I shall make no secret of this, I never have: I am a child inside. For all the intellectual mumbo-jumbo I can spew out of that fiery kisser of mine - enough hot air to fill a hot-air balloon, enough hot air, in fact, to easily break Piccard’s world record - I sometimes like doing nothing better than to curl up on a sofa and devour some good old-fashioned cartoons. Yes, you heard me correctly, old-fashioned cartoons, the real deal, old school. As a kid I was an avid watcher of the TV, and back in them good ol’ days I loved the Disney and Warner Brothers stuff. Duck Tales, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Tale Spin, Animaniacs you name it, I watched it.
Now, for some strange and mysteriously unexplainable reason, I watched these cartoons either in Hungarian or in German - and only in my adolescence/adulthood did I gain access to them in the original English. And what a difference it made! There is so much good adult humour in these cartoons! They are so much more than the two-dimensional stick-figure computer-animated see are ‘ay pee we get nowadays (I exclude the computer animated films here, such as The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Madagascar et al., I’m talking about animated cartoon series). It seems nowadays they can only regurgitate and exaggerate, and make everything so painfully obvious, kid-safe and politically correct, you just don’t want to watch it. Cartoons these days don’t DARE do much other than trample on lessons already learned. That’s what sets old-school apart. They were brave, unpredictable, they had more flare and more of just about everything. I mean take a look at this clip from the Animaniacs, called ‘Hot, Bothered and Bedevilled’. It’s absolutely brilliant, and not just because of the wonderfully clever title! I’ll just roll the clip:
Hot, Bothered and Bedevilled:
The Animaniacs have this unparalleled burlesque and carnivalesque quality; everything, no matter how serious, threatening and full of gravitas, is turned on its head so that you have no choice but to laugh. Now I know that kids probably won’t understand half the jokes, but I remember my friends and myself at ages 9-11: you couldn’t get us away from the screen. We’d leave everything else in medias res, even chocolate cakes and raspberry mousse were left derelict and abandoned for Yakko, Wakko and Dot...
But perhaps the most admirable quality of these old-school cartoons was their ability to educate, about literature, culture, values, morals, and all that. In short, to show up in a light-hearted, simple, yet funny and creative way those profound lessons every child needs to learn at some point, through teaching or experience, or both. On one of his many Indiana-Jonesian adventures, Scrooge McDuck of Duck Tales (note how much more fun it is to read Dickens’ ‘Christmas Carol’ with a classroom of kids who recognise the similarity (and attendant significance) of the names of McDuck and Ebenezer Scrooge...), discovers a golden duck statue. Whatever this duck statue touches turns to gold. Now that’s all wonderful, until, all of a sudden, the duck is brought to life and flies around wherever it pleases, turning the entire planet with all its inhabitants into gold along the way. Scrooge, one of the few who has as of yet escaped the duck’s bling-bling-curse, is now faced with losing all that is truly valuable to him, and I remember worrying my pants off as I watched these particular episodes. You also learn a valuable lesson about the eighth commandment - don’t steal - along the way.
Or what about the Animaniacs rendering of Hamlet’s ‘Yorrick’ speech. If you never understood what Hamlet was philosophising about in the famous graveyard scene, this next clip is an absolute must:
Animaniacs - Hamlet Graveyard Scene:
Or what about Johnny Bravo’s timeless blunders with the fair sex? No kid’s going to entertain sexist thoughts after watching this Elvis chauvinist fail time and time again.
And with these serious trivialities said, I shall leave you all with a few more of my favourite old-school cartoon clips, courtesy of YouTube, to sit back, enjoy, and maybe learn a thing or two along the way:
Animaniacs - Hooked on a Ceiling
Animaniacs - Nations Of The World
Pinky and the Brain, Tongue Twister (my personal favourite, and one of the best examples of why you should watch these cartoons in the English original where possible!)
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