Late last night as I was battling worry and insomnia, my TV remote transported me to the Cartoon Network where I encountered, for the first time  in 40 years, a minor Hanna-Barbara animated series called “The Perils of Penelope Pitstop.” Like all Hanna-Barbara shows, but especially the Saturday morning variety, “Penelope” was crudely drawn and aimed its humor at the lowest common denominator: compared to it, Woody Woodpecker is Faulkner. Drawn in by the comforting sounds of great vocal artists of the era like Mel Blanc and Paul Winchell, however, I watched about ten minutes of the show and realized, to my horror, that I now found it offensive…and not for the reason that I found it annoying in 1970 (it is, after all, moronic).

The plot of  every episode of “The Perils of Penelope Pitstop” (a spin-off of H-B’s more successful but just as repetitious and silly “Wacky Racers”) was the same. A female auto racer who is also a blonde, helpless bimbo with a Southern accent is stalked by a villain called “The Hooded Claw,” voiced by the great Paul Lynde.  The Hooded Claw, for no discernible reason,  concocts elaborate plots to kill Penelope, but is foiled, at the last second, every time. The cartoon is an obvious riff on “The Perils of Pauline,” the famous Pearl White silent movie cliffhanger serial in which each segment ended with the heroine tied to a railroad track or falling to earth dragging a collapsed parachute. Yet I found it impossible to appreciate the cartoon’s meager charms because of the loud clanging of  ethics alarms in my brain. Why is the only woman in the show portrayed as a walking, talking Barbie Doll? And why are kids being encouraged to laugh at a woman being stalked by a homicidal maniac? Because he’s an inept homicidal maniac? What could possibly be funny about stalking, an insidious phenomenon that every year leads to multiple murders?

“Oh my God,” I thought. “I’m politically correct!“

None of these things occurred to me in 1970; I’m not sure when my brain was anti-Penelope Pitstopped. I might have had some qualms about the show (other than the fact that it stinks) after young actress Rebecca Shaeffer was killed by a stalker in 1989, but probably not; I think it took many years of reading, listening and sometimes arguing with pop culture critics and women’s rights advocates who maintained that not even cartoons should stereotype women as sex objects and victims, and that making a joke out of stalking, even ridiculous stalking, trivialized a deadly societal problem. Whenever and however my shift in consciousness happened, it’s happened. I can’t turn off the switch. My ethics alarms have been set by the culture around me to go off at the sight of a dumb, fat cartoon villain in a mask and green cloak who sounds like the guy that used to be the center square on “The Hollywood Squares.”

I am officially incapacitated on this topic now. I can’t even venture an opinion as to  whether my objection to the show’s “attitudes” (I am very certain that the writers did not regard the cartoon as the result of  attitudes , but as a natural comic take on a classic movie genre) is reasonable or not. The seriousness of stalking has blown away all my deeply-ingrained deference to humor when watching “Penelope Pitstop”. Is this a valid cultural adjustment, or one more example of successful thought-control by the political correctness police?

Don’t ask me; you might as well ask Winston if Big Brother is really lovable.

I don’t mourn the loss of the inability to smile at or even tolerate a 1969-1970 children’s show, and I think it is possible, even likely, that stalking is one of those things, like child sexual abuse or genocide,  that should never be trivialized in mass media for entertainment purposes. Nevertheless I take this incident as a warning that the power of cultural consensus can alter our values without our even being conscious of it happening. The lesson  is that we cannot be passive, complacent or apathetic when we detect concerted efforts to turn the cultural battleship, regardless of the proposed new direction.

The wisdom and ethics of a cultural shift need to be considered, debated, challenged, and tested, and every one of us has a societal duty to be an active participant in the process. The consequences of absorbing  misguided social norms can be devastating. If we allow cultural values to be set by the loudest, the most zealous, the politically expedient or the most easily offended, rather than by rational evaluation, wisdom and objective analysis, we risk losing a lot more than “Penelope Pitstop.”