Blinded by Nostalgia: or, "Nah, I'm pretty sure cartoons WEREN'T better back in your day."

[ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢ: ɪɴᴄᴏᴍɪɴɢ ʀᴀɴᴛ]

[ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢ: ɪɴᴄᴏᴍɪɴɢ ʀᴀɴᴛ]

You know, out of every piece of media I've seen get treated as being like it's objective cheeks because it doesn't hold a candle to someone's childhood faves, cartoons may have it the worst. The number of times I've seen someone share the sentiment of, "Is it just me, or were cartoons better back in [ɪɴsᴇʀᴛ ᴅᴇᴄᴀᴅᴇ ʜᴇʀᴇ]?" is wild. True, some of it is undoubtedly ragebait… but I'm also thinking about all the times I've heard it outside this sub. People favoring media from childhood is nothing new, but even more so than movies, music, or video games, animated media especially tends to get the treatment.

Of course, many of those people also stopped watching cartoons in the same breath as they stopped puberty, but I'm going to have some faith, and assume that doesn't apply to most of the people in this sub.

So, for those of you that believe that having a bias towards older animation is some kind of hot take: trust me, it's not. In fact, if it were any more glacial, it would sink the Titanic.

And yes, it is a bias. You mean to say that out of the hundreds of series out there, that all of them are ass compared to childhood faves? Maybe if your childhood was during the Golden Age of Animation, and we were currently in the Sixties and Seventies, where every show had a shoestring budget, and were using the same tired-ass clichés and scenarios, but not in the year of our Lord in the Common Era of 2025. Stop the cap.

But ya know what? I'm the one who brought all this up; it's on me to prove my point.

Nostalgia can be a wonderful thing, and I see why many have a deep fondness of it. After all, who wouldn't want to be swept back to those halcyon days when life was simpler, and you didn't have a care in the world? But damned if it can't also cause us to see things with rose-tinted glasses, and getting swept up in that magic to the point where nothing else can compare. Not only does it make it impossible to measure up to an ideal, but it also makes some of us believe that our favorites of yesteryear were the rule, and not the exception.

Let's face it: when it comes to media, only the most popular and well-regarded tend to get remembered. Some works gain a cult following; others are reevaluated, and gain popularity as time goes on, or fall in favor when the hype dies down; everything else falls by the wayside. When you're looking at everything in real-time, it's easy to see how mid and lackluster everything is; it's presented front and center alongside everything else. Of course, most people are gonna assume that everything was better back in their day; they're only remembering the best, brightest, and most formative, after everything else has been filtered out.

Let's take the Nineties for example. Thanks to American animation going through one hell of a renaissance, that decade has a lot of good shit that everyone remembers: the DCAU; X-Men; Spider-Man; Gargoyles; Beast Wars; Animaniacs; The Tick; Daria; I could go on and on. There's also a slew of lesser-known series that have attained cult status, like Duckman and The Pirates of Dark Water; and then series that weren't necessarily good, but were still popular and entertaining enough, like Captain Planet and The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 (and later, Super Mario World). They—as well as dozens of others that I haven't mentioned—have been talked about over and over again, so they've etched a spot in the public consciousness. But for the dozens of shows that caught fire through the Nineties, there are literally hundreds of others that didn't. No doubt that they're remembered by someone out there, but sure as hell not like the others. Hell, some of them I'd argue deserving just as much love as those above… but most of 'em? Yeah, no; they're dog water.

Allow me to rattle off some of the many, many shows that I haven't seen much talk about, for one reason or another: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes; Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures; Kid 'n' Play; New Kids on the Block; The New Adventures of He-Man; Peter Pan and the Pirates; Widget, the World Watcher; Hammerman; ProStars; Mr. Bogus; Wish Kid; Where's Waldo Wally?; Spacecats; The Addams Family; Capitol Critters; King Arthur and the Knights of Justice; Wild West C.O.W: Boys of Moo Mesa; Eek! The Cat; Fievel's Adventures in the West; Mighty Max; Speed Racer (yes, there was a Speed Racer series that aired in the Nineties); Cadillacs and Dinosaurs; Tales from the Cryptkeeper; The Baby Huey Show; Bump in the Night; Free Willy; Creepy Crawlers; Highlander: The Animated Series; Phantom 2040; The NeverEnding Story; G.I. Joe Extreme; Starla Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders; The Savage Dragon (yes, the same Savage Dragon from Image Comics); The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries; Ultraforce; The Little Lulu Show; Waynehead; All Dogs Go to Heaven: The Series; Bruno the Kid; C-Bear and Jamal; The Fantastic Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor; Jumanji; Jungle Cubs; Project G.e.e.K.e.R.; The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper (i.e. the series based off the movie); Wing Commander Academy; Sam & Max: Freelance Police; The Legend of Calamity Jane; The Wacky World of Tex Avery; 101 Dalmatians: The Series; Mummies Alive!; Nightmare Ned; Histeria!; PB&J Otter; RoboCop: Alpha Commando; Cybersix; Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century; The PJs; and Sabrina: The Animated Series.

That's sixty series, all with at least twelve episodes. Many were dropped mid-season, but some managed to last longer than The Magic School Bus, and that's far more fondly remembered. Most aired on broadcast television in the States, though not all… but if Spawn is celebrated as one of the best series of the Nineties, and that aired on HBO, then Little Lulu and The NeverEnding Story are fair game as well.

Sixty series, out of hundreds… and that's just sticking with releases that aired in the West, were in English, and I rarely see people even mention, let alone celebrate. Of course, there's series like Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain and Avengers: United They Stand, but those are remembered because they're bad. There's also some shit from Europe that sound wild, and you'd think be remembered as at least a funny footnote, but aren't. (You mean to tell me there are series for Flash Gordon and Watership Down? What the fuck‽) And if I expanded my net to include works from the East, and started bringing up obscure and forgotten anime like Lord of Lords: Ryū Knight, Zetsuai 1989, Adventures of Kotetsu, and Thumbelina: A Magical Story, I'd be here all day… and that's just the shit that's listed on Wikipedia.

And in case you're wondering: I've seen over half these series as I was growing up; some, I watched regularly. A handful of them stick out in my mind for one reason or another… but for most of them, I forgot they even existed until today. I watched Eek! The Cat damn near every Saturday because it preceded one of my favorite shows… and aside from vaguely remembering that Eek was a little bitch, and that he had a dog named Sharky, I couldn't tell you shit about it. On the other hand, I only watched a handful of episodes of Tekkaman Blade Teknoman, and not only vividly remember several moments from it, but how they made me feel.

All that said: is anyone wrong for preferring something from another era? Nah, not in the slightest. Hell, I'm partial to many things from my own childhood, like the way anime was colored in the Eighties and Nineties. (What can I say? It just hits different.) But I'm not gonna act like most of what came out of that era was hot shit, 'cause it wasn't. Cherry-picking the cream of the crop only proves that those things stood the test of time, not that everything did. Claiming otherwise—especially through highlighting the worst of the worst—is not only honest, but is misrepresentative.

There's a lot of trash in every era. Just because you don't remember it, or have never seen it, doesn't mean that it didn't exist.