Our lives in elementary school were fairly rigid and formulaic. Go to school, complain about easy homework, and attend after-school activities, wash, rinse, and repeat. Then there was the weekend. That awesome, 48-hour period where anything was possible. It was recess on steroids. So naturally a good chunk of it was spent inside, watching TV. Saturday morning cartoons have been a time-honored tradition among young children for far longer than I have been alive and even with advent of the Internet, Saturday morning cartoons seem to remain just as prolific and silly as they always were. And we definitely were never short on options. Were you a “Doug” kind of kid or a “Sonic the Hedgehog” kind of kid? Did you gorge yourself at the “Yu-Gi-Oh!” table or did you rush to “Recess”? Did you cut your teeth on the comic book world from the animated adaptiations of Batman, Spiderman, and the X-Men? Or were you a more down-to-earth kid who liked the stylized, yet fully realized, shows like “Hey Arnold!”?
Admittedly, a part of this is pure nostalgia. When I was a kid, everything that didn’t involve me going to school or church I remember far more fondly than is probably right or necessary. If I were to go and watch cartoons right now, I would imagine they do not hold up as well as I would like. Oddly enough, Netflix has many of the shows from my childhood available for streaming, so if I wanted to, I could go watch my many favorites from Cartoon Network like “Courage the Cowardly Dog” and “Johnny Bravo.”
I did actually go back and watch a few episodes of “Courage” and in my rose-tinted opinion, the show holds up surprisingly well, at least as a odd and surreal experience. I was also surprised by how much of it managed to stick with me throughout the years. I couldn’t tell you what I learned in third grade beyone the cursive I never use but I could probably still recite a bunch of the Pokémon Rap. Beyond these shows taking up a bunch of time for us as kids, whether we like it or not, we probably watched these shows during many of our formative years. In that sense, that old horror tale you hear news stations repeat (when they don’t have anything else to report) about kids being raised by TV just may have a ring of truth to it. I do think the shows I watched did at least in some part form my sense of humor, which could, in some way, probably be pyschologically linked to the rest of my outlook on life in that sense.
I often complain about how much my generation (and pretty much every generation in some way) relies on nostalgia far too much to influence its way of thinking. And while I still stand by that assertion, I can admit that there is a certain charm to revisiting the past in order to gain some perspective. I don’t really wake up at the crack of dawn on Saturday anymore to watch Pokémon, but I don’t think the time I spent doing so was necessarily wasted either. And Pokémon still rules, by the way.
BY ZACK WEBSTER webst264@d.umn.edu