The Cartoons of the Nineties

I recently observed how kids nowadays keep playing with tablets and watch some really advanced kind of cartoons on television.

It took me back to the Nineties, the age I grew up in.

The programs which I used to watch then were,

1.Duck tales

A tale of a miserly Uncle Scrooge and his mischevious nephews. The highlight of this program used to be the money bath that Scrooge McDuck used to take in a pool filled with gold coins.

2.Talespin

A program where the lead hero, a bear who works as a pilot, his no nonsense lady boss and his assitant, a cute bear who is an aircraft mechanic. It was fun to watch Baaloo, the bear, bungle up flight duty and his boss reprimanding him and his assitant fixing the plane. I really admire how the whole thing was built, straight out of fantasy with the bear wearing a flight jacket and all and driving an amphibian plane which used to land in a perfect and beautiful lakeside port.

3.Small Wonder

This one was about a Robot girl called Viki if I am correct. The program revolved around the robot girl, her father (A scientist who invented her), her mother and her brother. The father was called Ted Lawson. It gave us a glimpse of an American household and the amenities that an American house had since it was shot in an indoor set, that of a house in America.

4.Tom and Jerry

This was the funniest of the lot and both Tom the cat and Jerry the mouse were cute and used to make us laugh till we cried by chasing each other and trying to outsmart one another. The background music played a very important role. One could not imagine this program without the background music.

5.Heidi

I dont know how many people used to see this program. I think it came in the early 2000's and was about a cute little girl called Heidi who lived with her Grandfather in Switzerland, if I am correct. I used to be fascinated by how European countries looked in the past as the animation was wonderful.

6.Thomas and friends

This was one program which fascinated me to no end. Astonishingly this program was shot with the help of miniature train sets and different emotions used to be portrayed simply by changing the front face of the engine. This program used to make me yearn for a huge train set of my own, the size of Sodor Island where I could play with trains and hear the engines go 'Toot toot'.

7.Captain Planet

This program had Captain planet as the protagonist who used to be called by 5 kids called the 'Planeteers' symbolizing the five elements of nature, viz, air, water, fire, earth and heart. The villain was called Captain Pollution. Actually when I think about it now, the premise of the program was good. It educated young kids about things harmful to the planet.

8.Swat Cats

This program had two cats, whose names I forget now, who used to run a junkyard and below which stored their plane which they used to fly to save people. Talk about high tech for kids. The floor of the junkyard would open and the plane would take off from there into the air. Cartoons of those days could stretch ones imagination to its limits.

9.The Jetsons

This program was about a family living in an ultra modern world where they flew in glass bowl type planes to their offices and had houses high up in the sky perched on needle shaped pillars.

10.The Flintstones

Completely oppisite to the Jetsons, this program was about a family comprising of Fred Flintstone, his wife Wilma, his buddy Barney and his wife Bettie. It was set in the stone age but had an amazing twist in the form of Fred and Barney driving to office in cars which they had to push with their legs. It also showed stone houses which were a mix of an Igloo and a cave's design. This program left me thinking about how the World must have been in the stone age.

Nowadays I see kids watching things but somehow dont see that fascination in their eyes when they watch cartoons.

I used to be fascinated by those cartoons and used to really enjoy watching them. It helped, I suppose that some of these cartoons were a little futuristic and left me wonderstruck about technology.

Cartoons in those days were a World of their own, where us kids could get lost for a while and return fascinated and awestruck, to the dreaded homework that schoolteachers used to give us to do.

That magic seems to be missing in the cartoons of today. I might be wrong but I do feel it.