The "Cartoons for Adults" Trend: Why Animation of a More Mature Nature is so Popular

Saturday morning cartoons never held much appeal for my mom and dad. My siblings and I, of course, had our favorites. We watched Bugs Bunny for the witty slapstick that only Warner Bros. seemed capable of at the time. We enjoyed "Transformers" because it was the epitome of science fiction for our young minds. Cartoons like "Cops" and "Jem" were the elementary equivalent of a soap opera.

Over time, the innocence of many cartoons has come into question due to the rise in political correctness and the overzealousness of certain groups to play God with universal parenting tactics. In the wake of the appropriateness question concerning children's cartoons, a whole new genre of animation has been spawned: the mature cartoon.

It started with "The Simpsons," the first adult cartoon to really hit the airwaves in a big way. When Matt Groening sketched his first shorts in 1987, I doubt if he knew how successful it would be, or how a couple decades later there would be an explosion of cartoons made specifically for a mature audience. Today we have "Family Guy," "South Park", and "Drawn Together", not to mention the variety of Adult Swim shows on the Cartoon Network.

It's a mix of factors that make these shows appealing to us as adults. First, there's the "kid" factor. Whether they're made for the younger generation or the older one, cartoons are still connected with youth. Kenny might have died in every episode of South Park's first season, but it was still a cartoon. In watching the animation, adults are given the best of both worlds: the ability to watch the R-rated stuff they were denied as children with the whimsy that cartoons brought to them in the first place.