Old toons are so old school, and so very missed
When I was growing up, Saturday morning meant cartoons. In fact, in the 1970s, it was the only day that meant cartoons. It was the one day when my folks let me own the living room TV for a few hours and eat my breakfast of Captain Froot Lucky Tooth Decay right there in front of the television set — somewhere between that range of “You’ll ruin your eyes” and “You’re gonna get radiation poisoning.”
(Judging by the bill from my optometrist, I must have sat closer to the “ruin your eyes” line.)
We had about four or five channels back then, and three of them showed cartoons on Saturday mornings. These were not necessarily good cartoons, but they were the ones I knew. I grew up with “Scooby-Doo,” “The Justice League,” “Spider-Man” and “Hong-Kong Phooey.”
I could sit there in my pajamas and put my cereal on a tray. There was no smart phone to buzz and interrupt my shows. Of course, there also was no way to change the channel remotely or fast-forward through commercials, which back then were all about super-cool action figures who were absolutely ripped with plastic six-pack abs — likely from all the hours they spent at the toy gym to compensate for not having been given genitalia.
They weren’t cutting-edge. They weren’t risque. They didn’t make too many bold social statements, although the statements they did make like “be nice to each other” and “don’t do bad things” might need revisiting these days.
Alas, those cartoons gave way to SpongeBob, PowerPuff Girls, Jimmy Neutron and other folks who will give you a headache. Those were the cartoons that were on during my son’s childhood — and, unfortunately, on every day across a variety of channels. He would never know the sacredness of Saturday morning cartoon time.
I was fortunate, though, that my son loved Scooby-Doo even more than he did the cartoons of his day. I read “Scooby-Doo” books to him at bedtime and did the voices. Now, my 3-year-old grandson has been introduced to Scooby-Doo and loves the old versions that launched in 1969. I guess the classics endure.
They were simple and formulaic. The gang would get in a mess, Shaggy and Scooby would get scared of some fake monster and then get distracted by food, and then they’d somehow catch the fake monster like the Miner ‘49er, who’d say something like, “And I’d haven’t gotten away with it if if weren’t for you meddling kids and your stupid dog.” Although, there was that one ending from Season 1, Episode 32 when the orange Tweet Monster was unmasked and said, “Completely unfair investigation by you meddling kids, I’m totally exonerated and Scrappy says very nice things about me” before grabbing Daphne inappropriately and heading out for a round of golf.
This past weekend, my grandson sat with me to watch another dog, Snoopy, in “A Boy Named Charlie Brown,” the 1969 animated feature film from the Peanuts gang. I never really was a fan of the Peanuts stuff, but I’ve always loved Vince Guaraldi’s music from the cartoons. I was able to sit there and chill to the music, he could wait for the Snoopy scenes, and in between we could wait for Charlie Brown to quit whining.
Today’s cartoons have so much motion and noise and action that I’m not sure it’s safe to watch them unless you’re zoned out on LSD or Captain Froot Lucky Tooth Decay. It’s nice that we still have the option to go through one of our 27 streaming services and find a simple cartoon from 1969.
Or maybe I just like Scooby because my son and grandson also like Scooby. My son is looking forward to coming home from Scotland for Christmas to sit with his nephew and watch 50-year-old cartoons. It’s a little hard to get three generations of boys to like much of anything these days that doesn’t involve french fries or yelling “Roll Tide!” And I’ll be perfectly happy to sit with both of them. Maybe we could do it on a Saturday morning with three bowls of Captain Froot Lucky Tooth Decay. An old man can dream.
Get more from Chris Johnson at KudzuKid.com.