I was born in ‘88. It means that I can never really say I was an 80s child. By the time I was aware of existence in general, it was already the 90s. 1988 is a very significant year for me. Some of you might think that it’s because it was the year I was born, but you’d be wrong and I’d mock you mercilessly for being so.

1988 is a significant year because it was the year that the original generation of Transformers was cancelled on television. I’m an old-school Transformers fan, so this new stuff doesn’t elicit the same excitement in me. The fact that Transformers got cancelled in my birth year led me to think about the cartoons of the 80s, and then the cartoons of the early 90s. Then, I had the crazy notion of “comparing” the two for an internet site! This should be fun.

The shit I grew up with in the early 90s were shows like The Rugrats, Hey Arnold!, The Moomins and The Raccoons. I’m sure you remember them all in some capacity or another. If not, Wikipedia that shit. It’ll bring back memories.

The shows that got cancelled or wound down in the late 80s were shows like Transformers, Thundercats, MASK and Gobots. These were all seriously awesome shows that got some major recognition and still do. They’re classic icons of the 80s era.

The more astute of you might have noticed a startling lack of similarity between the shows I listed for each decade. Let me spell it out anyway: The cartoons of the 80s were all about giant fucking robots, huge explosions, evil groups of people who wanted nothing more than to fuck shit up for everyone, protagonists who had cars that transformed, or were cars that transformed, or amazing shit that made you wide-eyed. The creative juices of the early 90s, however, produced stuff that was essentially real life in cartoon form. If I had wanted to, I probably could have lived a life very similar to Hey Arnold! without much effort. He didn’t ever do anything amazing or impossible. He just lived a normal life, and we were supposed to be entertained by that.

Why do you think I’m watching cartoons, bitch?! I want to see shit explode, not worry about someone’s love life when they’re far too young to even be thinking about love. The cartoons of the 90s bored me significantly. We went from giant robots that I could never even hope to experience in real life to mundane shit that was probably happening outside my door at that exact moment. Maybe it was their intention to make me go outside? I can’t imagine the awesome TV of the 80s produced many nature-lovers, since they were always glued to the TV shouting stuff like “AMAZING!” and “LOOK AT THAT FUCKING ROBOT!”.