Cartoons - Before and Now

The word cartoons brings to my mind cute and sweet little characters that fill my heart with joy. Though I am a fully grown adult I still enjoy watching animated movies and other programs that are meant for kids.

I still remember the different cartoons that I used to watch when I was a child - the different Disney cartoons - Mickey-Minnie, Donald-Daisy, Goofy-Pluto, Silly Symphony cartoons etc., Richie Rich, Tom and Jerry etc. For quite some days now, we did not have any cartoon channels in our Digital TV pack and never had the chance to watch any of them.

Recently we changed our Digital TV pack and got all the different cartoon channels. The child in me was so excited, not knowing that things have changed a lot over the period of years. I was so disappointed to see none of my favourite characters even existed on screen anymore! The fact that after 10 minutes of surfing the channels, I could not watch any cartoon for more than 10 seconds, should tell a lot about the quality of the cartoons.

More than the disappointment, I was shocked after seeing the many different cartoons. Entertainment overdose seems to be a major problem everywhere especially for children. During my childhood we hardly had 2 - 3 channels on the television and we used to see cartoons for one hour or so only. That one hour used to be great fun with my mom, dad and bro watching together the different Disney characters.

Now, with around 8 - 9 cartoon channels available for kids, I was surprised to notice that not even one channel telecasts decent cartoons. With parents who are too busy to engage their children with different activities, children have no option but get hooked to television to kill their boredom. Watching these cartoons which are filled with ugly characters and unnecessary violence, I am not really sure about the impact children would have watching them.

The cute, sweet, happy, joy-filled characters like Chip and Dale have become extinct. On their place we have dirty, ugly, violent and stupid characters like Chota Bheem, Ben 10, Oggy the cockroach, Spongebob. Power Rangers, Phineas and Ferb etc. These characters do not seem to teach any values to our children and seeing them, I feel, corrupts the minds of our precious future generation.

Thanks to the crazy media, we have kid channels in regional languages. The language that the different characters in the programs use are so horrible that I want the government to ban these channels. Children who pick up vocabulary in a jiffy, start using these words which are not only senseless but have a bad slang also.

With no parental discretion on TV watching by children, such cartoons seem to induce a lot of violence in children which they use against other children in school. With the general morality on a steady decline, the different cartoons seem to have a major influence on kids.

The different channels continue to produce such sub-standard cartoons just because our children seem to like them. Cartoons which were once a source of soulful joy and some moral, are now just meaningless drawings that are alive on the screen.

Here comes the important question - What do we do about this scenario? Shouldn't we be more concerned about what our children watch everyday? If they indeed want to watch cartoons, we still have DVDs of those old priceless cartoons. As the old saying goes, better late than never, let us wake up before too much damage is done.

Thanks to my brother and husband, I watched, and still watch a lot of really cute animation movies - Smurfs, Ice Age, Bolt, Up etc. I am glad to see that these movies and the characters still have values like love, care, affection. friendship, honesty etc.