Do kids these days know anything about classic cartoons?

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As a kid I watched many of the cartoon classics such as the original Looney Tunes and The Wonderful World of Disney and Woody Woodpecker and Popeye and stuff, and I spent almost every weekday at lunchtime watching The Flintstones. Speaking of which, they still sell Flintstone vitamins for little kids after all these years even though I'll bet they have no idea who the Flintstones are and if you told them they'd probably flip out about how real dinosaurs and cavepeople never lived together because dinosaurs went extinct millions of years before humans. Sure, let's not break some rules because it's a cartoon, after all it's perfectly okay for a talking humanized yellow dish sponge to be having campfires at the bottom of the sea. Seems that's all kids care about now is Spongebob and Anime and other junk. And yes, it IS junk! Teletoon, which is Canada's answer to CN in the States, used to have lots of classics but now for some stupid reason they have to show Johnny Test about 40 times a day even though it seems to be almost universally hated. I feel very bad for a generation that has never got to see the Golden Age of Animation because the Moral Guardians think they're too violent or politically incorrect, although I can understand why they don't want to ever show cartoons like The Censored 11 to anyone. I also watched the original Tom and Jerry cartoons which had the be the most violent of all back then and I still haven't killed anybody.

classic cartoons make me dizzy. they are all fuzzy and staticky in the sound. i don't care for modern cartoons ether.

Big fan of Betty Boop and Astro Boy.

[img][img]http://i778.photobucket.com/albums/yy69/buddatek_inc/bettyCapture.jpg[/img][/img] [img][img]http://i778.photobucket.com/albums/yy69/buddatek_inc/astroCapture.jpg[/img][/img]

Fireball XL-5 was a cool looking spaceship, but those puppets always creeped the hell out of me.

Personally, I've seen all those cartoons. I don't know if I'm what you meant by "kids these days".

I think children's programming has died out a bit due to the internet and such, so there isn't as much demand for re-runs of cartoons. Then again, I'm not familiar with the schedules of digital channels, so I don't know what they're showing.

Well you're making me feel like poop. I thought I was a classic "born in the wrong generation" kid because I like Daria and Aeon Flux.

I've always loved animation. I grew up watching the classic cartoon shorts - best of all were the MGM Tex Avery ones. However, I will admit that some of them (together with Tom & Jerry of course) are a bit racist to show today.

I thought animation was doing rather well nowadays though. Spongebob is actually pretty funny and so is Adventure Time. I think they're smarter than the Hanna Barbera stuff (Wacky Races, Yogi Bear etc) that was the staple of my childhood Saturday mornings. Pixar, Studio Ghibli and Aardman have all produced some great stuff (even if all of them seem to be on the slide). Outside of Ghibli I haven't watched much Anime (as it seems to be fixated on High School teenagers and their interests) so I can't really comment on that.

Sorry but I really, really don't get the My Little Pony thing...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-FParu9AO8[/youtube]

This could be good. It's a live action movie based on the 80s french cartoon series. The second and third seasons of the cartoon have also been released recently. It's generally considered to be the best of that era, along with Ulysses 31, made by the same people. If the film goes for realism in setting, like the show did somewhat, it could be really great.

Last edited by Stannis on 05 Feb 2014, 2:46 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I also used to watch a lot of classic cartoons, when I was growing up. I used to watch a lot of the old Looney Tunes and Disney cartoons, plus I've seen some of the old Betty Boop cartoons, too. My family and I used to shop at a store called Building 19, which is a big deal in New England, because they sell everything for cheap, and we used to buy a lot of the old cartoons on VHS, back when that was popular. I didn't like all of the old cartoons, though. I never liked Popeye, Woody Woodpecker, or Tom and Jerry, and I never really cared for Hanna Barbera cartoons, either. Except for Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, the late-night talk show he used to have on Cartoon Network. Now he was funny! I think it's true that a lot of kids nowadays may not be familiar with the classics, not unless they've been exposed to them, of course. But I would also have to agree that most kids these days might not be interested in them, either. They would probably want to see something more current, like Sponge Bob or Monster High or something. But I can also understand why a lot of parents might not even allow their kids to see the older ones, because they're too violent, or racist, or whatever.

Hmm, I don't think it's right to underestimate today's audience.

Just because they've not been exposed to the classic cartoon era we have straight away, doesn't mean there's zero interest. A lot of people who grew up with classic cartoons are currently the ones producing or directing a lot of material we have today.

True, there have been some... questionable choices, like the live-action movie adaptations of say, Yogi Bear, The Smurfs, Alvin and the Chipmunks, or the movie revival adaptations like the upcoming Peabody and Sherman, the proposed second Rocky and Bullwinkle adaptation, and now the recently-rumoured Chip n Dale: Rescue Rangers movie ... to name but a few, but then there have been some great revivals like the Paul Rudish run of Mickey Mouse shorts, including the very recent Get a Horse short, which borrow a lot of elements from Mickey of the 1930s. And if memory serves me correctly, the early Craig McCracken era (Two Stupid Dogs, Dexter's Lab, pre-Season 4 Powerpuff Girls) referenced a lot of Hanna-Babbera shorts from the 1960s; not to mention the endurance Turner/Warner Bros. put into Scooby Doo and Tom and Jerry.

Anyway, with revivals, remakes or references comes a lot of curiosity about the source material they come from and today's young generation have an advantage we didn't have growing up: the Internet. If something is airing or has been aired on television (or in the cinema), then you can bet a dime a dozen someone has it catalogued away online somewhere... the vaults networks/companies keep on older material are slowly dissipating due to this modern phenomenon. I'm not advocating piracy or anything, I'm just stating facts here.

Of course, I'm only speaking from personal experience and having a lot of nephews and nieces who are all Spongebob this, and Adventure Time that (not my cup of tea at all) and are sadly under the delusion that nearly all modern-day CGI movies are Pixar... sigh... and anime isn't that popular anymore since you can't sell toys and merchandise of it, unlike a certain American comic-book superhero company, and it's rather tricky to rate as Japanese culture is at odds with the West.

At any rate, classic cartoons are no longer a staple of modern society, and tastes in humour and the money animation gets (which is a pittance today, and it shows) have changed. But I wouldn't worry about no one ever knowing what the Golden Age (and to a lesser extent, the Silver Age) of animation is. Also, is Monster High a TV series in the US? It barely exists as a toyline here in the UK. Then again, the My Little Pony phenomenon took a while to migrate here officially too... (for some reason, CN UK shoved it sideways onto Boomerang)...

In response to dragonzatch's posting, we were talking about cartoons that were popular during our grandparents' or parents' day, cartoons that would have been popular during the '30s and '40s, or the '50s and '60s. That's waaay before your time! That's what we meant by "classic." We weren't talking about cartoons from the '90s, although I can see why you would consider those to be "classic," since you're so young. Don't feel bad, though. My sister is 29, and she considers shows that were popular during my time, the '70s and '80s, to be "old". I'm sure you would, too.

I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, it was really cool that, growing up in the 90s I was able to catch a lot of old cartoon shorts, Disney, Warner Bros., MGM, etc., most of which were excellent and a showcase of the talent involved, whether animators or voice actors. Watching those old cartoons provides something of a context and history complementing the contemporary cartoons. On the other hand, I also feel that each era should be able provide its own contemporary entertainment that can stand strong on its own.
Something of a 'problem' (if you can call it that) is that the old cartoons from the 40s, 50s or 60s (sometimes even earlier), is that it naturally uses the inventory of its time period, and references some things that will go over the head of an audience that was much later. In Disney and Looney Tunes, we see the hand-dial phones, the phonograph record players, the old cars, the heavy cigar smoking, the jazz and swing music, et cetera, et cetera, and it's all kind of anachronistic to our times. There's going to be an increasing disconnect between the setting that the cartoons take place in and its zeitgeist, and its audience, the younger that audience becomes. You'll have to keep thinking 'What's going on here? Oh, right. It's the 50s'. Now, this goes pretty much automatically and unnoticed when you're watching it as a kid, but at one point you're going to have an accumulation of decades upon decades of cartoon history, each of which featuring some quality shows that its fans (take note: fans) would not want to see removed from the small screen. But you can't expect the average primary school student to watch a 6 hour block of cartoons spanning from Steamboat Willy all the way down to Jetsons and Flintstones into SpongeBob and MLP:FiM; nor can you demand that the classics are required viewing for all kids. At the end of the day, it's entertainment, and the people currently working at the animation studios who are providing that brand of entertainment are going about it their own way, using today's sentimentalities and today's context.

Or, in other words, are YOU familiar with all the comic books and children's lit that was popular in your grandparents' childhood? Did you still play all the classic outdoors games and board games that were all the craze around the turn of the 19th into the 20th century? If not, it's probably because you had the luxury of sitting on the sofa in front of the boob tube with a bowl of porridge while you were watching Bugs Bunny in anticipation of GI Joe and Ninja Turtles.

I see. You mean OLD old cartoons.

I think that if children are encouraged to cultivate historical contexts, by whatever means; cartoons or whatever, then they will find it easier to piece things together when they are older and actively trying to figure out how the world works.