Stuff I Grew Up With: Cartoon Network

If you were a kid growing up in the 90's and you loved cartoons, there was no better channel than Cartoon Network. I must admit that it was the biggest part of my life throughout my childhood, alongside video games and movies. It seemed like no matter what time of day you happened upon this channel, you would see something great, from the classic Loony Tunes of Warner Bros., Tom and Jerry, Popeye, Hanna-Barbera shows like The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Yogi Bear, and action cartoons like Johnny Quest and Thundar the Barbarian. It was the dream of any cartoon lover, young or old. This is going to be my own personal retrospective on what Cartoon Network meant to my childhood. I will discuss many of the shows I mention in detail on future posts but this will be a general overview on the channel and my feelings towards it now.

I'm pretty sure that my aunt introduced me to Cartoon Network. From my childhood on up into adulthood, I visited her regularly on Fridays. One Friday when I was around five or six, she must have been looking for something to keep me occupied and knowing how much I loved cartoons, she turned it on. Our TV at home only had three channels at that time so I was not even aware that such a thing even existed. Loony Tunes just happened to be on and that kept my attention while my aunt did whatever she needed to do. Little did she know that she was creating an absolute obsession for that channel. For years, I'm sure she regretted having introduced that channel to me because that was all she got to watch on Fridays. Eventually, my parents got a satellite dish and the package that came with it included Cartoon Network. I was very happy little kid when I found out that I could now enjoy this channel whenever I wanted.

As a little kid, my first cartoon loves were Loony Tunes and Disney. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, the Roadrunner and the Coyote were all my heroes when I was a kid. Besides Cartoon Network, I watched them on Saturday mornings on ABC, as any kid of the 90's should have. When I started watching the ones shown on Cartoon Network, I noticed that there was a difference between the two. The ones on Cartoon Network always seemed "harder" in look than the ones on ABC. I know that's not a very good way of describing it but that's what my young mind perceived. Years later, I learned the reason for this was because, for many years, Ted Turner only had rights to the Loony Tunes and Merry Melodies made before the 1950's, which used a different animation and drawing style. Eventually Turner merged with Time Warner, so then all of the Warner Bros. classic cartoons could be shown.

I remember the different hour-long blocks of cartoons that would play. There was Late Night Black-and-White, a block that came on rather late in the evening and showed classic black and white cartoons, mainly the old Popeye and Betty Boop shorts. I always liked the theme music that played along with it and some of the cartoons were pretty funny. ToonHeads was a show that would feature three cartoons with a similar theme running throughout and would provide trivia in-between. I think at first it was just captions but later, they had a female narrator actually tell you the trivia. There was an interesting block called High Noon Toons, which featured cartoons that were present by cowboy hand puppets. (Cartoon Network was on a budget in its early days.) I wish I could find those wrap-arounds because I remember them being funny. I just barely remember Down Wit' Droopy D, a block that showed the classic Droopy cartoons. They were obviously going for a rap, hip-hop style with the block but I can't recall much of it.

I also came to know the Hanna-Barbera shows through the network. The Flintstones was always one of my favorites (I appreciate them even more now) along with some incarnations of Scooby-Doo. For a while, they only showed A Pup Named Scooby-Doo (which I still like to this day) but they eventually showed the original series as well as the many spin-offs. I don't care that much for the original series anymore but I do still like some of the later incarnations. When it came to The Jetsons, I always preferred the original series to the 80's ones. While I would watch them if I had no choice, I never cared much for Yogi Bear or any of those types of characters like Snagglepuss, Huckleberry Hound, etc. I have nothing against them, they just never struck me as anything special.

Cartoon Network also high-lighted a lot of action cartoons, mainly from Hanna-Barbera. I think that Johnny Quest is by far the best cartoon that company ever came up with. I still love it to this day. While I would watch many shows like Space Ghost and Dino Boy, Birdman, Shazzam, and enjoy them, they never struck me as stuff I absolutely had to watch. However, Hanna-Barbera did create the 1970's Godzilla cartoon, which I discovered on the network one afternoon. Being a Godzilla fan since the age of five, I freaking loved that!

Besides classic theatrical shorts and television cartoons, the network also had original cartoons, made either for the channel itself or shows that premiered on one of the corporation's sister channels (TBS, TNT, etc.) and later appeared on the network. Of the ones that appeared on the sister channels, two in particular were some of my favorites. One was 2 Stupid Dogs, a hilarious show that never failed to make me laugh. The other was Swat Kats, an awesome action show with great characters, intense and sometimes downright scary plots, and kickass music. The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest was another show I enjoyed (I had to after it replace the original show when the latter had an unusual farewell marathon), especially for its cutting edge, CGI Quest-World scenes.

The first original Cartoon Network that really caught on was Space Ghost, Coast-to-Coast, a strange show that had the intergalactic crime fighter now the host of his own talk show, with two of his arch-enemies as technicians. When I saw the ads, they said he was out to destroy television as we know it. Since Godzilla was sometimes a good guy and sometimes a bad guy, my young brain thought that ad meant Space Ghost was a bad guy here. Of course, he wasn't but it was and remains an odd show. (But I like it.) A sort of companion piece to that show was Cartoon Planet, which started out as another block of cartoons but eventually became a variety show with Space Ghost and his two villainous co-hosts doing sketches. (At least, I think it started out as a block of cartoons. Anyone else remember this?) It didn't last nearly as long as Space Ghost, Coast-to-Coast but even at a young age, I thought the interplay between the characters was very funny.

About the time I was seven, Cartoon Network began producing what they called World Premiere Toons, new, original cartoons that would be shown throughout a certain period of time. I'm sure many kids had no idea that these cartoons were meant to be pilots for new shows. I remember watching these cartoons whenever they would come on and liking the majority of them. Dexter's Laboratory was the first and for a while, the only one to become its own show. Eventually, Johnny Bravo, Cow and Chicken, The Powerpuff Girls, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and Mike, Lu, & Og came along, all of which I liked up to a point (and I'll explain why when I go into details on those shows). The channel then began producing cartoon shows that didn't start out as World Premiere Toons. These included Ed, Edd n' Eddy (which was one of my favorites), Time Squad (which I did like but it didn't last long), The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy and Sheep in the Big City (both of which I couldn't stand), and what was, in my opinion, Cartoon Network's last great original show, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.

Cartoon Network also served as my introduction to anime. The first one I saw was a show called G-Force, which I've found in recent years wasn't its original name. After that, I saw two odd anime movies the channel aired every once in a while late on Saturday nights, neither of which kept my attention: Robot Carnival, which I remember as being a strange, arty piece that I quickly lost interest in and Vampire Hunter D, which I didn't get through because it was too scary. But then I saw Speed Racer, which I really liked. Then came the Toonami block, which showcased both anime and shows in a similar to style. Among the latter were Thundercats (which became one of my favorites). Among the animes shown were Robotech (yet another series that has many identities), Voltron, and the show that got many of my generation firmly into anime, Dragonball Z.

Another great thing about Cartoon Network was how it entertained you even between commercial breaks with humorous bumpers and advertisements for the various shows. One of my favorites was one with Daffy Duck trying to read an advertisement but the lines were so hard for him to say that he kept screwing it up. In the late 90's, they created fully animated bumpers for the shows, some of which were pretty clever. When Animaniacs came to the channel, they had bumpers with Yakko, Wakko, and Dot commenting on some of the shows and characters within. There were also Cartoon Network's Things To Do, which "instructed" you on how to do physically impossible, cartoon-physics stunts. Another one was letters that were supposedly written in by actual viewers but I highly doubt they were. One denounced those things to do as being horrible and as a consolation, they come up with one that says the things to do are fake. Another one was some jackass writing in that all the cartoons suck and they show various clips of the characters crying with the announcer saying through a crying fit, "Are you happy?" There was also this short segments that had little kids in a roundtable sort of situation discussing their favorite cartoons. Sometimes they talked about other non-Cartoon Network shows like Rugrats and The Simpsons (I'm actually surprised they were allowed to do that).

Around the 2000's, the network slowly started to change. The most jarring one for me was Adult Swim, a late night block that featured much more mature shows and violent anime than had been shown in the afternoons and prime time. I didn't like this idea because all the shows that Cartoon Network had shown up to that point had been, more or less, family friendly. But when they started doing this, it felt like it was becoming something else and not the channel I always loved. It's interesting that this happened in 2001, around the time that 9/11 happened. It seemed like both the real world and my personal world were falling apart. 9/11 was definitely the end of the age of innocence that my generation lived in during the 90's and Cartoon Network, albeit unintentionally, seemed to be following suit. Although, I can't really bash Adult Swim all that much because, while I've never liked stuff like Family Guy and Futurama, it introduced to some of my favorite anime like InuYasha and Neon Genesis Evangelion.

By the middle of the new millennium, Cartoon Network was going through a real makeover. I, however, was unaware of that because those were my high school years and I was too preoccupied with school work to notice. Also, I had matured and I went through a phase where cartoons were no longer "cool". I've since gotten out of that phase, of course. By 2007, when I went back to it after not watching it for a long time, I realized that the channel from childhood was not there anymore. In its place was a channel that seemed to have lost its identity among its peers. It was now creating shows that were nowhere near as creative or as openly inviting to all ages. Shows like Chowder, Total Drama Island, and Adventure Time were shows that openly try to be crude and adult, as well as witty but they just come across as poorly made. The network was also clearly trying to cater to the "tween" demographic, which was also the downfall of the Disney Channel. Not only that, they seemed to forget the channel's very name and start showing live action movies, shows, and, worst of all, reality shows. Reality shows on Cartoon Network? How does that make any sense?

Maybe I'm just an old stick in the mud but it really pains me to see what Cartoon Network has become in recent years. In my mind, it's a shell of its former self. Its original spirit does live on, however, in Boomerang, a spin-off channel that is basically what it used to be. And fortunately, the original series of the show are being released in season box sets so we'll always have them. Despite what it's become, Cartoon Network will always be special to me for making my childhood an awesome one. Long live great animation!