What makes us love 90's - 2000's cartoons, and hate what's aired now?

Cartoons, no matter the stage of life you find yourself in, you will always remember the cartoons you used to watch as a kid for hours on end. Starting from the 1960s with the Flintstones to now with shows like The Amazing World of Gumball, there is a universal understanding that kids love cartoons, but what happens when you are no longer a kid? A burning question appears, why do kids even like to watch this stuff?

Many factors lead to this question, quality, culture, and age. When it comes to quality, we think of a story, creativity, and image quality. Because of the 90's limited technology, image quality was not nearly as nice and easy as it is today. This is why no cartoon from that time featured 3-dimensional scenes other than to showcase the very rudimentary but new technology, which was very rare and only for a few seconds if at all. It also took much longer to produce episodes with 90's technology, a single episode of SpongeBob took around eleven months to produce. To compensate for this, writers and drawers were forced to think more creatively, create a compelling story, and have visuals that made sense while not being unrealistic to animate. This is one of the most important appeals of 90's cartoons, they made up for image quality with unique plots and creative and innovative ways to convey that. On the other hand, modern cartoons have access to CGI, allowing high-quality imagery at a fraction of the time it took to produce a 90's cartoon episode, and the effects of that are clear. Because modern cartoons take much less time and effort to produce, their story and innovative quality decrease, resulting in mass production of episodes to please the masses. Rather than a year for one episode, it's a year for one season.

Culture is also a very important factor to consider, as no doubt 90's culture is drastically different than todays. For one, humor elements were spread apart and well-timed. This is likely because the technology was just coming out back then, tiny flip-phones, handheld videogames, CDs, and the web was a much smaller place when Yahoo ruled the internet. This lead to a perfect mix of new bright ideas and colors of the new era while also adhering to the traditional slow-going formulas found in old cartoons. Nowadays, we are flooded with information constantly, millions of new videos, articles, images one after another and so it only makes sense that cartoons should reflect that, throwing jokes, action, screaming, anything that grabs attention with any given opportunity at the new audience. The best piece of evidence to prove this is something we have all said, " I miss the good ol' days when things were simpler when I was a kid".

And that very quote is the most important factor, we are no longer kids. While habits are a great thing to have as an adult, it's the greatest part of childhood. The part of childhood we all remember the most is our routine, and a very important part of that routine was cartoons. As you can guess, when we are presented with time to watch cartoons now, we expect the same feeling we received as a kid, the ads, the music, the colors, everything, only to be disappointed because not only are all the cartoons completely different, they don't hold the same quality or culture as the old ones. It is so far from the routine that it is no longer a kids cartoon, it is a disaster, an anomaly, mindless nothingness. We have grown, the same jokes that got us laughing as a kid are no longer present in new cartoons as the current generations cant relate. You cant expect a child to have the same reaction to an impact font meme from 10 years ago if they weren't around to experience it, and the same applies to cartoons, as the old episode no longer elicits the same response as they for us 30-ish years ago.

The cultural and technological advancements should not hinder us from enjoying cartoons nowadays, we just need to understand what still makes them entertaining to children. So next time you take a glance at what's on the kid's channel, ask the kids watching, why? Our habitual and grown minds may not understand the value in modern cartoons, but the kids can tell you, and most likely you will hear the same thing you would say as a kid watching your favorite show on the television; Whatever that may be, there's only one way to know.