Life is more than just hard work, learning and kaizen (the Japanese word for continuous improvement).
TV shows are now assuming production quality in the past associated with movies and story arcs of great complexity and sublety. Even when my kids watch old classics like Heckle and Jeckle and Looney Toons and Steamboat Willy they watch them on 60" screens and 100" home movie screens as opposed to the 13" screens I saw them on as a kid. And I bought the Heckle and Jeckels from Ebay, grabbed the Looney Toons from Tivos because so much is not on DVD yet, and I buy the old shows off Amazon because the stores just don't have them in stock and Amazon has vendors selling them at better prices even if the stores did. Amazing how the futristic WWW and High Tech devices make old classics even nicer.
As I read my son and daughter Kirby and Lee Fantastic Four comics at bedtime from gorgeous Marvel Masterworks printing we then go to a theatre and a full screen Fantastic Four movie at the theatre that even captures the heart of my 5 year old daughter and 7 year old son as they see live people with amazing effects recreating the comics I read them to sleep with. And multicultural awareness produces amazing stories like Spiderman India that gives us Aunt Maya, a spiderman in Bangalore instead of New York and allows my kids to see that Indian culture can infise whole new styles to their fave superheroes.
Movies are reaching whole new heights of quality as International and Independent films find larger audiences due to distribution, home theatres and people just becoming more multi-cultural due to cheap air travel.
Electronic games I enjoyed as a child are now are now FREE on the internet in classic and improved versions, and Gamecubes, Xbox 360s, Wiis, DS and Gameboys allow my children to play thought provoking gorgeous games if I play them well. And Game Designers produce whole new kinds of games Pikmin 1 and 2 to show us how SciFi can be fun, thoughtful and gorgeous.
And the Internet makes it possible for me from my apartment in South Carolina to buy rare pikmin toys from a woman in Osaka, Japan and ask her to ship them to my son in Suginami-ku Tokyo. Flea Markets and interantional commerce available in ways never dreamed of a century ago.