Cartoons

It may just be my imagination, but cartoons are not like the ones that were around when I was growing up.

I don't just mean the styles or the fact they're not ALL out to shill products to the masses.

Tom & Jerry, for instance.

What I grew up with: Tom constantly trying to eat or poison Jerry or another cute animal. Jerry constantly beating the crap out of Tom, getting him caught in presses/grills/waffle-irons.

Now: Tom and Jerry have more of a rivalry going. One-upmanship, chasing that's stopped by a third-party, no weapons or poisons involved.

The changes aren't major, but they're there. A better example though is...

Scooby-Doo

What I grew up with: Scooby and the gang finding people in masks or the odd actual monster (ignoring the movies which were crawling with Classic Monsters). Bank robbers, creepy old people, swamps...

Now: Scooby and the gang still encounter fake monsters and threats, but in just two episodes of Scooby-Doo Mystery Inc, they encountered Cthulu and a neighbourhood of parents willing to abandon their demoniacally-possessed children and move away from the town. Also, Velma has to contend with playing second-fiddle to Shaggy's friendship with Scooby and Daphne is constantly trying to get Freddy in secluded places akin to a sexual predator.

As an adult, Mystery Inc. is hilarious, but as a parent it makes me wonder what my kids think of it.

It's not like cartoons back in the 80's and 90's were more straightforward though.

The main good-guy in Transformers was beaten to death in a feature-length movie.

In Teenage Mutant Ninja/Hero Turtles, they showed that the best way to deal with enemies is to throw them into a hellish dimensional limbo. And stupidity = evil.

In Gargoyles, the rich are so damned evil. Or aliens, as shown in Biker Mice From Mars.

In the 90's, superhero cartoons were full of lasers. Nobody owned metal ammunition. Cartoons made recently, there are totally guns. Avengers: Earths Mightiest Heroes has guns, for instance.

Taking another example from Avengers - in that, the evil organization HYDRA was behind World War 2. A group led by Germans and, at least in the present, populated by Americans amongst other nationalities.

What will Little Billy say when WW2 comes up in history class? He knows Captain America is fictional as he's a character in and on hundreds of things. There's no HYDRA lunchbox though. Will he think it strange that Teacher is saying the Nazi's started the war, so many decades ago, when his primary information source - television - showed that it was HYDRA?

I'm probably over-thinking it - any kid who believes HYDRA is real, will think Captain America is, too. Right?