Cartoon Phobia

I have been trying recently to put my finger on the route cause of my depression lately. I’m seemingly doing all the right things; exercising, eating healthy, what have you. But I still have no idea why at this point in my life at 36 years old I’m so confused as to what my purpose in life is.

Granted I have a life quest to seek out the perfect cheeseburger, but there has to be more than that. Why am I so unmotivated to excel in my personal life? Who’s to blame? Everything else is hereditary so why not depression as well? Surely it can’t be my fault that I turned out to be a 36-year-old loser, can it?

Want to know who I blame?

The childhood cartoons I watched growing up - that's what!

If anything else, I am a product of washed up hippies and their 70’s/80’s children’s shows.

Let’s look at the evidence:

The Smurfs – Little blue three-apple high creatures living communally in magic mushroom houses. How much more fucked up does it get? It’s no wonder they didn’t lock me up and throw away the key right there. Besides, wasn’t it a bit creepy that in the whole entire Smurf village there was only one female? This alone must raise some conservative eyebrows nowadays.

Dr. Snuggles – Okay, this was the crown jewel of fucked up cartoons when I was a child. Originally a Dutch cartoon, Dr. snuggles took it’s prepubescent viewers on a tripped out journey through a fantasy world or talking badgers, wacked out duck umbrellas, walking houses, Treacle Trees, and plots that involved stealing squares of the ocean. Shit, this television show in itself was an LSD trip sans actual LSD. In retrospect, the imagery in this cartoon alone might just be responsible for at least %80 of the flashbacks I have now in my adult life. All that was missing from this particular cast of characters would be the “crabalocker fishwife pornographic priestess”. Goo goo goo joob.

Romper Room – Never mind the spacey chick who looked through her psychedelic looking mirror at children who weren’t there, what else would you expect from a cartoon that features a character named ‘Doobie the Bee’? Case and point!

Today’s Special – Here’s a real prize. Set in an after hours department store, this show depicted the antics of a magical dancing gay mannequin and a mouse who talks in rhyme. Whatever on earth was expected that I should get out of this show besides behavioral problems later in life I’ll never know.

Barbapapas – "Clickity-click Barba-trick”…whatever the fuck that means. The adventures of a family of blob-like creatures who grow out of the ground and have the ability to shape their bodies however they wish. Man, the creators of this cartoon must have really smoked some of the good shit before inking out the storyboard for this particular program.

Hercules – Seriously, it’s no wonder that this cartoon alone didn’t inflict more damage on my young impressionable mind. It definitely helps explain why I’m the warped person I am today. Did anybody else ever wonder why all the beasts always sounded the same or why such a great mythological character of such manly proportions would ever hang around some eunuch centaur?

Polka Dot Door – Now don’t get me wrong. I know that this show has been a respected bastion of TV Ontario programming for many years now, but seriously…what the hell exactly is Polkaroo? This thing makes Goofy seem like a well-documented display at the Museum of Natural History. Besides, why did the hosts always talk to their stuffed animals as if they could actually hear them or give a shit one way or the other? And if that wasn’t a sign of larger psychological problems at hand I don’t know what was. I would have had these guys committed to an insane asylum immediately – not give them their own daytime show. I doubt Bear, Marigold, Humpty or Dumpty would ever care where the male host disappeared to each time Polkaroo reared his head anyway…I know I didn’t.

A Bear Called Jeremy – One the first childhood cartoons that I can recall in the classic old school stop-motion animation style. Except that this bear wasn’t like other bears. He liked to dance and sing instead of stealing picnic baskets. This premise was flawed from the very beginning. But then again, what else did you expect from a Polish animator?

The Secret Railroad – Here was the Holy Grail of all burnt out pothead animation. A boy finds an inter-dimensional train in the basement of his apartment, complete with a girl with star-shaped hair and a guy with a cat on his head. This even made Will-O-the-Wisp seem sensible by comparison.