hahahahahaha hey joey you see the nostalgia critic review cartoon hero

When I think about cartoons, especially in the context of their original presentation, I really don’t think about excessive gore. I kind of wish you would have warned me about that Garfield Clip. Sorry, but I have a very weak constitution, and my tolerance for that level of gore is minimal.

I’m so happy I missed the bulk of the Reagan era. I can’t help but agree that this kind of moralizing at best missed the point and at worst encouraged the very activities they were preaching against by missing what’s so attractive about drugs so completely. The way Mikey or the Chipmunks or Bugs or anyone acts in this one (given that all of them were, to some extent, rebels), it really defeats the purpose to have them preaching the same kind of message your parents or teachers would. None of this rings true to their characters. If drugs are supposed to be seductive and fun, then it doesn’t work to have otherwise fun and rebellious characters telling you it isn’t cool without showing you explicity why. It just feels like they’re selling out and breaking character.

Really, if you wanted to put kids off of drugs, you should take a page off of Pinocchio: Show the kids freely indulging in the druggie life (like the kids indulging in Pleasure Island), and then have it twisted later so that it becomes scary, and you SEE how their lives become ruined by it. Drug use can really ruin someone’s life, so EFFING SHOW IT! Show what drugs literally do to someone. Show how it destroys their bodies, destroys their happiness, what kind of a life it forces them into…something that isn’t maybe easily fit for an after-school special. But show it all the same, if you really wanna drill the message in. Be brutally honest, but be honest. It just doesn’t work to have layabouts, wise-crackers, and goofballs telling you the same thing you’d hear from your local authority figures, that it’s best to live the clean and narrow, and to do what your parents say you should do. It isn’t genuine, and it doesn’t register and/or sink in to the child brain. If anything, it just ruins whatever appeal these characters would have had for you. Kids can detect fakeness better than adults would want to admit, and if you try to use fakeness to sell them on a message, they’re gonna tune it out and, perhaps, be more susceptible to these kinds of temptation when it shows up, given how inauthentically you’ve argued against it.