It's a fair assessment to say that, as children, we were all exposed to some form of entertainment that grew to be our regular pastime -- for some it was playing with friends, for others, being content to mix imagination with toys or a blank piece of paper to fill the time. Once you're old enough, there's always the escape of a good book as well -- but for members of Generation X and those that followed, the one great diversion, the go-to form of entertainment, has been the cartoon.

Certainly it's been there before the time of the Gen X'ers, but it was that group that truly reaped the benefits of the evolution of television and the mass media. We were the first kids with cable, we were the first kids with VCRs… while still well short of being able to view what we wanted "on demand," it was kids like me that had one entire Beta tape (Dad was an early adopter) of our favorite cartoons gleaned from the TV, be it The Flintstones, Bugs Bunny Cartoons, those dated shows from the USA Network's Cartoon Express (The idea of a shark with the personality of Rodney Dangerfield hanging out with kids in an undersea world solving mysteries and playing in a band isn't at all bizarre or dated, is it?), or the contemporary cartoons driven by merchandising that arrived to us every afternoon ready to shape us into the model consumers that our society would embrace.

So the question is, how did it affect us? The power of the cartoon was an undeniable influence, based on a glance at modern pop culture -- t-shirts may be the most common expression of our ties to childhood, as more and more, you see people wearing the logos of G.I. Joe, the symbols of Autobots and Decepticons, the Thundercats, and even He-Man. And there's a good chance that they're buying apparel for their own kids with the same stuff on it, even if their kids don't really understand the cultural reference. That's the kind of influence these shows had on us. It's now cool to have liked what we watched -- even if it was unpopular at the time. Shows of one's youth have become a common identifying marker to others of the time period.

But what happens when we're afforded a chance to step back in time and revisit those same shows through much-older eyes? That's the question that this series of essays will explore. With more and more of the cartoons that made an imprint on our childhood being released on DVD and being re-aired on cable channels, we've all been afforded a unique look back at this medium as it was originally presented to us. So I'm taking this great opportunity to reexamine a variety of cartoons that I grew up with -- shows that have left some kind of mark, become part of my personal cultural heritage -- to see how revisiting the past may either be a wonderful trip down memory lane, or reveal a twisted corruption of my memories that will drive me into years of therapy.

My early prediction on the results: therapy.

On to the essay:
Tom and Jerry - The Ongoing Chase