I watched a lot of TV as a kid, and my brothers and I had a lot of cartoons on the agenda from day to day. Monday through Friday, we had the usual afterschool programs to check out, from an hour block of King of the Hill to The Simpsons (one of my favorites). On the weekends, we watched all sorts of shows, from Hey Arnold! to Dexter’s Lab, to the Powerpuff Girls and Recess. We also loved Batman: The Animated Series, and we still talk about some of the dark episodes that came out of that show, from the creation of Clayface to the one where there was a large sentient machine making Batman robots.
At some point, though having grown up considerably lackluster in the money department, we installed Dish TV and watched a whole new set of shows hitherto impossible to lay our greedy eyes on due to the restraints of local programming. Rocket Power and Rocko’s Modern Life were staples in the household, as were Spongebob Squarepants and Johnny Bravo, two shows that–in hindsight–had more adult themes than I understood at the time, but were much appreciated. There were a lot more, too, such as The Angry Beavers and Courage the Cowardly Dog (another one of my favorites). I definitely grew up in a golden age of cartoons that hadn’t really been seen since early episodes of Yogi Bear and The Flintstones and the rest of the Hanna-Barbera stuff.
(An honorable mention is Over the Garden Wall, which is my absolute favorite, but I omitted it from the proper post as it was a limited series).
