While Saturday morning cartoons may have disappeared from standard broadcast television, that does not mean we grew out of animation.
I am sure there are people are going, “But Phalon, cartoons are still around,” and yes, they are. Just not the way they used to be. Do you remember Saturday morning cartoons? I don’t mean streaming whenever you feel like it. I mean waking up early on purpose, sometimes at 5 or 5:30 in the morning, because you knew there was a whole block of cartoons waiting for you until 11 a.m. You watched everything you could, maybe with cereal in front of you, and then you went outside to play with your friends.
That was very pre-internet, I know. Kids today have their own way of watching things, but they don’t know what those mornings felt like.
Still, that doesn’t mean animation disappeared. It changed shape, like Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Mystique from X-Men.
Some people argue that cartoons are only for children, but I think that’s been proven wrong by anime and by the brilliant animated shows from Critical Role, specifically “Vox Machina” and “The Mighty Nein.” They feel like 80s and 90s cartoons that grew up and went feral in the best possible way. Both shows are based on D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) campaigns the cast played during their Twitch and YouTube streams.
Millennials and Gen Xers, and even some Boomers, were raised on animated television. We had morning cartoons, after-school cartoons, prime-time cartoons, and adult animation slowly proving that cartoons weren’t just something kids watched before school.
Even before adult animation became its own category, The Flintstones had already proven that an animated sitcom could air in prime time. Later, shows like The Simpsons, Daria, Beavis and Butt-Head, Family Guy, and American Dad kept proving that animation wasn’t just for kids.
A lot of cartoons dealt with trauma, satire, death, politics, complicated villains, grief, and good storytelling under all that pretty packaging. It wasn’t just bright colors and catchy theme songs. Some of these shows were telling stories kids could enjoy, but adults could understand on a completely different level.
One of the best examples is X-Men: The Animated Series. Look at Magneto. Most kids aren’t going to fully understand the complicated man Erik Lehnsherr. At ten years old, I thought he was just the bad guy. At 42, I can look at Magneto and dislike the man he became while still understanding why he became that way. Magneto was a Holocaust survivor. Horrific things happened to him, and he reached a breaking point. I think X-Men: First Class did an excellent job portraying that side of him, too.
That’s why shows like Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein don’t feel like some strange new thing. They feel like proof that the audience for mature animation has been here all along. People love a good epic story, even when we know it’s probably going to break our hearts, hand us a tissue, and then make us laugh five minutes later.
Critical Role is amazing at that. It gives us fantasy, comedy, violence, grief, love, found family, and absolute chaos, but it also trusts the audience to care about all of it. That’s what good animation can do when it isn’t treated like something only children are supposed to watch.
That’s also the best part about animation. It isn’t limited the same way live action is. You can go bigger. Magic can feel bigger. Monsters can look stranger. Action can move faster. Emotions can be pushed just a little further without feeling out of place.
That’s why people were so excited when the cast of Firefly mentioned wanting to do new episodes of Firefly, but animated. Animation could let that crew tell stories they never got to tell because Fox shut it down before the show could really grow. To be honest, I think a lot of shows could continue down that path. Animated continuations could give old stories a second life without trying to pretend twenty years haven’t passed.
So no, we didn’t outgrow cartoons.
We grew up with them. We understood them differently. We came back to them with more life behind us, more heartbreak, more humor, and probably stronger opinions.
Cartoons aren’t dead. We were waiting here all along.