TV Rex: Into the Cartooniverse
Missing out on culture in the parenting years and how cartoons can help teach culture.
A few years back, after my friend realized that I hadn’t seen like, any of the truly great movies of the 1980’s (Big Trouble in Little China, The Goonies, Better Off Dead, Gremlins 2,1 etc.) he arranged for a year-long, once-a-month event he called “Matt’s Movie Mondays,” as a way to further my cinematic education.
I was a little surprised that I’d seen so little of the era — before I’d gone into journalism school, I’d been a film major, and instead of partying and kissing girls, my entire high school experience had been sitting in my basement with my buddies and watching movies. I was hardly illiterate — so what had happened?
Now that I have two small kids, I know the answer: my parents had three small kids in the mid-to-late 80’s. They weren’t hitting up the movies. They weren’t doing cool shit. The movies they were watching were largely kids movies, at best animated features like Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast, but they weren’t like, doing deep dives into John Carpenter’s back catalogue.
So when the time came for my cultural education, they covered all the stuff that had been cool when they weren’t parents — 60’s and 70’s shit, and a few of the franchises (Indiana Jones, Terminator, Star Wars) that had gotten kicked off before we arrived.
My kids will similarly get a blank spot in their cinematic and musical education for the early 2020s. Today, my favorite soccer team, Tottenham Hotspur, posted a picture of the team’s captain, Heung-Min Son, with a young man who I assumed had won a contest.
The comments were very excited, but not about Son. So I clicked the young man’s name, and found out he’s Declan McKenna, a very famous musician with over a half billion listens on Spotify. I never wanted to be the dad who’s like “What’s a Dua Lipa?” but when you’re a parent, you just miss out on a bunch of cool shit because you’re doing a bunch of kid shit.
Cartoons and highbrow culture
While diving back into kids shows, I’ve realized just how much of my cultural knowledge comes from cartoons. While casting about for good music to work to one day, I found a playlist of classical music tunes. As I listened, I realized — I knew virtually all of these through cartoons. When Richard Wagner’s Tannhauser Overture came on, I instantly recognized it as the part in “What’s Opera Doc?” in which Elmer Fudd sings “We-TOIN my WUB, I want you always beside me!”
The Looney Tunes guys specialized in sliding classical music into their cartoons, but it hardly stops there — all of my favorite classical music has, at some point, been incorporated into a cartoon. Camille Saint-Saens “Danse Macabre” was set to an incredibly low-budget cartoon we watched every year around Halloween in elementary music class.
Modern parents’ favorite kids show is — to my knowledge, almost universally — the Australian show Bluey2. My favorite episode of the show is the truly lovely “Sleepytime,” in which Bingo, the four-year-old who is struggling with sleeping in her own bed all night, dreams her way into a new phase of life. The full episode is below:
The final moments of that show has really lovely music, which I did not know when first watching it was from an extremely famous orchestral piece, Holst’s The Planets. I was working at my desk and suddenly, during the “Jupiter” section of that suit, I was crying. I had to pause for a second until I realized why I was crying — because this was the music that played while Bingo’s mom said “Remember I’ll always be here for you, even when you can’t see me” at the end of “Sleepytime.” (You can listen below, the moment I’m talking about is at 3 minutes.)
What was even more ridiculous is that the reason I had even listened to The Planets in the first place was because another part of that Suite, “Mars,” plays at the beginning of one of my favorite episodes of the TV show The Venture Bros:
Between the highbrow world of classical music in Bugs Bunny and Bluey, the deeply progressive ecological thinking in movies like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind or Moana, the psychedelic weirdness of 80’s animation like The Last Unicorn or Heavy Metal3, and the family therapy of Encanto or Coco, I’m starting to think that by limiting your cultural education to cartoons… you still get a full cultural education?
On top of that, as I rewatch these old animated movies, I am realizing that a good chunk of movies I’d put on my list of “best films ever made” are cartoons: The Nightmare Before Christmas, Into the Spider-verse, and Princess Mononoke, to name a few.
If you’re at all interested in animation, might I suggest following
? They do weekly deep dives into the industry, and you can find all sorts of cool cartoons you’ve never heard of on there.In journalism school they teach you it’s lazy to finish an article by quoting someone else, but I’ve got to set my computer aside: my kids are watching cartoons. Here’s my favorite animated short4 of all time, The Missing Scarf.
Because the first Gremlins is great, but the second one is fucking insane.
Candidate for least favorite:
Or even better, the South Park episode set in the unbelievably horny Heavy Metal universe.
Don Hertzfeldt’s cartoons also belong on my “favorite shorts” list — check out World of Tomorrow here: