Children's Wasteland

Kids cartoons are absolutely pathetic these days. I remember the good old days when cartoons were epic…I would wake up early every Saturday morning to watch shows like Captain N The Game Master and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As a matter of fact, I remember quite well when the Chinese government crushed the demonstration in Tiananmen Square for one reason: it interrupted my cartoons. I kept watching it to see if it would go back to cartoons, to no avail. I rued the day that the Chinese government decided to crush feeble Democracy. It ruined my TMNT episode that morning.
Anyway, in St Thomas there wasn’t much to do relatively speaking and one thing my daughter kept asking for whenever we were in the hotel room was TV. We’d turn it on in the background and the only kids channel was Cartoon Network. Now in my day cartoons were successful and then spawned action figures to sell, except for the aforementioned Captain N, which was a 30 minute Nintendo commercial, but it didn’t beat you over the head with it, in the sense that they didn’t stop the show to extol the virtues of Mario Paint. The cartoons I had the misfortune to see were completely different. There’s Pokemon where there is at least some kind of coherent plot, so it’s not as bad. It’s still a lousy cartoon, but it could be worse. It could be like the one cartoon that I forgot the name of where you had two characters fighting back and forth. This action though was in completely lame “let’s play cards” form. They pulled out the cards from whatever game the cartoon was based on and talked about all the different things that their cards did. They explained the rules of the game and everything. I’m just glad that I was a kid during the golden age of Saturday morning cartoons when we could watch Voltron, Transformers, Thundercats, and Ducktales and not have it turned into a boring card game.