It's never too late...
Or maybe it is too late sometimes.
Anyway...
I wrote this essay for my writing class. It's sorta strange, but the topic is lovely. I don't mean to offend anyone who likes the to-be-mentioned shows. They were the ones that I thought of first that "fit", by today's standards under "Saturday Morning Cartoon". Tell me what you think!
Saturday Mornings Just Got Worse, Doc
There are seven days in the week, something I’m sure we all know. I’ll begin on Sunday. This is the least favorite day for procrastinators. They didn’t do their homework on Friday or even Saturday, so they’re scrambling to finish projects that are due the next day. Of course, Sunday always seems to be so much sunnier when you can’t go outside.
There’s Monday, which is the worst day of the week. You’d just gotten back from the weekend, so school is so unbearable the first day.
Then there’s Tuesday. Tuesday’s okay. There are still three more days of school, so it’s not that great.
After Tuesday is Wednesday, of course. The week is halfway through, but you’ve only been through two days…
Thursday is bad enough to nearly rival Monday. It’s like the last lap around the track- the last one hundred yards in the five-hundred freestyle. It’s almost over- but it’s not, which makes time seem to last forever.
Friday finally arrives. Seeing as it’s the last day of the school week, everyone (including teachers) is cheerful. Whistling can be heard all around the school as everyone prepares for a well-earned break.
But then it’s Saturday. Saturday. The day in which relaxing is basically a major religion. There’s the couch, there’s the T.V., and here’s a bag of potato chips.
When we were kids, Saturday mornings followed a certain ritual. Yes, I know. We still are kids, but- you get what I mean. When we were little elementary school kids, we would sit on the couch with a bowl of Lucky Charms and flick the T.V. on with the remote control. Maybe to Nickolodeon or Cartoon Network. Possibly even ABC Kids to watch Recess.
And so, we’d spend hours at a time on that couch. We wasted it with Bugs Bunny, Scooby Doo, and the little blue men/women (a.k.a. Smurfs). We laughed at explosions, dropping anvils, scaredy-cat hounds, evil cats, and wizards in, well, robes until we couldn’t laugh without making our bellies ache. Just like our parents had when they were kids. Ironically, they were now the ones yelling at us to get our rears into gear and off the couch.
Thus was the tradition of Saturday Morning Cartoons from the seventies (Raiti).
It was on one such day in the beginning of my freshman year, when we weren’t getting so much homework yet. Actually, I didn’t even have swim practice for once, which was rare, so I decided to take advantage of the fact to settle in front of the T.V. Turning the T.V. on, I brought in the bowl of cereal before happily starting to munch on my Cheerios.
At least that’s how it was at first, before I had even glanced at the television screen. Once I had, that was when everything came crashing down.
Okay, first of all, I used to be a Looney Tunes junkie. Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Taz, Roadrunner, Wiley E. Coyote, and Tom and Jerry were my best friends as a kid. Bugs Bunny was a given. I mean, “What’s up, Doc?”
So, you can probably imagine my shock when I saw, on the screen, a dancing blue sock. It took a while (and lots of pinches) for me to conclude I wasn’t, in fact, delusional. Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends? Did I plan on watching a blue sock try to make everything right in the world? Did I want to watch imaginary friends try to entertain themselves by throwing birthday parties and what have they? No. No. No. No. (Cartoon Network)
So in the light of this decision, I changed the channel to Nickelodeon and found two green… and pink… fairies flying across the screen. What is this? A few more minutes of watching and I had discovered what this was. It was a show dedicated to this kid who had actual fairy godparents. Or fairly odd parents, which certainly was the case. The green guy often went ‘Yes, yes, yes! Let’s do this,’ while the pink fairy would say ‘No, no, no, this is a bad idea,’ but would just do it regardless of her practical judgment. (Nick)
What happened to the humor of Saturday morning cartoons? The humor I was seeing was crude and boring and quite lacking in the imagination department. I mean, there are the classics: dynamite and dropping anvils, but they’re classics! No matter how many times any of us see them, we still laugh. They’re simply basic and funny. There aren’t any impertinent sexual innuendos or rude gesturing or obviously-fake clueless people. People weren’t pretending to be stupid or make stupid decisions for the fun of it.
I continued watching and soon my brother joined me on the couch with his Frosted Mini-Wheats. “Whatcha watching?” he asked me after we had been sitting on the couch for five minutes in relative silence.
“A bunch of crap,” I answered.
“Then why are you watching it?”
“Nothing else to do.”
Is that why some kids nowadays are so satisfied with the stuff on T.V., I wondered. Because they don’t have any other options? If they had grown up in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, it’s nearly impossible to settle for the random little things like planned stupidity on T.V. The fact that two million people in the U.S. watch these shows every time they air should tell you something. That might sound like a lot, but compared to the old statistic of twenty million, it’s a sneeze’s worth of young children. Maybe even the kids can tell that the quality of cartoons have gone down. (Raiti)
For the next half hour, we just there and waited for something worth watching to appear on the screen. Which meant we sat there until Pokémon came on because, let’s face it, watching The Fairly OddParents or whatever-it-was just plain sucked.
But Pokémon wasn’t worth waiting for. It wasn’t good. At all, which wasn’t what I had expected. Pokémon had seriously degraded, just like everything else. Since the nineties, plots were redone and repeated within different season so that, if you squinted and broke down your eyes enough, you could still see the hint of repetition. They weren’t original anymore because all of the good stuff had already been done. For example, the “looks like Team Rocket is blasting off again!” (Pokémon I Choose You!) saying is so repetitive; they’ve said it at least 300 times since the series came out, not including reruns! And that’s just talking about the catchphrase, not to mention the actual plots.
“Who’s that?” my brother asks me as we catch sight of another character- because you couldn’t really call it a person- entering the screen.
“I have no idea,” I tell him, “and I have to say I really don’t wanna know.”
It’s the blue sock making its way back onto the screen. Apparently, his name is Boo and he’s an imaginary friend in Foster’s mansion. This is something that really upsets me about today’s cartoons: sap stories. You know things are getting bad when the characters themselves are no longer original. The sap stories are the worst bit. Every character nowadays has some kind of story that is supposed to make you feel bad for them. For instance, Boo got abandoned and Timmy Turner from The Fairly OddParents has parents that don’t pay attention to him, a sadistic babysitter, and a teacher that is trying to catch his “fairy godparents”. That’s not even mentioning the fact that one of his fairy people is a nutcase and acts like a three year old, which wouldn’t be a problem if he wasn’t hundreds of years old.
After sitting there for two hours, analyzing the shortcomings of the cartoons and yelling at the silly characters on the screen, my brother and I finally turned off the T.V. to go outside and play on the neighbor’s rope swing. It may have taken us two hours to figure it out, but we finally did it: Saturday mornings are no longer worth waking up for.
Works Cited
Cartoon Network. “Cartoon Network”. Turner Entertainment New Media Network. 2 June 2008. .
“Nickelodeon”. Viacom International Co. 2 June 2008
“Pokémon!” Nintendo. 3 June 2008. .
<”Pokémon I Choose You!”>.
. By Satoshi Tajiri. Pokémon. . <27 Feb 1996>.
Raiti, Gerard. “The Disappearance of Saturday Morning”. Animation World Magazine.
What do you think? I'm pleased that I thought of such an amazing topic. You might've thought about this, mmmmmm? I went through 4 topics in a week before thinking of this one. :P
-END-
Anyway...
I wrote this essay for my writing class. It's sorta strange, but the topic is lovely. I don't mean to offend anyone who likes the to-be-mentioned shows. They were the ones that I thought of first that "fit", by today's standards under "Saturday Morning Cartoon". Tell me what you think!
Saturday Mornings Just Got Worse, Doc
There are seven days in the week, something I’m sure we all know. I’ll begin on Sunday. This is the least favorite day for procrastinators. They didn’t do their homework on Friday or even Saturday, so they’re scrambling to finish projects that are due the next day. Of course, Sunday always seems to be so much sunnier when you can’t go outside.
There’s Monday, which is the worst day of the week. You’d just gotten back from the weekend, so school is so unbearable the first day.
Then there’s Tuesday. Tuesday’s okay. There are still three more days of school, so it’s not that great.
After Tuesday is Wednesday, of course. The week is halfway through, but you’ve only been through two days…
Thursday is bad enough to nearly rival Monday. It’s like the last lap around the track- the last one hundred yards in the five-hundred freestyle. It’s almost over- but it’s not, which makes time seem to last forever.
Friday finally arrives. Seeing as it’s the last day of the school week, everyone (including teachers) is cheerful. Whistling can be heard all around the school as everyone prepares for a well-earned break.
But then it’s Saturday. Saturday. The day in which relaxing is basically a major religion. There’s the couch, there’s the T.V., and here’s a bag of potato chips.
When we were kids, Saturday mornings followed a certain ritual. Yes, I know. We still are kids, but- you get what I mean. When we were little elementary school kids, we would sit on the couch with a bowl of Lucky Charms and flick the T.V. on with the remote control. Maybe to Nickolodeon or Cartoon Network. Possibly even ABC Kids to watch Recess.
And so, we’d spend hours at a time on that couch. We wasted it with Bugs Bunny, Scooby Doo, and the little blue men/women (a.k.a. Smurfs). We laughed at explosions, dropping anvils, scaredy-cat hounds, evil cats, and wizards in, well, robes until we couldn’t laugh without making our bellies ache. Just like our parents had when they were kids. Ironically, they were now the ones yelling at us to get our rears into gear and off the couch.
Thus was the tradition of Saturday Morning Cartoons from the seventies (Raiti).
It was on one such day in the beginning of my freshman year, when we weren’t getting so much homework yet. Actually, I didn’t even have swim practice for once, which was rare, so I decided to take advantage of the fact to settle in front of the T.V. Turning the T.V. on, I brought in the bowl of cereal before happily starting to munch on my Cheerios.
At least that’s how it was at first, before I had even glanced at the television screen. Once I had, that was when everything came crashing down.
Okay, first of all, I used to be a Looney Tunes junkie. Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Taz, Roadrunner, Wiley E. Coyote, and Tom and Jerry were my best friends as a kid. Bugs Bunny was a given. I mean, “What’s up, Doc?”
So, you can probably imagine my shock when I saw, on the screen, a dancing blue sock. It took a while (and lots of pinches) for me to conclude I wasn’t, in fact, delusional. Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends? Did I plan on watching a blue sock try to make everything right in the world? Did I want to watch imaginary friends try to entertain themselves by throwing birthday parties and what have they? No. No. No. No. (Cartoon Network)
So in the light of this decision, I changed the channel to Nickelodeon and found two green… and pink… fairies flying across the screen. What is this? A few more minutes of watching and I had discovered what this was. It was a show dedicated to this kid who had actual fairy godparents. Or fairly odd parents, which certainly was the case. The green guy often went ‘Yes, yes, yes! Let’s do this,’ while the pink fairy would say ‘No, no, no, this is a bad idea,’ but would just do it regardless of her practical judgment. (Nick)
What happened to the humor of Saturday morning cartoons? The humor I was seeing was crude and boring and quite lacking in the imagination department. I mean, there are the classics: dynamite and dropping anvils, but they’re classics! No matter how many times any of us see them, we still laugh. They’re simply basic and funny. There aren’t any impertinent sexual innuendos or rude gesturing or obviously-fake clueless people. People weren’t pretending to be stupid or make stupid decisions for the fun of it.
I continued watching and soon my brother joined me on the couch with his Frosted Mini-Wheats. “Whatcha watching?” he asked me after we had been sitting on the couch for five minutes in relative silence.
“A bunch of crap,” I answered.
“Then why are you watching it?”
“Nothing else to do.”
Is that why some kids nowadays are so satisfied with the stuff on T.V., I wondered. Because they don’t have any other options? If they had grown up in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, it’s nearly impossible to settle for the random little things like planned stupidity on T.V. The fact that two million people in the U.S. watch these shows every time they air should tell you something. That might sound like a lot, but compared to the old statistic of twenty million, it’s a sneeze’s worth of young children. Maybe even the kids can tell that the quality of cartoons have gone down. (Raiti)
For the next half hour, we just there and waited for something worth watching to appear on the screen. Which meant we sat there until Pokémon came on because, let’s face it, watching The Fairly OddParents or whatever-it-was just plain sucked.
But Pokémon wasn’t worth waiting for. It wasn’t good. At all, which wasn’t what I had expected. Pokémon had seriously degraded, just like everything else. Since the nineties, plots were redone and repeated within different season so that, if you squinted and broke down your eyes enough, you could still see the hint of repetition. They weren’t original anymore because all of the good stuff had already been done. For example, the “looks like Team Rocket is blasting off again!” (Pokémon I Choose You!) saying is so repetitive; they’ve said it at least 300 times since the series came out, not including reruns! And that’s just talking about the catchphrase, not to mention the actual plots.
“Who’s that?” my brother asks me as we catch sight of another character- because you couldn’t really call it a person- entering the screen.
“I have no idea,” I tell him, “and I have to say I really don’t wanna know.”
It’s the blue sock making its way back onto the screen. Apparently, his name is Boo and he’s an imaginary friend in Foster’s mansion. This is something that really upsets me about today’s cartoons: sap stories. You know things are getting bad when the characters themselves are no longer original. The sap stories are the worst bit. Every character nowadays has some kind of story that is supposed to make you feel bad for them. For instance, Boo got abandoned and Timmy Turner from The Fairly OddParents has parents that don’t pay attention to him, a sadistic babysitter, and a teacher that is trying to catch his “fairy godparents”. That’s not even mentioning the fact that one of his fairy people is a nutcase and acts like a three year old, which wouldn’t be a problem if he wasn’t hundreds of years old.
After sitting there for two hours, analyzing the shortcomings of the cartoons and yelling at the silly characters on the screen, my brother and I finally turned off the T.V. to go outside and play on the neighbor’s rope swing. It may have taken us two hours to figure it out, but we finally did it: Saturday mornings are no longer worth waking up for.
Works Cited
Cartoon Network. “Cartoon Network”. Turner Entertainment New Media Network. 2 June 2008. .
“Nickelodeon”. Viacom International Co. 2 June 2008
“Pokémon!” Nintendo. 3 June 2008. .
<”Pokémon I Choose You!”>.
. By Satoshi Tajiri. Pokémon. . <27 Feb 1996>.
Raiti, Gerard. “The Disappearance of Saturday Morning”. Animation World Magazine.
What do you think? I'm pleased that I thought of such an amazing topic. You might've thought about this, mmmmmm? I went through 4 topics in a week before thinking of this one. :P
-END-