The Sissification of the American Cartoon

This is deeply disturbing. My kids were watching cartoons the other day while I was on the computer. After a while it struck me that I hadn’t had to threaten them at all to get them to leave me alone or pipe down. It was then that I looked up and saw that they were all sitting there staring half-comatose at the tube...not laughing. Nary a chuckle from any of them for the duration of the cartoon.

I hesitate to name names, but if you were guessing “Arthur” you were right. Have you seen this show? It is disgraceful. I have a number of problems with it, but first and foremost is that it’s all dialogue and no pain – that is, it ain’t funny. All it is is whining set within the context of nonviolent relationships. Just a bunch of sissies. Where on earth did that come from?

I’ll tell you. The sissification of our cartoons has resulted from the sissification of our culture. I trace it back to Woodstock – make love, not war. The hippies who were smoking dope out in the country back then are the hippies smoking dope in the boardrooms of entertainment corporations today. So, when it comes time to pitch a new cartoon, it doesn’t even occur to them that someone needs to get hurt in order for it to be funny. Their minds are so blown from dropping acid that everything is funny to them. Therefore, all the little unisex animal characters just talk out their differences, which simply comes across as wimpiness and whining. If we want our kids to learn how to whine, all we need to do is make them watch The View. If we want them to laugh, we should be able to turn on cartoons.

When I was a kid, cartoons were hilarious. I’ve seen ‘em all a hundred times and I still laugh at them. Those of us who had the privilege of growing up with Tom & Jerry, Yosemite Sam, and Wile E. Coyote understand that human children are hardwired to get a kick out of the physical pain of animated characters. It’s inborn. It’s human. It’s normal. And the only dialogue in those cartoons was Yosemite Sam threatening to kill Bugs Bunny and saying, “Aww hate that rrrabbut.”

The rationale behind the sissification of cartoons is that if we show children violent images, they will grow up to be violent adults. Let’s think about this for a second. As violence has decreased in our cartoons, has their been a proportional decrease in the violence of our society? No? It seems to me that there has been a negative correlation between the level of violence in cartoons relative to violence in the real world. For those of you educated in the West Virginia public school system, that means that as cartoon ouchies have got lesser, real ouchies have got morer.

The explanation of this mystery can be found in another sociological change I’ve witnessed. The aforementioned hippies are the very ones who have begun to brainwash our culture into believing that little boys need to be fixed by teaching them to be little girls. We all know some parent who doesn’t let their male offspring play with toy guns. They give them dolls instead. This, I surmise, is where the increase in actual violence comes from. If my parents raised me as a girl and deprived me of hilariously violent cartoons and toy guns, I might be prone to real life fisticuffs, too. But my parents did let me play with guns. They bought me toy guns and when I wasn’t satisfied with the quantity they encouraged me to make guns out of leftover PVC my dad had out in the garage.

I also watched many a violent cartoon in my youth, and yet I’ve never dropped an anvil or a grand piano off of a cliff in the desert in an effort to kill another person. I don’t know anyone who has. I’ve never shoved a pool cue down the throat of a cat so that it protruded out of the cat’s tail. (Although, I did fantasize about it yesterday when I found cat poo on my back doorstep. I don’t own a cat.) I’ve never loaded TNT into a rabbit hole to blow my lunch out of hiding. You see, as a child I realized that cartoons are pretend.

Related to the lack of violence in our cartoons is the lack of clear “ethnic” identities of the animals. Is there any question what kind of animal Daffy Duck is? But Arthur could be anything from a rat to a pigmy sasquatch. It’s creepy. As I write this, my son informs me that Arthur is an aardvark. That is pure insanity. He is an aardvark that looks nothing like an aardvark. See for yourself.






Now look at Daffy compared to a real duck.


See how far we’ve sunk? What are we so afraid of? That we’re going to offend aardvarks by playing on stereotypical aardvark characteristics? That our kids are going to treat aardvarks like aardvarks? It’s crazy.

Anyway, I have a proposal. Let’s scrap every cartoon made after 1960 and see what happens to crime. We’ll try it for a year. If I’m wrong, bring back the sissies. But I can tell you one thing, at my house there will be no more “sensitive” cartoons. They have been outlawed. There is only violence and laughter from now on.

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