What I learned from cartoons
I started watching Saturday morning cartoons when I was younger than you are now. I was a little kid. Pre-literate. Pre-my-parents-waking on a Saturday morning. My brother Dougie and I would sneak downstairs and plant ourselves in front of the TV while the Indian Chief test pattern was still on and the only sound was the eeire "ooooooooo" of the test signal. We were mesmerized by absolutely nothing. It was like waiting for a street light to turn on. We'd sit there with a bowl of Cheerios and the bags of heroin my parents would leave lying around (Mom, Dad, face it: Cheerios are addictive) and wait . . .and wait. . . for the TV to turn on. For the test pattern to turn into the National Anthem which is how TV stations used to start their day followed immediately by cartoons. I am an original Looneytune. All those cliche stories about Baby Boomers weaned on televison by mothers who would plop their kids in a play pen in front of the TV. . . I am that cliche. I was that kid. I yam what I yam, and I don't believe I suffered permanent brain damage from the experience. But I think I'd be a little spooked if I found my six or seven-year-old parked in front of a TV watching the test pattern at 5:30 on a Saturday morning. Fortunately, we have drugs for that kind of behavior now. Maybe they're still calling them Cheerios.
Have you watched Saturday morning cartoons lately? Of course you haven't. Why would you? You can read. You wouldn't be watching cartoons at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning, and neither would I except I saw this really cool comercial for a Superman suit. The thing actually inflates to make puffed up muscles whenever Superman chooses to turn on the suit-inflating fan on his belt. Can you IMAGINE?! When I was that age I was ready to jump out of windows empowered by a bath towel tied around my neck. I can only imagine where I would have jumped from in an inflatable Superman costume. But I gotta tellya that thing looks so cool. It comes with power gloves that make noise. If you swing your fist, it goes "Swwwwishhh. . " The little kid in the TV commercial kid is like, five years old, and I never saw a cooler kid in my life. He ((italics)) was ((end italics)) Superman. At five. When I was his his age my idea of cool was a Davey Crocket coonskin cap.
The cartoons on Saturday morning TV are a lot different that what I watched as a kid. For one thing instead of talking pigs and puddy tats all the cartoon characters are Japanese with huge European eyes battling some evil global overlord who can fire thunderbolts from the palm of his hands. The plots are "borrowed" word for word from video games. In fact the characters even talk about bonus points and the number of "lives" remaining. The story lines are as repetitive and predictable as an episode of Scoobie Doo (don't tell me that's not a real monster instead of a person wearing a monster mask like it is in every other episode). What I did notice in the new cartoons was the lack of classical music. Warner Brothers managed to work classic melodies from the "Tales of Hoffman" to "Bloom in Love" into the soundtrack of cartoons. For a lot of us it was our first exposure to classical music and left an indelible impression. To this day I cannot hear the stirring opening of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkarie" without thinking of Elmer Fudd stalking Bugs Bunny with a shotgun singing "Kill da wabbit! Kill da WABbit!" You know that gurgling, stuttering, laughing sound that Porky Pig makes before he says, "That's all folks!" at the end of a Looneytune? How would you write that sound? The answer, according to Warner Brothers official Cartoon Pig-to-English dictionary is "Gah-ha-dee, Gah-ha-dee, Gah-ha-DEE." You can't say you didn't learn something new today.
