#4- Cartoon-tastic!

As the parent of two young children, I watch a lot of cartoons against my will. Not awesome, grownup cartoons like The Simpsons, Family Guy, Robot Chicken (not technically a cartoon, I know, shut up!), Futurama, Bob's Burgers, and American Dad, I love those ones.  What about cancelled classics like The Critic, Home Movies, Dr. Katz, The Oblongs, Beavis & Butthead, King of the Hill?  Those were great too.  And to a lesser extent of awesomeness, but still admirable, you've got your Aqua Team Hunger Forces, Cleveland Shows, Space Ghosts, Metalocalypses, the list is endless.  Don't forget the 'kid' shows that are really for (immature) adults; some of my favorites from back in the day were gems like Dexter's Laboratory (la-BOR-atory), Powerpuff Girls, Johnny Bravo. Following in those fabulous footsteps are current fun times like Spongebob Squarepants and Phineas & Ferb.  Almost all animated Disney features (the ones that are released to theaters, not the straight-to-DVD horror shows) and Pixar products are purely sublime eye-gasms.

Of course, we mustn't forget Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes!  Roadrunner & Coyote, Bugs & Daffy, or Bugs & Elmer Fudd, and the Bugs Bunny in space episodes, with Marvin the Martian and the crazy space-yeti monster (I will love him and squeeze him and call him George)!  Was it a space yeti or an earth yeti? Either way, it was marvelous.  Oh, oh, remember those Foghorn Leghorn ones with the tiny but determined chicken hawk?!  Or the sweet, insane rapist, Pepi Le Pew!  Tom & Jerry!  But that's Hanna Barbara, not Warner Brothers.  Hey, remember Jerry's uncle that had the huge-tiny mouse cowboy hat and played his tiny mouse guitar and sang all mumbly until he yelled, 'CRAMBO!!'? Holy crap, they were so classic, so wonderfully violent and included little to no dialogue so they could transcend age and language barriers. Everyone can find something entertaining about those oldies.

That was quite the cartoon-tangent I just went on.  I'd say I'm sorry, but... I'm not.  It was totally necessary.

Needless to say from that long list of proof that I've wasted my life in front of the T.V., I love cartoons.  I prefer the animated medium to live action, in fact.  Cartoons are just, prettier.  Better color palettes, more vibrant.  There's also so much more room for story telling.  Any genre, any time, any place, anywhere.  The writers and animators aren't confined by the rules of physics, there are no CGI budgets, and the actors don't have to age or get into horrible, eyeball-poking-out accidents or develop drug/alcohol/sex addictions.  The creators have much more control over every aspect of their characters' world.  I think I lot more creativity can be squished out of a situation like that, and that can make for much more entertainment opportunities.

Now, back to my opening statement.  Since I have said children, and I'm much too lazy to do something as ridiculous as not letting them watch TV, they watch a lot of 'preschool programming'. After so many years of watching these 'educational' shows, either while half-asleep, half-listening, or three-quarters-drunk, I no longer can stand the banality of this vast animated empire of sweet, cherub-faced, audience addressing demons.  I'm not speaking in generalities here, many cartoons aimed towards toddlers and preschoolers are wonderfully charming and actually educational to boot.  Some of them, however, SOME of them are just fucking awful.

I've seen crazy continuity issues, grammatical errors, random anthropomorphicalities and general technical inaccuracies have gotten to a point that it has melted my brain.  I have for many years excused these things as imagination allowances.  Kid cartoon characters playing make-believe don't have to accurately depict how long it would actually take to get to the moon., or that Saturn isn't actually small enough for a 'person' to sit upon it like it was a giant hippity-hop.  Or that its rings aren't really solid enough to bounce and flip around the planet like a... I don't even know, some kind of twirly-twirl-do-dah.  But when my six-year-old watching says, 'aren't planets supposed to spin around (i.e. orbit)?', I have to admit that they're just fucking awful, stupid and terrible cartoons.

But what am I do to?  Wage war against the children's entertainment industry?  That probably won't turn out well (anybody remember 'Death to Smoochy'?  No?).  It's a gigantic, indestructible industry that has some powerful players, from a bald, Canadian 4 year-old, to a personality-impaired Latina girl with a simian companion, all the way up to a shirtless, giant-eared rodent that is most likely in control of the Universe.  Shit, I can't even buy diapers without some brand name cartoon on it.

Why don't you just buy cloth diapers, you say? Or perhaps organic ones that don't lower themselves to commercial endorsements? Why don't you  just not let your children watch such television, and just not purchase the toys they want and instead buy them well-crafted, unique and brain stimulating toys from individual retailers and not soulless mega stores?  Because I'm not a fucking millionaire, that's why.  I live in the real world and have to worry about paying my mortgage and squeezing the very last drop out of the laundry detergent bottle.

I would love to have the time, money and energy to escape from the gelatinous children-centric media blob and its slimy ooze that coats everything it touches with smiling, vapid creatures from what surely must be the seventh-level of Hell.  But I don't.  So I remind the ol' offspring that fairy tales and happily-ever-afters are, unfortunately, just stories that aren't real.  I do stuff like talk to them about the human digestive system during dinner, complete with pictures from my old anatomy book.  I always answer their questions honestly, and walk the fine line between abetting their belief in magic and feeling guilty about tricking them with Easter eggs.  In short, I do the best I can with what I got.  And I watch a lot of fucking (good) cartoons to ease the pain.