I get the most random pieces of music stuck in my head. For the last three days it’s been the theme to Super Chicken. The cartoon shorts, not the porn site you pervert. The weird thing about this is, until last night I had never seen Super Chicken. The cartoon is from 16 years before I was born. Thanks to extreme boredom last night, I have now seen every short. It was weird, stupid and funny all at the same time. Not stupid in the way the worthless crap that passes for comedy these days is (Will Farrell, I’m looking at you here), but stupid as in the stuff little kids find amusing.
It got me thinking though about the differences in what kids watch for cartoons. I grew up with Count Duckula, Danger Mouse, Scooby Doo, Inspector Gadget, Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry and so forth. My ex-girlfriends kids watch Sponge Bob, Johnny Test, Fairly Odd Parents and those kinds of cartoons. I hear all these guys from my generation bitching about how the cartoons were better when we were kids and how stupid the stuff kids watch today is. But seriously, looking back at those cartoons, were they really any better? Or is it that we’re giving them a pass because we remember them fondly, but we don’t do that for modern cartoons because were in that awkward late-20s stage where we’re “too old” to get into them?
Personally, having spent time watching cartoons with 2 adorable (and slightly psychotic) examples of todays kids, I think its the second explanation. Seeing those kids and how they react to modern cartoons reminds me of how I reacted to the cartoons I grew up on. It’s not the cartoons that are the problem, it’s us. So sit down, shut up, watch a couple cartoons, and remember for one day what it was like to be a child.
