too young to otherwise see the film. But 'Freddy's Nightmares' is realy indicative of a few other things, as well.

1) This represents an instance in which television was used in conjunction with film (not to mention music in the form of soundtracks, merchandise) to push a product on people. It really wasn't even entertainment anymore, it was simply a multi-pronged marketing attack to make sure that people were as aware as possible of 'A Nightmare on Elm Street.' In later years, things like this would become as integral as the film itself, perhaps even more so, with absurd instances like 'The Secret World of M. Night Shyamalan,' in which they actually claimed that he was able to see ghosts, only to reveal the very next day that it was all a hoax.

Is marketing still an annoying hindrance, or have we walked forward into a new world where that sort of thing is just sort of the nature of the game? Is this something that people should be outraged by? Maybe just a little bit?

What is the product here? The tv show or the film? Or 'Spaceballs: The Flame Thrower'?

2) This represents probably the first time in which American culture has chosen a child murderer/pedophile as a cultural figure worthy of entertaining children.

3) On a personal note, I have something of a fondness for the original 'Nightmare on Elm Street,' and the seventh film in the series firmly positions them on top of the mid-90s self-referential horror heap. While slasher films are generally viewed as Reagan-era reactions to the free love of the 60s, in which children are punished for their freedom, 'Nightmare' separates itself from the lot with one key difference: Freddy Krueger is an adult, whereas Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees are both stunted children. If a town acting complicitly with a child murderer (and the adults are never any help in any of these) isn't a direct slam on draft-era suburbia, then I don't know what is.