One day as Neil Cavuto was ending his economics show on FOX News, he showed a clip from the old 1960s Batman show.

"It's a bomb!" The narrator shouted, and sure enough, there was Adam West in his goofy-looking Batman costume holding a large metal globe with a wick coming out of it, and the wick was throwing off a shower of sparks. Quickly our fearful hero scurries around looking for a place to ditch this incindiary device, but to no avail. He scrambled to the overlook of the ocean and was about to heave the bomb out to sea...but was stopped by a flock of baby ducks.

I believe that was the only time in the entire series that Batman actually got blown up by a villain's bomb. Neil used that bit to make the argument that we in America are too nice and we need to get tougher on ourselves and others in the world if we are to have any chance whatsoever of making the world a safe and secure place for us and our kids.

Much later, I was thinking again about cartoons and how I had yet to come up with a viable editorial line with which to entertain and teach you, the reader. That's when Adam West and Batman struck again.

I recently got an email from a reader who mused that gone aer the days when a cartoon would last more than a season before vanishing and being replaced by something that would also, not last more than a season. This is contrasted by the 70s and 80s, where not only would a cartoon last for more than a year, it would get replayed endlessly in re-runs.

What I think has happened is that slowly but surely, people have come to the realization that children and teenagers are not only a lot smarter than perhaps they were a few years ago, but they are more sophisticated, and therefore, they are a market to be captured, not an audience to be entertained....or perhaps they are looked at as so much an audience to be entertained that they've become a market to be captured....or maybe I'm on crack...who knows...

The point is that gone are Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner, and in are Dexter and The Tick. (Not that I have anything against these shows.) Cartoons have gotten more sophisticated along with the view that we have of children.

So the new sophistication of cartoons is bad because children can no longer become attached to a single cartoon and carry that with them throughout their childhood...unless they are sophisticated enough to have taped the epsiodes. And I hear you out there..."What about the Power Rangers?" To which I reply, "Yes, how about them?" Does anyone remember the name of the original Pink Ranger? The answer will be at the bottom of the page...but the Power Rangers too are an example of what we're talking about. How many incarnations of the zord-encrusted team have we seen? What was the name of the Rangers' original guardian guy and what was the name of his pet robot? (I know he wasn't a pet, but I hated him anyway...) Just as you're getting to know these kids and what they can do, Bandai and Saban come out with a whole new breed of Power Ranger...

There is a good side. The good side is that goodness winning for goodness' sake is OUT! YES! The good guys might still win, but perhaps the evil guys might be able to make it look like perhaps they won't.

And if you don't have enough evil from the bad guys, perhaps some of the near-insanity from the good guys will satiate your need for vile villainy. I mean, the present-day writers for the Batman series have went back to the way DC Comics originally conceived the Caped Crusader. Gone is the feel-good era of Adam West! In his place is a hero that is just as flawed as the evil he fights. The difference between Batman and villains like the Joker, or Two-Face is that his deranged state drove him to fight on the side of justice. Today's Batman would have blown the baby ducks into next week. And again, all of this is done because we've realized that children can not only handle a complex hero, BY GOD THEY DEMAND IT. This is because these same people grew up on cartoons where they good guys could never miss anything they shot at, they always won, and in the middle of always winning, they never got so much as a scratch. I think one day, an adult kid who just got his or her job at a writer's studio woke up and said, "something's just not right with this picture..."

I think the jury's out on whether the changes cartoons have gone through are good. I think at this point it would be something that perhaps should be thrown to the audience. SO, email me and tell me what you think. I'll post your answers.

Artemis

(comments welcome - please email me at lunahq@yahoo.com and I will post your comments here as well.)