"From fairytales to lifeworlds" - European Children's Film Series in the long 1960s

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Due to its analysis of children´s film series as an outstanding category of the long 1960s popular culture, which developed from the outset with reference to transnational discursive relations, the project is in some aspects highly innovative. Up to now, children´s film series have not been a subject of historical research, so that the project will provide new insights into media history in several perspectives: On the producers´ side it shows the shifts toward aspects of entertainment and taking the lifeworlds of children into consideration. As far as the question of distribution is concerned it contributes to relativize the American impact by underlining European exchange processes. With reference to consumers it can point out the changes of media consumption resulting from a leisure behaviour adapted to the conditions of TV consumption in terms of time and space, from changing viewing habits and from its consequences for communication within families and peer groups.The compatibility of the project to the debates of general contemporary history is guaranteed on the one hand by the insights the history of children´s film series provides into the national characteristics and the transnational convergences of social discourses from a European perspective. Differences in the scale of norms and values and in the understanding of liberality and tolerance in various countries become obvious from programme decisions and the thus connected discourses. On the other hand, the research on children´s film series focusing on the European programme trade points out to cultural, economic and political convergence and cooperation in Europe, in some case even across the Iron Curtain. Finally, more than in other segments of popular culture, children´s film series show socialisational and identificational effects within a European framework.