NOSTALGIA: Poly’s 2012 Homecoming theme has students hearkening back to their childhood favorites.
By Hanna Bernbaum, Focus Editor
Next week Poly students will take on the personas of television cartoon favorites as part of this year’s “Animation Nation” Homecoming theme.
The four “sub-themes” for each class are Nickelodeon (Seniors), Disney Channel (Juniors), Cartoon Network (Sophomores) and Looney Tunes (Freshmen). There is a designated dress-up day for each sub-theme next week.
In recent years, some of Poly’s themes gave a flavor for the past; students brought back the eighties in 2009 and later fell into a “time warp” in 2011. However, 2012’s “Animation Nation” is more than just an old satellite dish on the roof; it is a dish of televisual memories. It is not the current television cartoon characters that students are aiming to dress up as; it is the ones from their childhood.
Generally, the period from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s was when current high schoolers were young children. Now teenagers, these students are also the so-called “Internet generation” that, thanks to Google and meme generators, is embracing that “Renaissance Age” of cartoons twice over via the World Wide Web. This is not to be confused with the “Golden Age” of cartoons which, according to tvtropes.org, was experienced from 1928 with the introduction of Steamboat Willie until the early 1960s. In fact, the freshman sub-theme of Looney Tunes is the only one that falls under the “Golden Age of Animation.”
Looney Tunes cartoons were produced from 1940 to 1959 by Warner Brothers and first gained viewership via Saturday mornings on primetime networks like ABC, CBS and NBC. Included under the Looney Tunes umbrella were shows such as The Bugs Bunny Show, Merrie Melodies, The Road Runner Show and other lighthearted segments featuring comedic animals. Looney.goldenagecartoons.com indicates that Ted Turner purchased the broadcasting rights to Looney Tunes in the 1980s and Cartoon Network became the main broadcaster of Looney Tunes beginning in 1997. However, the last channel to air Looney Tunes regularly was Cartoon Network’s classic cartoon alternative, Boomerang, in 2005.
In the late 1990s, Cartoon Network not only aired shows from past generations but had original shows as well. Popular cartoons from the late 1990s that experienced a re-run afterlife in the 2000s included Johnny Bravo, The Powerpuff Girls and Dexter’s Laboratory. The three aforementioned shows had a common thread of 1960s “mod” influence in their animation, in contrast to the network’s other shows like Cow and Chicken and Courage the Cowardly Dog, whose main characters were sickly-looking, domestic animals.
In 1983, Disney’s television network, Disney Channel, was launched. The channel was originally cartoon-less and primarily aired live-action sitcoms and narrative shows. Alan Baltes of examiner.com says that 1997 brought Playhouse Disney, Vault Disney and Zoog Disney onto the network. These are the cartoons to which teens now have flashbacks. Some of the most prominent Disney Channel cartoons were Kim Possible, The Proud Family and, of Playhouse Disney fame, PB & J Otter and Rolie Polie Olie.
The television channel that experienced perhaps the largest boom in “Renaissance Age” cartoons was Nickelodeon. The channel was developed in the 1970s but it was not until 1988 that it finally found itself a home at Universal’s Orlando, Florida studios, according to retrojunk.com. In the mid to late 1990s, Nickelodeon produced cartoons with zany characters and premises that usually veered closer to dysfunction than normalcy, such as Rocko’s Modern Life and CatDog. Arlene Klasky and Gabor Csupo, creators of Rugrats, AAH! Real Monsters! and The Wild Thornberries, were significant contributors to Nickelodeon’s unique brand of 90s and early 2000s cartoons. These cartoons leading into the new millennium still had an unabashed yet craftsmanlike quality, right before the surge of computer animation. The millennial generation that Nickelodeon cultivated feels especially attached to Spongebob Squarepants, which first aired in 1999. Up until present day, episodes are aired on Nickelodeon and the series surpassed Rugrats in being the longest-running cartoon on Nickelodeon: nine seasons.