TV Toons




		Winter 2002 – 2003 Volume 2 • Issue 2 Write Between the Lines is an exploration and articulation of the obvious and the obscure. A cavalcade of creation and commentary designed to amuse and bemuse.


	TV Toons

	Happy Happy Joy Joy by Jesse Crowder

	It all started with that dagnabbit rabbit Bugs Bunny and his crew of crazy characters. Those simple and wacky cartoons invaded the soul of 60s American culture, and deeply imbedded themselves in young hearts and minds everywhere. Animation became a singular service—that of entertaining children. When one would say "cartoon," one would think of kids sitting in front of the TV on Saturday morning. Not anymore. In the past decade, the seed Looney Tunes planted has blossomed into a TV animation phenomenon. Animated series are growing like weeds, and not because children have finally taken over the world. Instead, a phrase other than "children's programming" comes to a TV producer's mind when he or she hears "animation"—ratings. Ratings drive the industry, and they have skyrocketed for animations, not just on Saturday mornings, but also on Sunday nights, Wednesday nights—any night. The word animation can now be mentioned in the same sentence as primetime without attracting wild laughter from network execs. How did the ratings go up for cartoons if children aren't watching them anymore than they used to? Grown-ups are tuning in. The typical audience for animated shows has changed with the massive influx of adults watching the immensely successful (and not to mention, subversive) Simpsons. The Simpsons, created by Matt Groening, is a show that takes cartoon rubbery characters and injects them with human qualities and situations. The Simpsons is very real to its adult audience who find themselves unusually familiar with the cartoon version of Americana: family, nuclear power plants, donuts, and beer—all major aspects of patriarch Homer Simpson's life. Bugs Bunny didn't have a job. Daffy Duck didn't have a family to raise. Yosemite Sam had a gun, (okay, so do too many real people), but until The Simpsons, no audience member ever saw him or herself depicted as hanging out at the local cartoon bar. Homer Simpson is a man people can talk to—to see themselves as. That's what allows The Simpsons to break the mold and enter the adult world of humor, it's about characters we can relate to, and an absurdity we can appreciate. Adult humor has fueled the fire behind shows like South Park, which emerged from its cult status to commercial cachet with a theatrical film release. The show has now, along with The Simpsons, entrenched itself in the iconography of American culture. It ignores all societal conventions for what is considered "decent television" and pushes the boundaries of censorship in the United States. The main characters are school children in a Rocky Mountain town of Colorado, named South Park. They cuss, get killed, and do everything else a parent would never wish their children to see or do. That's the show's success. The young adults, who have only recently left the clutches of their parents, relish the opportunity to push the limits once imposed upon them. Not only does South Park give kids this opportunity to shove against the restrictions of society, it is also quite hilarious. It pokes fun at society, and everything in it. There are characters like "Big Gay Al," a homosexual who appears now and then with ultra-stereotypical comments like "ssssuper" (with a lisp). But the show is not making fun of the people it stereotypes, instead it's laughing at the stereotypes themselves. Every character in South Park is a stereotype, and it laughs at their proliferation in society. The exaggeration of stereotypical characters is what makes the show funny. The young people of America, of course, laugh along with it. The gradual rise of adults in the animated television audience cannot be solely credited to South Park and The Simpsons. Roots of this migration can also be found in the 90s series Ren and Stimpy on Nickelodeon. This series focuses on the appeal of everything raunchy. Ren, a dog, and Stimpy, a cat, share an apartment in typical suburban America. Like The Simpsons, Ren and Stimpy are characters adults feel they can connect with in an absurd way. Be it by watching Ren pluck out the nerve endings of his teeth after they rot away (for the nerve ending fairy), or by watching Stimpy clap his butt cheeks to the song "Happy Happy Joy Joy." Their words and actions are exaggerated to a ridiculous degree, which appeals to children, and yet they still have such depth of character and complex behavioral patterns that adults can find the humor. SpongeBob Square Pants, a new Nickelodeon favorite, crosses age barriers as well. It is the complexity of modern cartoons that is bringing in the older viewers, and a few networks have succumbed to the trend. Cartoon Network, a station created to entertain children first, started to build its older audience in the late 90s with the show Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, which took old clips of animation from the original 70s Space Ghost series and put the characters in a talk show environment, where they would interview celebrities and make fun of each other. Watching Space Ghost have a staring contest with Dennis Leary is television gold. Cartoon Network wants that gold, and now has quite a handful of shows that entertain both older and younger viewers. Dexter's Laboratory and Powerpuff Girls are two of these. They take a simplistic, thick-outline style of cartoon animation, and add the complex situations and characters that adults find humorous. The big guns want a piece of the action too. Fox, home of The Simpsons, now has a Sunday night lineup made almost entirely of animated series. Matt Groening created another successful series in Futurama, which takes the basic comedic style of the latter and places it in a space-age environment. Shows like King of The Hill and Family Guy are part of Fox's arsenal. King of The Hill is, on a basic level, an animated working class family situation comedy. The Family Guy takes comedic elements of modern sitcoms and combines them in animated form. The family dog can sometimes be seen chasing the miniature horse and wagon that was chased in the classic Gravy Train dog food commercials. Each depicts a different animation style and humor, illustrating the animation industry's development through its diversity of shows. The influence of animation in TV comedy is apparent in Saturday Night Live, which now includes a snarky animated segment called "TV Funhouse" and MTV's controversial "Clone High" (so controversial as of March 2003 it's on hiatus; episodes may only be showing in Canada.) Why not play out skits in live action? Well, animated characters seem to have a unique ability to play ridiculous or possibly offensive roles, and get away with it. The world of animation is one of infinite possibilities. If you can think it, you can draw it, and that's what the television industry has slowly come to realize. Animated shows can walk where live action shows cannot, animated characters can do things real people cannot. Kids have always loved the world of the limitless. Finally, the adults are realizing what children have always known—cartoons are just more fun.