Doug Kern pens an interesting article about wussified cartoons:

I always assumed that the threat of litigation had driven violence from Saturday morning. After all, if you show Superman frying a supervillain with his heat vision on Saturday morning, then, sure enough, some idiot kid in Dubuque will fry his little brother with heat vision one fine Saturday afternoon, and then everyone loses except the lawyers. But I was wrong. Federal regulators, rather than nervous trial attorneys, wussified Saturday morning TV in the early seventies. Uncle Sam made our cartoons insipid, in the hope that a nice stiff dose of cultural chloroform would deaden our proto-male violent tendencies and transform us all into prissy poindexters who would eat our vegetables, sit still in our seats, and eventually vote for French-speaking politicians.

That same castrating impulse informs much of our society's approach to violence among teens. God help the poor kid who puts a butter knife in his lunchbox, if he attends a school with a zero tolerance weapons policy. If you squirm in class too often, mouth off too regularly, or act like a boy during mandatory androgyny intervals, expect Uncle Ritalin to move in for a permanent stay in the mischief-making corners of your mind, courtesy of America's peerless public school system. Guns? Behold the spectacle of Rosie O'Donnell at the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards, exhorting kids to "never touch a gun," lest they get bullet cooties or something. And what about violent video games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City? That game alone is surely responsible for the surge in motor-scooter car-jackings and golf-club assaults on prostitutes, committed by thugs who dress like Ralph Lauren and talk like Ray Liotta.

While I disagree with his later points, whenever Super Friends is playing on some channel or another I marvel at how insufferably bad they are. For all of Warner Bros.'s mishaps on the big screen, at least they cleaned up (or should that be dirtied up?) the cartoons. Despite being twenty-five years old, I still enjoy a great deal of the Batman and Superman animated serials. Of course, I am predisposed to superheroes, but as Marvel's Sunday Morning treats in the mid-90's (as well as, of course, Super Friends) proved, every fan has their limitations. Move it away from the strict superhero genre, other serials like Gargoyles (which I cound as modern fantasy, but some don't make the distinction between superhero and modern fantasy) managed to deal with subjects appropriatedly while being entertaining and, at times, violent. Fight scenes have always generally been my least favorite part of ostensible action serials. One of the wonderful aspects of cartoons is that you're free to coreograph all kinds of super duper fight scenes that cannot be done live-action within a budget (the short-lived Flash TV series comes to mind). If you're constraining all of that to non-violent goody goodyism, you're not using the medium to it's full advantage.

[via Susanna]