Think about it for a second; you’re just starting to wake up on a Saturday morning, you turn on your TV, and scroll through the many channels. When you finally choose something, it ends up being a cartoon from your childhood that you still enjoy to this very day, let’s say…16 years since you first watched it. You just mind your own business watching your show, when you suddenly hear a voice from behind say, “Aren’t you a little old to be watching an animated show?” 

Now you feel insecure about yourself. What if you won’t be seen as mature? What if you get made fun of by everyone? What if you end up being one of those losers who reviews those cartoons whilst also attempting to show off their own creations in their parents’ basement, which also doubles as your bedroom?

Of course, this is a hypothetical scenario. I’m 16, and yet, I still watch cartoons from when I was five or six to either laugh at my lack of taste or get a sense of nostalgia (mostly the former). If I’m weird for not letting go of what shaped my childhood, then screw it, I’ll remain weird. My interests are my interests, and I’m sure there’s others out there who think that way, too. Here are just a few reasons why you don’t have to give up what you love just to be seen as mature.

Number One: Adult animation exists! This is probably the most apparent reason. There are various animated programs that are meant for an older audience, such as The Simpsons, Futurama, and Family Guy. All of these shows hold up well enough for many seasons to be ordered, and have many quotable moments to go along with them. Data from parrotanalyitcs.com, a site used to report and get an insight on various shows and movies, animated or otherwise, showed a 151.6% increase in demand for adult animation between January of 2020 and October of 2023, compared to the 47.5% increase for crime shows and 98% increase for documentaries. The data also reveals that between various popular streaming platforms, Max demanded the most adult animation at 100 programs, Hulu took second at 80, and Neflix took third with 66. Keep in mind that cartoons are still created by adults, which brings me to my next point.

Number Two: Kids’ shows are still run by adults, who occasionally sneak innuendos into their work to make the programs enjoyable for all audiences. This isn’t a new thing, either. Here’s a little bonus fact: animation was never intended to be for kids to begin with. According to the conversation.com, a news site that recaps history of events and keeps updating us on current ones, the reason everything became more kid-friendly was because there were various Hollywood scandals happening on and off screen. Said scandals led to the establishment of the Hays Code in 1934, which prohibited anything that could be classified as inappropriate on screen, such as certain words, jokes, and anything alluding to R-rated activities or something of the sort.  The innuendos are what sort of keep this fact alive. For example, in an episode of the Powerpuff Girls, a friend of the main trio was visiting and calls herself ‘an accident’ when telling Professor Utonium not to worry about accidentally creating the three in his lab. But the Hays Code’s biggest case of shifting gears has to be with the character Betty Boop, turning her from what I can describe as an oversexualized flapper to an ordinary and slightly Mary Sue-esque school teacher who is incredibly tame compared to past cartoons. Case and point: adults are producing these cartoons for everyone, including kids and their parents. 

Number Three: Cartoons can be pretty valuable as educational tools. Sure, most of these educational shows are intended for younger audiences a lot of the time, but there are many instances of animated shows tackling real world issues: Captain Planet on drug addiction, HIV, and AIDS, Static Shock on racism and gun violence, and a Peanuts special on cancer, just to name a few. All of these episodes and many more show both the actions and consequences of social issues and norms in a mostly family friendly setting that is easy to understand. If these cartoons didn’t exist, then a lot of people, myself included, wouldn’t have ever gotten a head start on lots of important topics that every kid has to learn about sooner or later. There’s also this lovely thing called ‘morals’ that a lot of cartoons teach everyone about. The moral of the story in an animated show typically occurs after the climax of the episode, and these moral messages are not just for kids; plenty of adults need to hear them sometimes, too. These morals can act as alternate material for building one’s skills since there are plenty of people out there who don’t learn these things like they should’ve. For example, the formally longest running animated show, Arthur, provided a lesson in every episode, and all of them are really good in execution. There is an episode where Arthur punches his sister, but most people sided with Arthur because D.W. definitely deserved some kind of comeuppance for touching and breaking a model plane Arthur spent weeks carefully building. As far as teaching socially acceptable behavior goes, that episode is probably the only real bad apple in the 253 episodes the series spanned over the years.

And that, everyone, is why you’re never too old to be watching your favorite childhood programming. This is what my own life has been  centered around so far and what has given  me the little spark to practice creating my own work in the form of animatics and other types of content with my own characters, which are based on and named after people from my real life setting, though I’m currently in the process of separating the work from the inspiration. Don’t let anyone else try to convince you otherwise if watching animated shows is what you love. This may be coming from someone who produces cartoons (hint hint, wink wink, here’s my YouTube channel where I post all of my creations and various little projects that I may or may not work on sometime in the future), but I really do mean what I say. Be yourself, unapologetically. Who knows? Your creation might become the next big thing.