The Difference Between High Culture and Low Culture is Measured in Dexter's Laboratory

"Classic: a book which people praise and don't read."
-Mark Twain

In a college course I took back in the 1970's, the professor asked the class "What is the difference between high culture and low culture?" After a long pause while the other students pondered this question, I broke the silence by saying "About 12 feet". That got a laugh, but hopefully it also made the point that this distinction between high culture, (i.e. the art worthy of serious academic study), and low culture (the popular trash that academics should scorn) is taken way too seriously. As is often pointed out, much of what we now consider "high culture" (the plays of Shakespeare, the Viennese operas) were the popular culture of their times. Many revered artists have worked in supposedly "low brow" arts. Lyonel Feininger, a leading figure in the modern art movement, once did a newspaper comic, The Kin-Der-Kids.

For that reason, I particularly enjoyed this YouTube video, Requiem for a Dexter. This video looks at Requiem for a Dream, a highly revered film that tells the story of four young people's experiences with illegal drugs. The point of this short is that many of the innovations of this independent feature film actually appeared two years earlier in a Dexter's Laboratory cartoon, "Topped Off", where Dexter and his sister Dee-Dee experiment with this mysterious substance that seems so important to their parents: coffee.

I doubt that the creators of "Requiem for a Dream", consciously stole anything from "Dexter's Laboratory". Most likely, Darren Aronofsky (the director of "Requiem for a Dream") and Genndy Tartakovsky (the creator of "Dexter's Laboratory" and director of "Topped Off") independently devised the same innovations for the stories they told. But why does Aronofsky earn so much more accolades than Tartakovsky for basically the same ideas, especially since Tartakovsky came up with these ideas first?

Dexter's Laboratory makes me think that my initial estimate of difference between high culture and low culture (12 feet) may be a bit on the high side.