Recently...

My lads have got me stuck on their cartoons, like Avatar and Naruto.  So now that the first season of Jonny Quest is out on DVD, I decided to give them a peek at the kinds of adventure cartoons I grew up with.  I warned them in advance that the animation was limited and not nearly as flashy, and that the stories tended to be repetitive.

Generational culture shock, it seems, goes both ways.  About halfway thought the episode, they're staring, bug-eyed, at the screen.  Thinking something was amiss, I asked what was wrong.  The following exchange took place:

"Those... those are guns!"
"Yep.  When I was a kid, they used guns in cartoons."
"But they're kids!  Shooting guns!"
"Yes, Jonny and Hadji were taught the responsible use of firearms."
"They're killing bad guys!"
"Uh, yeah... my generation was pretty straightforward about dealing with people who tried to kill us."
"That is so cool!"

I love having boys. 

Admin Edit: moved from Gen. discussion to Animation forum.

  Yes, I sometimes feel that modern cartoons are just a tad...  erm...  too sheltered?

Your kids sound hilarious. 

You made my day with this.  Ah...for the days when cartoon violence was just that...cartoon violence!

Modern cartoon are generally too lazy. They take from comics nowdays when modern comics are starting to now take from 80s cartoons. I'm seeing alot of TMNT, Voltron, Thundercats, Battle of the planets, all of them are coming back.

I donno- I sometimes think cartoonists are lazy, but they pop out with the odd good one like Megas and a few others. All in all though, the good stuff on tv is either old, or previously a comic.

On Aug 14, 2007 12:26 am, arkillian said:

Not so much lazy, I think.  There's money to be made in nostalgia.  Those are the cartoon parents of today watched while growing up and they enjoyed them.  So they'll buy the DVD's and the toys for their own children.  And now that they have the technology to make these old...and really not so fantastic...series into live-action features, they're going to do it because they know they'll make money.

lol that's awesome there are few cartoons these days that are as good as the old ones. Avatar is definitely one of them.

As for lazy script writers and animators I totally agree. Barely any of the new cartoon shows are hand drawn (that I've seen anyway) most of them are done in flash or After Effects and they just redo all the old stories or take them from comics.

I agree about cartoons being too sheltered nowadays, it's all these people who don't want to admit they have bad kids and blame it on TV and Videogames. XD

Kinda reminds me of that South Park episode with George Lucas and Steven Spielburg remaking their old movies and turning guns into walkie talkies and calling Wookies "Hair-Challenged individuals" or something like that. Whatever happened to people getting hurt being funny? Ah the good ol' days where we could laugh at people's mistakes and call them names and not be troubled about being "Politically Correct." Or when people could die on TV without parents saying "No we have to protect our children from the inevitable!"

I don't know about you guys but I say let cartoon violence live!