I think it's very common for people to look back longingly at the media they grew up with, especially during their formative teenage years, and think that that was the golden age of entertainment, and that it was so much better than the crap they churn out today.  I think a lot of this is nostalgia and rose-tinted glasses.  I mean, sure, there were some great classics of yesteryear, and a lot of revolutionary masterpieces, and sure, there's a lot of regurgitated slop today, like the endless Marvel machine.  (The Infinity Saga was good, but for the love of Celestia, let it go.)  But just because something is new doesn't mean it's worse, and the fact that you grew up with something doesn't automatically make it better.

I've had the good fortune to watch a lot of amazing animated kid's shows in recent years, most of which I've made blog entries about.  I am properly blown away by the quality of animated shows today.  It seems like I just find one incredible gem after another.  It simply amazes me to think about just how much better kid's shows are today than when I was but a wee lad.

I grew up in the ye olde '90's.  (Incidentally, the 1990's kind of seems like the last decade in which the world felt normal.)  Anyway, I've always loved animation, but the shows I grew up with were mostly cheap, low-effort, zany, wacky, off-the-wall slapstick comedy with no story, no continuity, zero character development, and no arcs.  I was raised by the likes of Rocko's Modern Life, AHHH! Real Monsters, Johnny Bravo, Dexter's Lab, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Ed, Edd, n Eddy, and assorted Looney Tunes.  Now, I'm not saying that all that stuff is bad, per se, but let's face it--it's fairly low caliber.  It's all kinda crap, honestly, but sometimes enjoyable crap.  It's like fast food.  It's crap, but sometimes it's tasty crap that hits the spot.  Sometimes it's just what you want, even if it's not high-quality.  I have an especially soft spot for Rocko--that was my favorite.  I'm very nostalgic for it, but I'm under no illusions that it's the greatest thing ever made.  I recently got to see some Courage, Dexter's Lab, and Ed, Edd, n Eddy for the first time in... sweet Celestia, gotta be well over twenty years.  (F*CK, I'm a dinosaur.  )  I was all geared up for this great trip down memory lane, and I was frankly shocked at how bad these shows really are.  Funny thing is, they were exactly as I remembered them.  The shows hadn't changed--I had.  What was once enjoyable was now totally boring.  I expect better now, because I've seen what a great kid's show can be.

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is another outta the park home run.  Moderate spoilers ahead.  If you're interested, get out now.  Kipo is a unique, incredibly imaginative adventure with writing and mind-blowing twists that rival any show made for adults.  The show's protagonist, Kipo, a 13 year-old girl, lives in a post-apocalyptic world 200 years in the future.  At around our time, (the early 2020's) all animals started rapidly mutating as if evolution was accelerated by a factor of a million.  In the span of a few decades, animals across the planet had gained human-level intelligence and the powers of speech.  They rebelled (and we lost) and humans were forced to retreat and live in underground cities like Zion from The Matrix in order to survive.  Over the course of two centuries, the surface had been reshaped by animalkind, and was no longer hospitable to humans.

Humanity didn't know how or why animals mutated.  Scientists in the underground cities attempted to unravel the mystery and find a solution.  Enter Kipo, the daughter of two of Earth's best scientists.  Unbeknownst to her, Kipo was genetically engineered with mutant animal DNA, making her a shape-shifting animal-human hybrid who holds the key to humanity's future.  After growing up underground for her entire life, Kipo finds herself suddenly thrust unto the hostile and alien surface world.  She must improvise, adapt, and overcome, and maybe, just maybe, find a way to make peace between humans and animals.

I'm gonna leave it at that and not summarize the entire plot this time.  It's a spectacular show.  The premise is so creative, mature, and epic in scope that it easily could have been a live-action show for adults.  Seriously, all you'd need is a little blood, a few f-bombs, and maybe a sex scene or two and you'd have an adult sci-fi show that stands shoulder to shoulder with Westworld, The 100, The Last of Us, or anything like that.  The writing is superb, the characters dynamic and robust, each with their own backstories and motivations, and it's packed full of surprising twists and layers upon layers of intricately woven plot.

At it's core, Kipo is about the dream of peace, acceptance, and friendship between all people, no matter how great their differences.  It's a story about letting go of the past and of all preconceived notions of what the world should be, and instead imagining what it could be.  For most of my life, I believed that death was one of the biggest impediments to progress.  Our lives aren't long enough to make good use of the knowledge we gain throughout it.  By the time we have enough knowledge and experience to know what we should do, we're often too old to do it.  And then we're dead.  And then we have to start all over with someone else.  I used to view that as a negative.  Too much time has to be constantly wasted trying to teach the next generation what's what.  But I don't think that way anymore.

Steve Jobs called death the single greatest invention of life.  He believed that death was necessary for progress, and called it an agent of change.  He said that older people become set in their ways and only see the world the way it is now, often looking backward to times past and thinking that that's the only way the world can be.  He noted that young people look at the world anew, without any preconceptions, without any biases, prejudices, baggage, or longing for the past--they just see it now, and imagine what it could be.  He believed that that was necessary for change, and I think he was onto something.  As we age, we do indeed tend to cling to old ways of doing things, even if we don't realize it, and imagine that that's the only way.  It takes a brand new, fresh perspective to see new possibilities.  We need the ideas of young people who have never been indoctrinated by the past in order to envision better futures.  I don't think I've ever seen a show that better illustrates, or a character that better embodies this idea than Kipo.  It's inspiring in many ways.

I can't get over how good so many kid's shows are today.  The scope, scale, and detail of many of these shows are absolutely equal to adult dramas.  Where were these shows when I was a kid??  If I had had Kipo, FIM, the rebooted She-Ra, Amphibia, the Bending franchise, etc when I was 8 or 10 years old, it woulda melted my f*ckin face off!  I mean, it melts my f*ckin face off today!  To be fair, there were cartoons of yore that attempted arcs and big stories.  There was the original She-Ra and He-Man, but, I mean, pfft, c'mon.  Kinda crappy.  Pony G1 attempted to be a big fantasy adventure.  Again, kinda crappy, imo.  I was big into X-Men: The Animated Series, which I talked about awhile ago.  That was a mixed bag.  I also loved Spider-Man: The Animated Series.  That was okay.  Oh, Batman as well.  There was a lot of superhero stuff.  That stuff was... I'd say okay not great.  None of it holds a candle to the shows I've written about in my blog.

Sadly, I think that a big reason for the lower quality of kid's shows in times past was simply an unfair, undeserved mindset by adults that kids were too dumb to understand complex shows, and wouldn't have the attention spans for arcs.  But that's clearly not true.  I'm glad to see that the makers of kid's entertainment now take the shows and their audience more seriously.  There has never been a better time for animated kid's shows than right now.  It's truly a golden age.