Old School is the Best School

I was sitting around my parents’ house a few days ago watching T.V. with one of my nephews.  I needed this break from campus because just too many people were wanting to hang out, asking for autographs, or wanting to just touch me in general.  I know, it’s hard to imagine that I’m that popular but what do you expect with a nickname like “Jet”.  I’m kinda a big deal…a really big deal. Ok, enough of the shameless self-promotion, back to my very important topic.  OK, so I’m being a huge loser watching cartoons with my 9-year-old nephew.   It had been awhile since I’ve watched actual Saturday morning cartoons since I became a big boy and graduated to AdultSwim (Venture Brothers, Family Guy, etc).  I was excited to return to my glory days of mindless fascination but I was disappointed to find that I was oddly bored with all of the cartoons that I watched.  It mainly seemed like every other show was an attempt at copying Spongebob humor or an attempt to be EXTREME and AWESOME!!!  Where were all of the goofy cartoons that really rode their characters’ personalities to be funny or used the time-tested formula of mixing humans and animals?

When I fondly think back to those days in my whimsical and fabtaborous childhood when cartoons were entertaining I think of cartoons that had some gusto, plain old goofy ass gusto.  I know that you might be thinking, “Whoa! T.C., you can’t compare the cartoons of today and yesteryear because you are much older and your tastes have changed” and this idea just scares the crap outta you!  I completely agree with this but I have recently watched some of those old cartoons like Teenage Mutant ninja Turtles (the good version) and Street Sharks and I still loved them.  I loved the bright pretty colors, the extremely cheesy one-liners, and of course the skateboarding turtles and roller blading tiger sharks.  These old cartoons, the 2 aforementioned ones in particular combine everything that made being a kid growing up in the late 80’s and 90’s just sooooo good.   It combined extremely cheesy jokes.  You know that every little kid thinks they are a new-age Richard Pryor when they are spittin’ out gut busting lines like “Your momma is so stupid, she locked herself in the bathroom and pooped her pants!”  This is actually pretty funny but I am a very immature 22-year-old (I need a life…I’m so alone) back to reality!  Ok, these cartoons also combined the 2 best things for kids back in the day 1) Sports and 2) The hope of being mutated into a huge muscular mutant of a badass animal.  For example, when I was young my favorite animal was the noble and majestic donkey.  At the time I was very into skateboarding and there would be nothing more exciting to me than being a skateboarding, chick getting, donkey-boy.  Nothing could have topped that…not even having real friends.

I just think modern cartoons should try to stop being so extreme; we get enough of that in the movies.  I watch cartoons to be goofy, to unwind and pretend that I am donkey-boy, the protector of justice!  Until the day when cartoons revert back to being awesome and lame I guess I’ll just suck it up.  The current formula is what the kids crave.  All they want is gratuitous sex and violence…was that Cartoon Network my nephew was watching or skinamax?  Hmmm, I really need to start paying attention to what’s going on and stop reminiscing about donkey-boy…and another thing, why was skinamax reminding me of donkey-boy? Was there a donkey in one of the shows?  Why was it there..more importantly, what was it doing and why was my nephew watching it?  Hmmmm, interesting… that cheeky little monkey. -TCR

Tags: Cartoons, StreetSharks, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 6th, 2010 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Cartoons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.