While formal schooling spearheaded the Islamic Republic of Iran's efforts to inculcate future generations in the ideology and values of the state following the 1979 Revolution, state socialization of the "children of the revolution" was not confined to textbooks and curriculum alone. This paper compares the images and messages found in postrevolutionary Farsi textbooks (Grades 1-3) with children's television programming broadcast in the IRI during the years 1979-1999. We argue that the religious and political messages found in both mediums were highly inconsistent over this period, and in the case of textbooks, greatly unstable. Far from constructing a coherent message as to what comprises the ideal Islamic Citizen, as is often presumed or asserted in the literature, textbooks and television in the first two decades of IRI rule combined to reveal a state cultural apparatus that was far from coherent or even always Islamic in character. Inconsistencies in the formal ideology of the state provided opportunities for parents and their children to develop subjectivities separate from that of the state, and to even use everyday programs such as children's cartoons as a refuge from political and social indoctrination.