The Greatest Cartoon Ever
Hey. Get ready to
tear me apart. Get ready to rip me
limb-from-limb as I declare a statement that will shock the very foundations of
the zeitgeist to it’s core.
Adventure Time is over-rated.
BOOM. There. Said.
*drops mic*
*Picks up mic again*
OK, so let me unpack that.
Adventure Time is brilliant. It’s
masterful and funny and full of fantastic characters and story and marvellous
inventive. But it’s everywhere. It’s on t-shirts and hats and pencil cases
and games and I really love it. I haven’t
seen every single episode (there’s a lot) but it’s not struck the chord with me
that it has with so many other people, and many of my friends. I don’t consider it the *fanfare* Greatest
cartoon Ever.
So why is it that this cartoon has magically captured children
and adults? And why is it that so many
of the queer community love it so much too?
Because to those fans, Adventure Time is the greatest
cartoon ever. Everyone has their favourite
songs, poems, stories, films etc.
Adventure Time is dear to many people’s hearts.
Me and my housemate recently watched a few Count Duckulas,
which are incredibly pun-heavy surreal nuggets of British eccentricity. Much more nutty than Dangermouse, with some
great set pieces that lead to a zaniness only 80s cartoons could provide. The puns drove me quackers.
I’ve also been caning a lot inordinate amount of the Batman The Animated Podcast which is a
gushing source of fan nostalgia waterfalling from my iPad. Check it out, I never watched much Batman TAS
cos it wasn’t on UK telly as much (Batman Of The Future was though, or Batman ‘Beyond’
to you ‘Americans’), but the Podcast is very funny, well-made and goes into
great detail of the show, which I love, cos I love analysing and details (could
ya guess?)
Retro cartoons are back, or at the least they have a marketability. You can slap a 80s or 90s cartoon onto
anything and it’ll sell. But how much do
people revisit these cartoons?
You know I love Pokémon.
But I don’t even think the Pokémon cartoon is the best thing in the
world EVER. It holds a heap of nostalgia
for me, and I’d watch it gleefully, but that would be rooted in the memory how
much it mattered when I was 11.
On the flip side, I devoured Gravity Falls. Such a well-crafted collection of
stories. Twin peaks meets Hey Arnold. Not only were the jokes spot-on, but the
characters were 3-dimensional (which is ironic considering one was a nightmare
2-D space demon), including strong female characters, gay characters and quite
possibly a Trans* character. I couldn’t
watch the finale for fear of it ending, like the apocalypse. But end it did, and marvellous so. With salty tears running down my cheeks, as
Dipper and Mabel bid farewell to Gravity Falls, and part of their childhood, I
too said goodbye to a cartoon which PROVES to me that cartoons are still high
quality.
Well, actually, it doesn’t.
Because it’s all subjective. Just
as one person adores Adventure Time for its fresh take on the adventure genre,
another person will argue “cartoons aren’t as good as they used to be” while
rocking their He-Man t-shirt.
But compare this whole comparison with other genres. We hold Citizen Kane up to be one of the
greatest films of all time, just like we declare Shakespeare, Dickins and
Tolstoy to be our greatest writers. The
greatest musicians include Bob Dylan, The Beatles and Presley. I’m not saying I much rate these assumptions
but that is the general structure of our western culture.
But no one really holds up a cartoon as the greatest
ever. Because kids don’t care about
that. They just love sitting after
school and watching something silly, exciting and/or funny. They’ll watch reruns, they’ll watch the latest
show, as long as they enjoy it, they enjoy it.
If you enjoy something, you enjoy it.
I’ll analyse it for hours and hours and hours, but at the end of the day
you love something because you love it, and the rest is silence.
Oh, and for the record the Greatest Cartoon Ever is Legends
Of Treasure Island. Without doubt.
Goodnight out there, whatever you are….
No comments:
Post a Comment