Kid Stuff: Cartoons

Thesis: in the English-speaking world, the last 50 years has seen a dramatic increase in the quantity *and quality* of text and visual mass media intended for children.

Let’s define some terms.  I’m talking about books, cartoons, TV, and movies. Music is not included; comics and graphic novels are a special case. When I say “intended for children”, I am talking about mass media that is targeting children aged 4-12 as the primary audience. So, yes Disney movies are included here, no the original Star Wars movies are not. Kids absolutely watched Star Wars — I watched it as a kid — but they weren’t the primary audience.

Stuff aimed at the youngest children is excluded here, as is Young Adult stuff. (I agree that the boundaries of the latter category are very slippery.)

Detail to the thesis: this transformation was not smooth. To simplify, from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, text and visual mass media products for children were generally mediocre to bad. There were individual works that were good or excellent, but the average was dismally low. And the quality was not much better at the end of this period than at the beginning.

But starting in the back half of the 1980s, kids movies, TV, books and cartoons suddenly started getting /better/. And they got steadily better and better for the next 15 or 20 years, until by the middle 2000s they had reached a new plateau of excellence, from which they are perhaps only now just starting to descend. The period 1970-1985 was a dark age of kid stuff; the period 2000-2020 was a golden age. There was a massive cultural transformation here.  And it happened fairly quickly, and it’s been discussed much less than you might expect.


A personal note: I was a kid in the 1970s, watching standard American kids TV and movies, reading typical kids books.  And then in the early 2000s I had kids of my own.  So I had first-hand experience of both the Dark and Golden Ages.  And I repeatedly had the experience of watching a cartoon, TV show or movie with my kids and thinking, good lord — this is /so/ much better than the stuff I had when I was a kid.

I’m going to start with a discussion of kids cartoons, here defined as animated stories for kids, aged 4-12, broadcast on mainstream television.  I’m starting with animated kids cartoons for two reasons.  First, they’re a fairly clearly well defined genre.  Archer, South Park, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force are animated, but they’re not aimed at kids 4 to 12.  The Electric Company and The Muppet Show were aimed at those kids, but they weren’t animated.  There are a few edge cases — I’ve seen people argue over The Simpsons and Bob’s Burgers — but by and large we can sort most TV shows into Clearly Are or Clearly Aren’t.

Second, the jump in quality is just staggering.  Watching Avatar: The Last Airbender with my kids was a profoundly different experience from watching Wacky Racers when I was their age.  A: TLA is a kid’s cartoon, with a plot that a six year old can follow without difficulty.  I know this, because my six year old followed it.  But it’s a very intelligent kids cartoon with clever writing, witty dialogue, beautiful animation, interweaving storylines, and some fairly complex narrative techniques.  And it’s one that touches on some very deep and dark issues.  (Starting with the fact that the protagonist is a genocide survivor, and no I’m not kidding, and yes this is handled in a way that is thoughtful but age-appropriate.)  Even lighter and sillier fare — Phineas and Ferb, say — was just infinitely smarter and funnier than anything that was being produced during my childhood.  

The transformation was astonishing and extreme.  I have met people who’ve tried to claim that kids music hasn’t gotten that much better, or kids books.  I haven’t met anyone who disagrees that cartoons from the 1970s and early 1980s mostly sucked, while the ones since 2000 are just ridiculously better.  

I said above that this stuff hasn’t been much discussed, but animation in TV and (especially) movies is a partial exception.  There’s general agreement in the academic world that there was a First Golden Age of American animation (roughly 1930 to the early 1960s), followed by a Second Golden Age (traditionally dated to begin with the release of Disney’s _The Little Mermaid_ in 1989). 

What comes between is less discussed.  That’s because this was the age of Hanna-Barbera.  Hanna Barbera had produced some mildly okay stuff in the 1960s — the Flintstones, Jonny Quest, the original Scooby-Doo.  But by the 1970s they were cranking out D-list garbage:  The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, Jabberjaw, Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels, Speed Buggy, the Funky Phantom, CB Bears, Super Friends.

Understand that I’m talking here about stuff /created/ in the 1970s and early 1980s.  There were a few good animated cartoons on TV back then.  But almost without exception, they were from an earlier period — Bugs Bunny from the 1940s, Road Runner and Rocky and Bullwinkle from the 1950s, the Pink Panther and How The Grinch Stole Christmas and the Peanuts Christmas and Halloween specials from the 1960s.  If you go to ranker.com and look for “best cartoons of the 1970s”?  10 out of 12 are actually from earlier decades.  (The remaining two are The Muppet Show and Schoolhouse Rock.)

What wasn’t Hanna-Barbera back then was relentlessly recycled IP.  Version after version of Scooby Doo; version after version of Tom and Jerry.  Spinoffs — the Flintstones gave rise to a bunch of them including the inexplicable Pebbles and Bam-Bam Show, Yogi Bear gave us Yogi’s Gang and Yogi’s Space Race, the Wacky Races somehow gave rise to three different spinoff shows.  There were something like five different versions of Super Friends.  /And they were all terrible/ — bad animation, weak voice acting, formulaic writing, predictable plots.

Were there bright spots?  A very few.  I mentioned Schoolhouse Rock.  The animation was terrible, and the politics were sometimes questionable (google “elbow room” for an example) but hey, civic education plus catchy memorable songs.  But the overall standard was miserably, dismally low.  

Okay, so let’s compare the 1970s to… oh let’s say the decade 2001-2010.  We turn on the television and —

Phineas and Ferb.  Samurai Jack.  Danny Phantom.  Kim Possible. Sean the Sheep.  Invader Zim.  As Told By Ginger.   Fairly Odd Parents.   Justice League.  Justice League Unlimited.  Jimmy Neutron.  Charlie and Lola.  Teen Titans.  Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends.  My Life As A Teenage Robot.  Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars.  Ben Ten.  Ben Ten: Alien Force.  X-Men: Evolution.  My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy.  Avatar, The Last Airbender.   

/And I could keep going/.  Even the mediocre shows from the 2000s were far better than anything from the 1970s.  Like, my kids enjoyed Spectacular Spider-Man, which ran for a few seasons starting in 2009.  Objectively this was a by-the-numbers superhero cartoon.  But it had very good animation, complex stories with multiple plotlines, more-than-competent writing, and solid voice acting.  You put it next to Super Friends and… yeah, there’s literally no comparison.  Or, The Secret Saturdays was a throwaway C-list show to fill half an hour on Saturday morning. It was basically Jonny Quest updated for the 21st century.  But it had decent animation, clever dialogue, a racially mixed tween protagonist and an antagonist who was just ridiculously meta.*

Sure, there’s room for criticism.  A lot of the 2000s stuff was very gendered.    (Sometimes you can see exactly what they were thinking, like the Token Girl in the boys adventure — looking at you, Ben Ten.**)  A lot of it was “toyetic”, there to sell toys and video games.  There were some duds — there are always some duds.  Nobody is getting too nostalgic over Skunk Fu, Bratz, or Mr. Bean: The Animated Series.  And a lot of it was reworking of old IPs, particularly of superheroes.

But on the other hand, a lot of it was breathtakingly original.  Like, who ever came up with Invader Zim?  Foster’s Home?  The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy?  “A grumpy tween girl and her idiot little brother win a bet with Death and force him to be their best friend forever.  Death has a strong Jamaican accent.”  What?  And a lot of it had positive messages about tolerance and acceptance:  As Told By Ginger had the first BM / WF relationship on an American kids show, the X-Men cartoons leaned hard into the “metaphor for being a minority or queer”, Avatar: TLA was an extended discussion of dealing with trauma, Danny Phantom has become a gay / trans icon***, and don’t even get me started on My Little Pony.  

And even when a show was just a superhero cartoon designed to sell action figures, the quality of the writing and animation was often astonishingly high.  My Little Pony was supposed to be a throwaway show about plastic toy ponies.  It ended up having, let us say, some large and very unexpected cultural impacts. Even the stuff based on weary, tired old IPs could be good — 2010’s Scooby Doo: Mysteries Incorporated is universally agreed to be the best of the dozen-plus versions of Scooby Doo.****

— Okay, so at this point some of you may pause and say, well, the best of the dozen-plus versions of Scooby Doo?  Gosh, that seems like an important cultural phenomenon!

To which I respond, this is froth, but the froth is outlining the wave.  There was an immense cultural shift in children’s entertainment; it happened very quickly; both its causes and effects are underdiscussed and poorly understood.  And kids cartoons were at the extreme edge of that shift.

Now, to be clear, television in general did get better during this period.  The 2000s were the age of The Wire, Six Feet Under, Arrested Development, Deadwood, Dexter, The Thick Of It, The Street, both versions of The Office, and New Who.  So, perhaps it’s just that television generally was improving, and the rising tide lifted all boats?

Two problems there.  One, the gap simply isn’t as large.  There was some damn good TV back in the 1970s.  All In The Family, The Carol Burnett Show, The Bob Newhart Show, Colombo, Kojak, The Rockford Files, Barney Miller, M*A*S*H, Taxi, the amazing first six seasons of Saturday Night Live.  Our British cousins had Coronation Street, Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers, Are You Being Served, Monty Python.  A lot of that stuff is still watchable today — hell, a lot of that stuff is still *watched* today.  Colombo has been enjoying a modest revival recently, and my teenage children are at least vaguely familiar with Monty Python sketches that aired decades before they were born.

Yes, there’s definitely a quality gap between Colombo and The Wire.  But it’s a lot smaller than the quality gap between Jabberjaw and Samurai Jack.  At least Colombo is good for what it is, you know?  The Office is better than The Bob Newhart Show, but it’s not “so much better it’s really a completely different sort of thing” better.

Second, as I said at the start, it wasn’t just kids TV.  It was kids movies and books and all sorts of other things.  We’ll get to that, but here’s advance notice: over the period 1970-2020, when an adult mass medium or genre improved in quality, the associated kids mass medium or genre usually improved in quality more and faster.  I’ll try to address some of that in future posts, if my strength holds.

 I’ve picked the 1970s and the 2000s as examples because (1) they’re just 30 years apart, (2) the quality gap is literally breathtaking, and (3) I personally experienced both those decades, as child and then parent.  But I could expand the focus and the thesis would hold.  Move back into the 1990s and, although there’s still great stuff — Batman: The Animated Series, Courage the Cowardly Dog, The Magic School Bus, Sponge Bob — the quality begins to fall rapidly.  Duck Tales?  Rug Rats?  Tiny Toon Adventures?  Not terrible but not great either.  Gargoyles and Animaniacs were ground-breaking at the time, but they pale in comparison to the stuff that was coming out a decade later.  Compared to the 2000s, there’s much less excellence, much more schlock.

In the other direction, move forward past 2010 and, whoo.  Gravity Falls?  Steven Universe?  Trollhunters?  Infinity Train?  Amazing World of Gumball?  Regular Show?  Adventure Time?  You don’t want to get me started on Adventure Time.  Let’s just say that if the golden age of kids cartoons has a local peak, it’s probably somewhere in the years around 2016.

Anyway, to recap: in the US/UK, the last 50 years have seen a dramatic increase in the quantity and quality of text and visual mass media intended for children.  This is a rise across the board, but it is perhaps most astonishing in the specific field of animated television shows — kids cartoons. 

More in a bit, perhaps.


*  The Secret Saturdays: a family of cryptozoologists hunts cryptids.  The villain, V.V. Argost, is the host of a horrible wildlife / reality TV show about cryptids.  The Saturdays want to save the cryptids, Argost wants to capture them.  His awful television series is a recurring show-within-the-show, often used to comment on the action and/or to satirize bad television.  As a villain, Argost is ridiculously campy and over-the-top, prone to monologues, self-congratulation, and literally mugging for the camera while he drops quotes from movies and TV shows. 

Plot twist: it turns out Argost is himself a cryptid, a highly intelligent yeti.  The reason he acts that way is, he’s a highly intelligent yeti who spent the entire decade of the 1980s watching cable TV.  He’s a walking pile of bad cliches because that’s how he learned human culture.

**Ben Ten was literally designed to capture the zeitgeist and — quite explicitly — to make its creators a pile of money by selling toys to tween boys.  (My tween boys owned several of them.) But even so, it was generally good, occasionally excellent, and had one of my favorite one-liners from any TV show ever:

Gwen:  Bad idea, Kevin.  He thinks you’re still evil.
Kevin:  I’m not evil.   [smugly]  I’m… nuanced.

***Queer-coding:  Danny is an adolescent boy whose parents are famous ghost-hunters.  An accident turns Danny into a half-ghost — so he can turn intangible, float, deliver chilling screams, and so forth.  Supernatural superhero fun, right?  Except he has to keep his powers secret — not to protect his loved ones, but to protect himself from them, because everyone knows that ghosts are monsters.  A recurring situation is Danny fretting about which of his friends he can trust with his secret.  A dark recurring gag is that Danny’s enemies all know what he is, while his parents remain clueless.

****That’s the one featuring an elderly Harlan Ellison voiced by elderly Harlan Ellison.