Episode 38: Retro '90s Cartoons! The Lessons They Taught Us About Mental Health, Relationships, & Life

Buckle up because we’re going retro! Some of the first important lessons we learn as children come from the kinds of media we’re exposed to and if you’re a Millennial or Gen-Z that probably means your formative years were full of cartoons like Rugrats, Wild Thornberrys, Daria, Hey Arnold, Animaniacs, Magic School Bus, The Simpsons, and more! Join us as we explore some of the life lessons we learned from these iconic 90s cartoons and how our perspectives of them have shifted once we grew up. Click here to see our resources for this and all our other episodes.

 AUTUMN

Welcome to the different Functional podcast where we explore the triumphs and challenges of trauma recovery and being neurodivergent in a neurotypical world. In today's episode, we're going retro and looking at the lessons we learned from iconic 90s cartoons.

So, I am Autumn, the older sister, and to start the show off, I'm going to share with you my favorite 90s cartoon characters, but they're actually different as an adult than they were as a child. So as a child, my absolute favorite cartoon character was Daria from MTV's Daria, because I felt like I was her. I related to her so much. I was way too smart for all of my peer group. I didn't fit in, and even more so, I did not want to fit in. So, I so related to her, my absolute favorite.

But I'll have to say that as an adult, it shifted. And my absolute favorite 90s cartoon character now is Ginger from Nickelodeon’s As Told by Ginger. And I related to her as a child, but I could never really connect with her because she had this really healthy and supportive family. And as an adult, where I'm at on my healing journey, I'm now capable of feeling the grief that comes with that loss of love and support when you have a dysfunctional home. And so I really connect with Ginger a lot. And I actually use the as told by Ginger parenting model, so to speak, to parent my inner child.

IVY

 2:14

That is actually a very good model of parenting. If only every child got the opportunity to have a family, especially a mom like Ginger did on As Told by Ginger, the world would be a much better place.

I am Ivy, the younger sister, and I'm actually super excited about this particular episode, although I will put a little disclaimer out there. We're fudging the numbers just a little bit. Some of these are not necessarily going to be 90s, but they're close enough. And I give that disclaimer because my favorite character as a child is from Invaders Zim, which actually came out in 2001. But it's close enough to the 90s. We're going to call it good. And my favorite character was Gir. Because who doesn't love Gir? If you've seen Invader Zim and you don't like Gir, what is wrong with you? He's adorable. Chaos. He's the cutest character that ever existed. I wouldn't want to live under the same roof with him because he is pure Chaos and he'll find a way to, I don't know, turn your washing machine into a waffle maker. But he is very adorable and would love to share cupcakes with him and go to the park with him occasionally. Not live under the same roof, though. I don't think I could handle that much energy and chaos.

As an adult, my favorite cartoon character from the 90’s is Daria. Unlike Autumn, I did not really relate to Daria when that show was originally on the air. But as we were preparing for this episode and I was rewatching old episodes of all of these different shows to refresh my memory, I realized there is nothing I want more in this world than to be just like Daria when I grow up. And I feel like it's doable for me because I already have the monotone voice and a certain amount of cynicism and sarcasm. I think it's feasible I could do it. I could become Daria when I grow up. I even like her fashion sense.

 AUTUMN

I would definitely have to say I agree, Ivy, that you're a lot like Daria, just because even the way you said it in opening today, you're like, I'm very excited about today's episode. Like, I can't even get as monotone as you get because my voice just has too much inflection. Maybe I'm more like Gir. Or maybe more like Zim. But, yeah, you're very, very monotone, so I think you're well on your way to Daria, and I say congrats on that. Congrats.

 IVY

I think that might be one of the reasons why I liked Gir so much, is because in some ways, he does remind me a little you because he does have a lot of tonal inflection, and he can go from being really serious to being, like, yeeeee, so excited, and I don't have that. I mean, I'm sure even the yee that I just made was probably not super convincing. I am a very monotone creature by nature.

 AUTUMN

My current kitten that we just got  is, I would say, very Gir. Like it's just walking chaos. If he had opposable thumbs, he would probably turn our washing machine into a waffle maker and it would explode. So, yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about being Gir.

 IVY

I think you should feel flattered by it because I'm not saying you are entirely like Gir, I am saying that some of your mannerisms are like Gir and you are capable of showing a full spectrum of emotions, which I find impressive because that is not something that I am good at. So I think you should take it as a compliment. Also, I still think that your cat is aptly named because you named the cat Bruce. And I don't think your cat is like Gir. I think your cat is much more like Bruce Campbell from Evil Dead. I just feel like he's got more of those vibes going on.

 AUTUMN

All right, so as we said, to start this out, we are going to be talking about the popular and iconic cartoons of the 90s and early 2000s. And before we jump in, I do want to note that there is a significant age difference between Ivy and myself. So, I was born in 82 and Ivy was born in 88. And so when you're talking about cartoons that were released in the 90s, some of these Ivy may have seen when she was six or seven years old, whereas I would have seen them where I was 16 or 17 years old. So this should be kind of an interesting look at how these cartoons hit you at different developmental ages.

[Rugrats]

All right, so let's go ahead and get started. And the first show we want to talk about is Rugrats. This is probably one of the most iconic cartoons that came out of the 90s, came along on Nickelodeon, basically a bunch of babies that I feel like were unsupervised a lot for being infants and toddlers, and they got into a lot of different shenanigans. What do you remember most about the Rugrats, Ivy?

 IVY

 6:22

Mostly what I remember from that show when it was on the air was just pure entertainment because I was quite young. But I do agree with you, they were unsupervised a lot. Although will say that now as an adult, after I watched a few of those episodes, to refresh my memory the other night, I don't feel like that's entirely inaccurate, though.

I don't have kids, but I do have a lot of friends that have kids, and children will create chaos and have entire adventures in the 2 minutes and 5 seconds that you had your back turned or that you were in the bathroom. So I actually do not find it completely absurd of the things that go on in that show. They obviously stretch it because they're trying to create these storylines of imagination, but the ensuing chaos that they wreak on households, I think, is actually quite accurate for people that have children. I don't know if you have kids and your kids are pure chaos, let us know. But I'm pretty sure Rugrats is somewhat accurate.

 AUTUMN

 7:23

You can call me a liar if you want, but especially if you were like an 80s kid like I am. So that late 80s, early 90s. I don't remember a lot of parental supervision, even for my friends or my acquaintances who had healthy, loving homes. I feel like it was very much just kick you out the door, you ride around on your bike, and you show up sometime after dark, and it was good. So I feel like Rugrats was kind of also accurate in that aspect, too.

 IVY

 7:54

Now that we've briefly covered some of the perceived accuracies of the show for that time period, and just children in general, what did you actually learn?

 AUTUMN

 8:02

 I always wondered if this is kind of like what childhood friends would be like or what they'd talk about or do if you didn't come from trauma. Because in all honesty, all of the friends I had as a kid also came from trauma. So even at six years old or eight years old, the interactions I was having with my friends were about the traumatic events that were occurring in our house and kind of a commiseration and a validation. It was almost more like a group therapy session led by young children is pretty much what my childhood friendships were. And so when I saw this, I thought, is this what childhood friendships were about? Like, is this what you would do if you didn't undergo constant trauma?

 IVY

 8:49

 The only thing that I can really think of as a takeaway from when I was actually a child, I felt in some ways very jipped by this show. I also felt very jipped by another show that we're not really going to be covering. I think it was called Muppet Babies.

But I had the impression as a small child from these shows that if I just thought about it hard enough. I could make those things reality. Because in those shows, they paint imagination as this thing where if you just think about something hard enough, you can make it real. And so for a large part of my childhood, I did not think that I had a good imagination. I thought there was something wrong with my imagination because I could not imagine going on a safari and actually make the safari appear around me. I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought imagination was supposed to transport you to the actual place that you were imagining. And so I felt very jipped and disillusioned by those shows. And I actually had self-esteem issues a little bit as a kid because I thought my imagination was broken. I assumed all of these other kids in the real world, when they imagined things, it was actually becoming real. But somehow my imagination was broken, and I just wasn't making things happen. So that was my main takeaway from it as a child, which is kind of depressing and sad to think about now.

Maybe that's why I mistrust my imagination now. I'm like, now I could never write a novel. Other people's imaginations are so much better than mine. Maybe there's still a part of me thinking that if I write a novel and it doesn't actually occur in the real world that it apparently is just a bad storyline. I don't know.

As an adult, though, holy shit! I thought as a kid that these were pretty healthy normative families. They're not.  Like, some of them are fine, but my biggest beef is with Angelica's parents. They're terrible. They're bad parents. They are corporate whores. They did not want to be parents. You can tell from how they treat their child. They just spoil her with objects and then they're just super concerned with their careers and nothing else. It's no wonder she has behavioral problems. And she's always mean to everybody. Poor kid just wants attention and she's not getting it.

And then, like Tommy's parents, Stu is like, off in his own world with his daydreaming about his inventions. And Dee Dee is constantly seeking advice from essentially fake doctors. She's like, I don't know, seeking advice from the equivalent of Dr. Phil. I don't feel like that's a good way to parent, personally. Like, well intentioned, but I don't think a good way to parent.

I do like the twin’s parents, though, because the mom is very practical and level headed, and Grandpa is actually pretty practical and level headed. And I do like Chucky's dad because he is legitimately trying as a single dad, and kudos to him for that. But some of these, the parenting skills in that show were quite terrible.

 AUTUMN

 11:45

 The Pickles family has some issues. I just remember from that childhood adolescent perspective thinking that this was a really normative, healthy family. But as you say, some of these things, I'm like, you're right. Like, his parents were kind of corporate whores and Stu was super self-involved all the time. And so I'm like, wait, was this a normative healthy, quote unquote family for the time and I had an accurate perception of them? Or was it more that my family was so fucked up that I was looking at them as some healthy family because they were just healthier than me? And now I'm kind of curious about that. I feel like we need a larger poll of people to chime in and be like when you were growing up, based on your family, did the Pickles seem like a healthy bunch or did there seem to be some problems with their parenting skills?

 IVY

 12:40

I'm also kind of curious about that. I feel like the most functional adult in that show was the twin's mom. She's got a little bit of like the pull yourself up by your bootstraps attitude, but she's also very practical and very level headed and very much wanting her kids to have real experiences and scrape their knees a little bit and be comfortable in their own skin, which I think is great. But I will say out of every character that is on that show, I think the one that has it the most together is Susie Carmichael and she is a child. So that tells you something about the adults in that show.

 AUTUMN

 13:12

At least by my perception, I thought the children were supposed to be more responsible than the adults. I also really related to Susie Carmichael because one, she had my last name because grandma's name was Carmichael and I was like, yeah. And she was really together and really kind and I was like, I want to be like her.

[The Magic School Bus]

You started talking about imagination and how you thought that imagination was supposed to transport you and just become a reality. Let's move into our next show that we're going to talk about, which is the Magic School Bus, because I feel like that one dealt a lot with imagination. I mean, maybe not, but in my mind that was like Miss Frizzle had this imagination and through it she was able to create this Magic School Bus solely out of imagination and was able to take these kids on amazing adventures. How did you feel about that one?

 IVY

 14:00

Oh, yeah, I mean, it's all the same thing. I feel like I really got fed a false line about what imagination was as a kid from these shows. I was going to say I'm not bitter about it. Maybe I am a little bit bitter about it. Otherwise I don't think I would be talking about it as much right now. Didn't realize I was holding on to that bitterness, though.

Yes, it's just another one of those shows that had me convinced that my imagination was broken because I was not somehow finding a way to turn a school bus into something small enough that you could swallow it so that you could explore the digestive system of the human body. I really desperately wanted to believe that those sorts of things were possible and that my imagination was the only one that was broken.

I did really love that show, though, partially because sometimes in school when the teacher was sick or they didn't feel like teaching. You got to watch that on the TV instead. And that was a much better day because it wasn't lessons and there was no homework, and you didn't get called upon to answer mathematical equations, which was good, because I hated that, and I really loved Miss Frizzle as a child. I just thought she was the coolest thing ever. She was a very competent woman. She was very strong. There was nothing she couldn't do. She was fearless. She was just a complete and total badass.

As an adult, I rewatch those shows, and I think that is still true. But also, if she's actually doing those things and it's not just some imagination game she's playing, she puts those children in a lot of danger all the time, which is probably not good, and I bet their parents did not sign off on that. A lot of those adventures could have seriously injured or even killed some of those kids

 AUTUMN

 15:49

I wonder what kind of liability waivers they had with the school. Or if she was just doing that on the low when the school principal had not approved or signed off

 IVY

 15:56

 Yeah, I don't think anybody would have signed off on that. I think she had to have been doing it on the down low and just been like, hey, kids, when you go home today, don't tell anybody this happened.

 AUTUMN

 16:07

I did admire her, and she was really strong, but I always thought she was just a little bit ditzy, like she should just have it a little bit more on the ball, especially for watching that many kids. But then as I got older and I became an adult, I did sort of realize, you never get that much on the ball. Like, as a kid, you think, oh, yeah, you should have it together, and one of these days I will. But that never really happens. You always are still just a little bit ditzy. I don't know, maybe some adults out there are adulting wonderfully on the ball, but I still feel kind of Miss Frizzle about a lot of my life.

 IVY

 16:42

 See, I never saw her as not being on the ball. I always just assumed that Miss Frizzle was an Aquarius and she was living in her own reality and just taking the kids along with her, because in her reality, everything goes the way that she wants them to, and she is on top of everything, even the things that seem like close calls. She's totally got it. That's why she never sweats anything. She's just like, no, that's fine. She's always very calm and composed and very certain that things are going to turn out all right. So I just always assumed she was an Aquarius.

 AUTUMN

 17:12

 I would say one of my biggest takeaways, honestly, from the Magic School Bus was that lesson learned idea, because I really thought that knowledge was a safe place to escape. And that is one of the things I did to escape my childhood, is I really went academic and I learned a lot and was very educational and very lessons and school and reading. And I think part of that did come from shows like Magic School Bus or even Reading Rainbow or Wishbone, if you remember those back in the day, was that idea that if you read enough and discovered enough and were educational and academic enough. You could escape your world.

And luckily, like Ivy, I didn't believe that I was actually going to be transported on a magical little school bus. And so it actually worked for me. It was a safe place in a storm of chaos. The lessons and the academics were a consistent, constant place that I could feel safe and things were known and they were for sure, and I could make advancement and I was protected. And so I kind of like the Magic School Bus for that because it was nice having a calm place in the chaos of a dysfunctional home.

 IVY

 18:19

I don't really have anything else to add to that except, yes, I agree. And also, we would have covered Wishbone and Reading Rainbow in this if they were more cartoons, but they're mostly not, so that's why we didn't cover them. Although I'm kind of sad that we're not. Maybe we should do a live action ninety s at some point, too.

 AUTUMN

 18:37

[Hey, Arnold]

So let's go ahead and move on to the next cartoon on our list, and that is Hey, Arnold. And I don't know how many people remember this. Like, I see some paraphernalia or merchandise. I'm not sure what they call it. I'm pretty sure it's not paraphernalia, but I see some merchandise out there for it. But not as much as, like, the Rugrats.

But this was a Nickelodeon cartoon I always remember as the odd shaped head cartoon because the main character, Arnold, had, like, this football head and his best friend had this really tall, conical hairdo, which I was so jealous of for reasons unknown as a kid. They were, I call it inner city. Maybe they just lived in the city. I mean, coming from a rural area, everything city is inner city. So they lived in the inner city.

And it was a pretty good cartoon. I feel like it had a lot to say about family and friendship. I also think this is another one with the minimal adult supervision. That was one of my big takeaways, was just like, yeah, this was normal. You wander around the city unsupervised at night as a nine-year-old, why wouldn't you? Of course, you'd just get your power tools at 2:00 a.m and build things in your room. Who would stop you?

Because I guess in my reality, growing up as a kid, nobody would stop you. I really feel that there were times that Ivy, myself, my brother could have disappeared from the household for days and nobody would have actually noticed for quite a long time. Now I'm really beginning to wonder, is this 90s parenting that we're seeing and that's why it's represented in the cartoons? Or am I just thinking this is normal because I came from a dysfunctional home? I don't even know anymore.

 IVY

 20:11

 I've never really known what was actually normal versus dysfunction and how much of normal is dysfunction that's not being called dysfunction. And to your point about us being able to disappear for long periods of time, I actually did get lost in the woods once because I was wandering around our property. And then I got lost in the woods and then I ended up on a neighbor's property that was way down the road, and nobody knew I was gone until I had to ask the neighbors to call my house so that somebody could pick me up because I didn't know where I was. Nobody knew I was gone. Autumn came to pick me up, and I'm pretty sure still, Autumn was the only one that knew I was gone. I'm pretty sure our parents had no idea that that ever happened. 

 AUTUMN

 20:58

And that was what happened. Like, they got on the wrong bus and they ended up lost in the city, and I'm pretty sure nobody knew they were gone. So, yes, Hay Arnold was just real life. That's how it was.

 IVY

 21:09

You are probably remembering Hey, Arnold as being the Weird Head Shape Show, because Helga in that show, literally calls him Football Head. That is her name for him because she bullies him, because she likes him, but she calls him Football Head all the time, and his friend is named Gerald. And I think everybody that watched that show was jealous of Gerald's hair because that was really impressive.

My takeaways from that is that Arnold and Gerald had a beautiful bromance that I hope continued well into adulthood. I hope they're somewhere out there in their made-up world still friends to this day, because their friendship was just it was amazing. It was, like, the best friendship ever.

As far as, like, Arnold goes, everybody that lived in that boarding house, all of the adults around him were a little crazy, like both of his parents, both of his grandparents were a little senile, and all the other people that lived in that boarding house were oddballs and misfits, but in really benign and even sweet ways. And I love that Arnold, more or less in the show, is turning out to be a pretty well rounded kid because he still had a lot of love and support and concern and care from the adults around him. But it was a nontraditional family, and all of them were either a little bit crazy, not quite there, or just were weird. And I really loved that about that show because it showed me that you really can basically choose your family. And family doesn't have to look a certain way. It can look any number of ways and still be a good, loving, supportive home.

The thing that I took away from that when I was rewatching episodes of it the other night, though, that I did not expect was I found myself relating to Helga a lot, which I did not feel that when I was a kid watching it because she was very much a bully type. And I was not that I was much more likely to be bullied than to bully others.

But when I looked at what was going on with her behind the scenes, that part I related to a lot, because in her household, she had an older sister that was the golden child who could do no wrong and was so talented and so beautiful in every way. And they were perfect and wonderful and Helga was completely ignored. Like, she did not exist, really. She was never going to be as good as her sister. She was barely human. And her mom was an alcoholic, like, literally an alcoholic, which they allude to in the show quite clearly. And so I related to that of just having parents that were inaccessible to me and never feeling like I was going to be as good as either of my older siblings. Because Autumn and our brother were both golden children in their own way. And anything that I was appreciated for as a child, I always felt like I wasn't actually being seen. I was more things were being projected onto me as being good qualities, but I was like, I am not that, though. This is more about my father's image that he wants people to have of his family and he wants people to have of his children. But I didn't relate to it, so I never really felt like I was seen. And I felt like I was pretty frequently ignored and rejected by the adults within my family.

And so I did something very similar to what Helga did, which was I, in my desire for love and affection, was seeking that externally by romanticizing the idea of romantic love. It was almost like as a child, on a subconscious level, I accepted I will never really be loved by my parents and never really be seen by my parents. But there's still hope that I'll have love someday. Because someday I'll fall in love, I'll find my person and I'll fall in love and everything will be wonderful and amazing for me. And so as a child, I developed really intense crushes. And I didn't understand at the time why they were never requited. And now I look back at them as an adult and I'm like, oh, I am real glad I grew out of some of those things because I straight up would have been like a stalker as an adult if I had carried those behaviors forward into adulthood.

And so I felt a lot of as I was watching some of those old episodes, I really felt a lot of empathy and compassion for Helga, because I was like, no, I get it. I feel like I was doing much the same thing she was - I will never have love at home. The only hope that I ever have of being loved is to be loved by somebody romantically later on. So let me put all of my hopes and all of my fantasies and my daydreams towards that, because that is the only viable option for love that I will ever have.

Which, that's it's pretty sad, but I'm in some ways I'm kind of glad that that was represented in a show because it is a little bit dark and I mean, I think a lot of people that watched it didn't really think about it that much, but she was straight up a stalker. She was collecting locks of his hair and things that he had thrown away and basically building a shrine to him. And I didn't quite go to that level, but I got pretty close to doing that. And it was coming from a space, with both her and with me, it was coming from a space of feeling so completely unseen, unloved and rejected by the people that you would want and need that love from most. Pinning all of your hopes for love in the future on romance, which really, I feel like, negatively impacted me well into adulthood until I actually learned to love myself and learned healthy relationship skills. I feel like that really set me back.

 AUTUMN

 27:02

 I feel like that is part of why a lot of these 90s cartoons still speak to us even as adults. It's not just that reminiscent nostalgia piece, but I feel like a lot of these cartoons actually had some of these darker themes, these more human themes that a lot of us didn't necessarily pick up on as children. But then when we look back, we really see them and we relate to them. And while we didn't maybe consciously pick up on them as children, I do feel that we did subconsciously, on some level, pick up on these themes and these ideas. And we did use them maybe to help us.  Well, some of us did use them to help us grow in our own ways, especially those of us that did have those absent, neglectful, traumatic childhoods where we didn't have a lot of positive parental figures. The TV did raise us to some degree, and these cartoons were part of that.

And I do wonder to some degree if that's what helped you, Ivy, on your healing journey, was that idea of having seen Helga and having seen how that played out and not wanting to be that person and so choosing to make better choices. Because if you hadn't seen someone like Helga, how long would it have taken you to realize that path that you were on, to see the stereotype that you were becoming, to see the consequences that were about to be born of your actions? You know what I mean?

 IVY

 28:22

It had to have been on some subconscious level because I had completely forgotten about any of those complexities of that character until I rewatched some of those episodes the other day. Because a lot of these shows that we're covering today, I had not watched since I was a child, so I had to refresh my memory about a lot of them. And this one really struck me because I did not remember these facets of Helga at all. And I didn't remember her backstory whatsoever. But it really did hit me hard once. I was reminded of it. And I was like, God, that feels painfully familiar to me.

 AUTUMN

 29:02

[Dr. Katz]

 So, speaking of issues following you into adulthood, let's move on to the next show on our list, which is Dr. Katz. And I don't know if this one is remembered by a whole lot of people, but I loved this show. This aired on Comedy Central, and essentially the idea behind this is that Dr. Katz was a therapist and he would have various clients, and all of his clients were voiced by different stand-up comedians.

And so they were kind of doing some of their bits as if they were in therapy, which is kind of amusing because I feel like a lot of stand-up comedy, at least the stand-up comedy I watch, is like an open mic therapy session in a way, where you just kind of laugh about the trauma and the issues you've had. And for a lot of us who've gone through trauma, humor is a very big coping skill with it. It's almost like you have to have that. You laugh at it or you get destroyed by it, and a lot of us choose to laugh at it. And that was one of the reasons I love Dr. Katz.

So I would have seen this in early adolescence because I think it came out in like 95, 96, somewhere around that time frame. But it really hit me because they were talking about fucked up childhoods and anxiety and depression and all of this sort of stuff, but they were doing it in a humorous manner, in a way where the issue wasn't overtaking their life, but was just a part of it that they could then handle because they could laugh about it. And that's one of the biggest things I took away from the show, was that humor is a potential way to confront these mental health monsters that I was dealing with.

Because when I was 15or 16 years old, I didn't have the skills necessary to cope with depression or anxiety, and I didn't have the support anywhere in my life that would even have been able to help me deal with that vicariously. And so I looked at Dr. Katz and I was like, wow, it's okay to be fucked up, and if you're funny about it, maybe you can survive it.

 IVY

 31:04

 We mentioned a lack of adult supervision, and this show, to me, is definitely indicative of the lack of adult supervision we had, because this was definitely not a cartoon for kids. This was a very adult themed cartoon. Adult themed to the point that when I remember watching it with Autumn, I don't remember taking anything away from it. I thought it was just kind of weird and boring, but Autumn was older and so she commandeered the remote, and so I watched whatever Autumn watch. So I didn't really remember anything particularly interesting about this show. It was kind of like a boring cartoon because it was for adults, but whatever, it was still a cartoon, so I'll watch it.

I did, however, refresh my memory on this show over the last few days, and of all the shows on this list, I got hooked on this one. There are 81 episodes in total, and while I was sick on the couch trying to breathe without dying, I've watched 70 some episodes of Dr. Katz now. And I am, I think, addicted to this show.

As a child, it meant nothing to me, but as an adult, I find it really interesting. And my takeaway from it now is that we're all human and we're all fucked up, even the doctors, which I kind of knew because our father was a doctor of psychology and was also pretty fucked up. But not in a funny way. The way that Dr. Katz is, he's got all these clients that have issues and they're sharing their issues in funny ways. And Dr. Katz also has issues like his adult son who mooches off of him and won't move out of the house, but he has no backbone to tell his son to get a job and grow up and get out. So I find this show to be really entertaining, but also a good commentary on how every single one of us has issues. Even your therapist has their issues. In fact, your therapist probably became a therapist because they had issues that they were trying to understand so that they could fix their own issues and try to help other people fix theirs.

 AUTUMN

 33:24

 I would also venture to say a lot of the great therapists out there, that's why they're the great therapist, because they've been down that path and they know what it's like. And it's not the blind leading the blind.

 IVY

 34:32

I just want to add there that sometimes it is the blind leading the blind, but the good therapist will admit to you that they are the blind leading the blind, and they're just like, well, this theoretically makes sense. So let's try this approach, which is one of my favorite things about the therapists that I have worked with, is they've all been good enough to be like, yeah, I don't actually know what I'm doing completely either, but we'll figure it out together. I got you.  That's a sign of a good therapist.

 AUTUMN

 34:03

I think that's really important when you grow up. I mean, not just with trauma, but all the stuff that comes with it, or being autistic undiagnosed or ADHD undiagnosed. You always feel like you're the one that's the problem and everybody else is normal and everybody else is healthy, and everybody else is okay. And I love that Dr. Katz pointed out, not the case. Not the case at all.

[The Wild Thornberrys]

So let's move on to the next show on our list. And this is The Wild Thornberrys. It was a Nickelodeon show.  And this was a little girl. She could speak to animals and she would go on various safaris with her family. There was her mom, her dad, there was a little basically wild child brother. And there was a very 90s, superficial, concerned about makeup and appearance, vogue magazine kind of teenage sister. But overall, actually, this family was very, very functional, I thought. Yes, they were different. Yes, they were in weird circumstances, but they all worked really, really well together.

And this was actually a show that I was really drawn to because I loved Eliza's character. She was super smart, kind of a nerd, kind of a geek. She could talk to animals. And of course, I loved animals and related to animals way more than I did to people. But the show was hard for me to watch because it always felt like Eliza was the key that kept her family together, like she was the piece that made everything complete so that they could work and be happy and be adventurous. And that broke my heart a little bit, because I was very much internalizing that idea, kind of like Ivy thought about imagination, meant I could make it real.

I thought in some ways that The Wild Thornberrys was showing me a reality, that if I was intelligent enough, if I was smart enough, if I was clever enough, if I could just do enough, I could be the key that would make my family happy. And that's not true. My family had way too many issues, and it wouldn't have matter what I had done. But as a young teenager, that is still something I thought. And so it broke my heart to see Eliza being able to do this and me sitting there wondering. But, what am I not doing? Like, I'm trying to be smart enough, I'm trying to meet everybody's needs, I'm trying to be a good girl. Why? Am I not enough? Why am I not good enough? What am I not doing that Eliza is doing to make my family a happy family?

And so this one was really hard for me to watch as a kid because I couldn't be like Eliza enough to fix my family.

 IVY

That's really sad that that was the takeaway that you had from this show. It's not surprising, but it is sad. And I think it's this along with my thing with the imagination, I think it really highlights that you get a lot of really great things from these shows, but there's also some illusions that you pick up from these things because they are fantasies, they are made up worlds and made up families. And so you do end up with some of these illusions that are really sad to have to accept at some point that it's not feasible, that it's not real, or at least it's not real and feasible for you.

I also had kind of a conflicted relationship with this show. I love this show. It is all things wonderful and amazing because I love animals and I love documentaries and I like learning about different things around the world. I loved all of the people in this family. They were so tight knit.

Even the teenage older sister, Debbie, she was still actually pretty cool. She was just one of those people that wanted to have some sense of normalcy, but her family was just not normal. They were documentarians. They were always out going on adventures in other countries and uncomfortable circumstances and dealing with all sorts of crazy things that she didn't want to have to deal with because she just wanted to be a normal teenager and have normal friends and all of that. But she still really loved her family.

I was always sad that I couldn't have a family that was close knit like that. Even when there are disagreements or even when there's bickering, to still have that closeness and that bond and that sense that, yes, no matter what happens, my family will be there for me. Because, to be perfectly honest, I was not convinced as a child that either of my parents would put their life on the line for me if necessary. I was not convinced of that. I did not have that kind of sense of safety. And watching The Wild Thornberrys, their family constantly was doing that in almost every episode. They were like putting their lives on the line to save each other. Which probably is also not super healthy in a lot of ways, not the most stable of childhood environments, but it definitely seemed better in a lot of ways than what I had, which was. Just kind of feeling alone in the world aside from Autumn, essentially. So I struggled with that part of it.

And  I also struggled, too, because one of the things that I loved most about that show was how adventurous, and they loved going out into the world and doing crazy things and having all of these experiences and learning along the way. And I loved that because I wanted to kind of be like an explorer and as an adult. That's part of the reason why I love going off roading, and I love camping and I like hiking and foraging and doing all of those things because it's the closest that I can get to that.

I'm saddened not only for myself and for my siblings, but also saddened for my parents that there was none of that adventurousness. I'm sad that that was a message that both of my parents internalized was that failure meant I am not good enough, and I can't handle not being good enough. And so I will only ever do the things that come to me naturally. I feel like that really was a disservice to all of us in the household. I still find myself being far more timid than I think I could have been had I come from a family that was not only loving and supportive of me, but come from a family that valued experience.

I really wish that I had grown up in a household where it was encouraged to try things. Even if you're not good at it, try it. Do it. It's fine to fall. It's fine to scrape your knees. It's fine to not get it right. It's even fine to mess it up royally in most situations because you're learning. I wish that we had had that, and we did not. And I think it's been a huge disservice to everybody in the family. I think it's made us more fearful of things than we need to be and causes us to self-sabotage in a lot of ways.

 AUTUMN

 40:32

I do think that points out another reason why the show I liked it so much, but it also hurt too much to watch it. I did pick up a lot of that timidity too. They have that phrase that goes around now, like, living your best life. They're living their best life. And it took me a long time to find the courage to live my best life because I was hiding behind fear and clinging to safety so much and clinging to my old programming too much. And so that idea of being an adventurer and just living life and taking those risks and being alive was so appealing to me, but also so overwhelmingly scary. But I mean, maybe I could go back and watch it now and find some inspiration so that I can continue to live my best life.

[Aaahh!!! Real Monsters]

Now let's move on to the next show on our list, which is, Aaahhh!!! Real Monsters. And this is one that I related to and could actually watch because I felt like everybody was really anxious and unsure and there was no real family to speak of. It was just friends. And so I felt like that was somehow better.

So Aaahh!!! Real Monsters was another one of those Nickelodeon shows, and its main characters were basically three little monsters. There was a dude that held his eyes above his head and had huge armpit hair, which always creeped me out a little bit. And then there was this big eared red monster. And then there was this tall black and white candy cane looking monster with big red lips. And they were basically in monster school and learning how to be good little monsters.

And I really enjoyed it because all of them had their little anxieties and they weren't quite sure if they were good enough or not. And their friends always supported them and pushed them to try the task they were scared of. And so I enjoyed Aaahh!!! Real Monsters because it did encourage you to push your boundaries a little bit, but they had friends that were there to help them in case they fell. And I loved that piece of it.

IVY

I didn't get anything super meaningful from it as a kid and even watching it as an adult. The biggest takeaway that I got from it is that it represents something, somewhat akin to the Adams Family or the Nightmare Before Christmas. Things along those lines. There were a lot of different sorts of movies around that time period that I felt had that kind of vibe where it was questioning conformity in a lot of ways. And that part I did like.

It was this idea that not everything that's, quote unquote good and right is actually good and right and not everything that's, like dark and evil and bad is actually dark and evil and bad. It's all a matter of perspective and how you choose to look at it. I always really loved things like Aaahh!!! Real Monsters or like the Adams family because they were dark and kind of weird and kind of goth and their sense of humor was kind of dark and edgy and all of that. But it was painted in a really positive light because you had these close relationships. An in Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, you had these friends who were really close and they were encouraging each other. And in the Adams Family, you had this actually very functional, loving family that were challenging all of the social norms.

And I really liked that because as much as I wanted our family to be, you know, healthier. I wanted to be more loving. I didn't want to really fit the social norms either. That didn't really appeal to me. I would much rather have been like the Adams Family than been like the family in 7th Heaven. I just would much rather have preferred that. I liked that aesthetic. I liked that they were a little bit dark and that they were challenging of the social norms.

And maybe one good takeaway that I did get from our parents was that as much as they were afraid of trying new things and afraid of a lot of things in general, one of the things that they weren't afraid of was being different. In fact, that was something that both of our parents, I think, prided themselves on was being different than other people. They really valued differences and diversity in a lot of ways and being unique. And that is something that I took as a very positive thing from both of our parents. And I think that's why shows like Aaahh!! Real Monsters appealed to me because it was challenging of social norms. It was saying, okay, this thing that is bad isn't actually bad, it's actually pretty cool. And I think I would like to follow more of that path.

 AUTUMN

 44:55

 I also grew up with that idea of being different and being proud of being different. And the only normality you saw was these peppy, bright, happy, cheerful, Brady Bunch style families and I didn't want that. And so it was nice to see things like Aaahh!!! Real Monsters or the Adams family where you could be different, but still be happy. It didn't mean you had to be different and sad or depressed or dysfunctional or broken. You could just be different and still be happy. And I was like, oh, that's an awesome concept. And I'm actually starting to learn that that's a real concept. So I'm glad that Aaahh!! Real Monsters sort of introduced that to me in my youth.

[Courage the Cowardly Dog]

So speaking of monsters, let's look at the next show on our list, which is Courage the Cowardly Dog. So in this cartoon, this little tiny scaredy-cat dog had to constantly overcome his fears to battle or deal with all of the monsters that would show up in this show. And I'm going to say this right now, I could not watch Courage to Cowardly Dog and I still cannot watch Courage to Cowardly Dog. And there are two main reasons for this.

One, Courage had a hole in his front tooth, which constantly, overwhelmingly concerned me because I have a lot of issues with body and it's creepy and it grosses me out. And I was so focused on this tooth like the whole time and it was so overwhelming I could not watch it.

The other piece, which is probably the bigger reason, but I just blamed it on the tooth as a child, is this dog had way too much responsibility. All of the adults, all the humans around him were just these bumbling nincompoops or abusive assholes. And so he, who did not have the capacity or the skills necessary to deal with what was being dumped on him, was forced again and again and again and again to take on responsibilities that were way too big for him. And that was pretty much my childhood in a nutshell.

And so this show is actually triggering on a trauma level to me to see somebody so scared and so afraid, yet being forced again and again against his will to take on more responsibility than is necessary simply because the people around him and the people that should be caring for him fail to do so because of their own issues. And so yeah, I am not a Courage to Cowardly Dog fan because of that. I have nothing against the show, but it triggers me too bad

 IVY

 47:21

 To be fair, both of those are very legitimate reasons to be triggered. I was not personally freaked out by the hole in his tooth until you brought it up the other day. And I was like, actually that might be the most terrifying thing about that show because can you imagine the nerve pain he must have been constantly living with? Yet another way in which he was not being properly taken care of. Take your dog to the vet.

There's not really a whole lot of takeaways that I got from the show. I did kind of watch it off and on. I thought Courage was cute and he was sweet. I appreciated that he was always willing to do what he had to do and overcome his fears because he loved Muriel so much. I thought that was very sweet, although, like Autumn was talking about, it's very sad that he was put in that position.

The biggest thing that I remember about it as a child is that I was always way more afraid of Eustace than I was of any of the monsters that showed up. But I never really thought much about that until I was rewatching some episodes the other day because I kind of forgotten the show existed. And I'm like, yeah, of course I was more afraid of Eustace than I was of any of the monsters that showed up, because when you actually watch the show, he is a domestic abuser.

He legitimately is a very abusive, dangerous person. He's cruel. There's no good qualities to him. He is not loving. He's not just a typical grumpy old man. He is legitimately an abusive person. And when I watch the show as an adult, I'm looking at this dynamic between him and Muriel. And to me, it seems very clear that he has always been a horribly abusive asshole. And she is as airheaded and overly pleasant as she is as a coping mechanism to deal with him over the years. Almost like her brain broke and she created her own sense of reality so that she wouldn't have to be afraid of her husband. Like she's just been so desensitized over the years and lives in her own little fantasy world because that is the only safe space that she has. And they're so isolated out in the middle of nowhere that even if she had wanted to get help at some point, there's no way she could have.

And I know maybe I'm reading way too much into it, and there's probably lots of people who are going to be mad at me because they loved that show. They're like, oh, it's just a show. You're taking it too serious. But I'm sorry, I can't not see it because we do take away a lot of messages from TV shows, especially things that we watch when we were kids. You do take away a lot of things from that, even if it is on a subconscious level. And it's disturbing to me that that relationship dynamic was normalized.

Like, I love the show. Don't get me wrong. I like the show and I like Courage. And I even like Muriel. She's very sweet. And even some of the monsters I kind of like because they're entertaining in a weird sort of way. But I can't not see that really toxic and abusive relationship dynamic because those sorts of relationships do actually exist. There are people out there that that has been their whole life and that has been their way of coping with their abuser. Just to create their own reality and just be kind of saccharine sweet and ditzy because it was easier for them than confronting the horror that they were living with and the isolation that they were living with.

And again, like Autumn was saying, it's very unfortunate that Courage was put in that position to have to be the responsible one, but he really is also a symbol of truly unconditional love. In some ways, everything that he does is because he loves Muriel, and that is tragic, but it's also very sweet in a lot of ways. I wish I could have more positive feelings about this show, but it's really hard for me to unsee that extremely abusive and toxic relationship dynamic going on there

 AUTUMN

 I feel like there are just so many components of a traumatic home in there, between the fear brought on by the monsters and the living in this constant state of anxiety, the ditzy, unattentive parental figure, the abusive parental figure, the isolation, the uber forced responsibility. To me, there are just so many pinnacles of trauma in there. But like Ivy said, maybe it's us just reading into that ink blot of a cartoon. So I would be curious to know, for those that did go through trauma, if you watch Courage the Cowardly Dog and you saw those things, or if you were just like, oh, no, it's just a show. So if you would reach out to us, because I'm curious to know if it's just me and Ivy.

[As Told by Ginger]

Now lets go to the completely opposite end of the spectrum here, and talk about As Told by Ginger.  And I talked about this one a little bit in my fact of the day.  In this show, Ginger, I think she's like middle school, beginning of high school age, if I remember right. And it's kind of a coming of age tale where she's learning to come into her own and be her own person. And she's being raised by a single mom, and she's got a brother who's just a total weirdo in just a wonderful, wonderful way, but he's just a total weirdo, and she's got two best friends.

And I love the show. I loved it as a kid, and I love it even more now as an adult, because to me, this is one of the most functional, healthy, loving, supportive families I saw in a cartoon throughout the entire 90s, early 2000s. She was a wonderful mom. She let them be their own people, but she also set down rules and guidelines and boundaries, but she never stifled who they were and supported them in self-discovery of deciding who they wanted to be and whatever decision they made, as long as it wasn't harming themselves or somebody else. She was 100% behind them and would help them in whatever way she could.

And like I said as a kid, it was hard for me to see that show because that was what I wanted. Ginger was, she was sensitive and she was intelligent and she was open and she was different, and she saw the world differently. And she didn't fit in with the crowd, and she didn't necessarily want to fit in with the crowd. She wanted to be her own girl. And I related to all of that. And then I saw a family that loved her and supported her in being that person. And gosh, it was just this bittersweet heartbreak for me of just wanting that so badly.

And even now, I spoke to it a little bit in the fact of the day of dealing with that grief I always have having gone through that trauma, what if I'd had that support? What if this sensitive, intelligent, creative little girl had been  supported, had been loved, had been taught the skills necessary to confront life? Where would I be now? And I try to not get caught up in that and remind myself what is is. And it's about moving forward.

And so I do take that parenting style that I learned from Ginger and even that love that was across the family. Not just her parenting of Ginger, but the way Ginger and her brother reacted and interacted, because they were very different and they had little sibling rivalry, but they were so supportive and loyal and loving to one another. And so I try to take that template of love and use that on my own inner child and my own self to support my growth now. So I think out of all of the cartoons of the 90s as told by Ginger, both as a child, well, teenager and now spoke to me the absolute most just because of the wonderful the wonderful template of love and support that it offered.

 IVY

 55:18

I really loved this show when I was younger, too, and then I pretty much completely forgot about it until Autumn brought it up when we were making this list and when I was rewatching some of the episodes.

The biggest thing that stood out to me was just an incredible amount of self-awareness for a girl that age. Like every episode, she would learn some sort of valuable lesson, which is a common structure for TV shows, but she would learn some sort of valuable lesson and she would ultimately come to those conclusions on her own. Yes, she would get these cues from her mom or from her friends or whatever, but ultimately she would come to these conclusions on her own. She was able to put together all of the things that she was getting from her external environment and kind of internally process them and come to her own conclusions and develop her own beliefs based on her experiences and things that she was learning from other people and the guidance that she received from others as well.

Which I think a lot of people in dysfunctional families, we develop that sense of self awareness out of necessity, but it does not come as easily. It is something we have to fight a lot harder to develop because we often don't have good supportive families and social networks that help us to find our sense of identity and our place in the world and develop our belief systems. And so we have to figure those things out on our own and we do it out of necessity as a survival thing.

But similar to Autumn, I often wonder if I had had access to a much more stable and supportive and loving family, how much further along in my journey would I be? Because when you grow up in a dysfunctional family and you grow up with a lot of trauma and abuse and you get to adulthood, there are so many things you did not get to learn when you should have. There are certain stages of child development that everybody goes through. And if you get the short end of the stick, you enter adulthood having missed a lot of things, having not been taught a lot of things. And so you have to teach yourself. And that is hard, that is so much harder and the consequences are so much bigger.

And so I often wonder what it would have been like if I had come from a home life that was stable and supportive and loving. Where I could have developed my sense of identity. And I feel like I would have still been a very introspective person because I remember being very introspective even when I was very, very small. I've just always been that way. And I wonder what I could have done with myself at this point in my life had I not had to spend all of my early adulthood, literally all of my 20’s and my late teens as well, trying to figure out how to life,  how to function, how to do basic things, how to regulate my emotions, how to deal with difficult relationship things, how to keep a job, how to budget my finances. All of these things that you have to teach yourself when you come from a traumatic and abusive household. If you didn't have such a huge chunk of your adulthood taken up by those things that you could have learned when you were a child, what would your life have looked like?

And like Autumn, I try not to get caught up in that. But you can't not wonder. And I do envy people that do have that. And I know nobody's life is perfect. Everybody has their what ifs. Everybody has their things that they struggle with. But when you grow up with a lot of abuse and trauma, there's a lot, lot of what ifs that just seem so much bigger.

 AUTUMN

 59:11

 Like Ivy said, once you get on on your own, you have to teach yourself all this stuff. And as you go down this wonderful, trauma, healing journey, you do have to parent yourself. And so I love that I was exposed to As Told by Ginger, that it existed, that it was out there, because it did provide me a template to teach myself to be a parent, to be supportive, which are all things I didn't see and I didn't get to learn from the supportive figures in my life.

[Daria]

So since we talked about As Told by Ginger, let's go ahead now and talk also about Daria. And if I remember correctly, this show aired on MTV and it was more aimed towards the adolescent crowd, but I was an adolescent, so it rang true with me. This one is about basically a misfit girl and she doesn't want to fit in, and so she doesn't try. She is very monotone and she has her own beliefs. And you know what? Let's just say this. Let's not beat around the bush. Tell me if you think I'm wrong, Ivy, but I'm going to say Daria was probably autistic. I'm just going to say she had a very strong sense of justice.

 IVY

 60:14

I would agree. I mean, if she wasn't autistic, she was definitely neurodivergent of some kind. There's no way that she wasn't with the way that she thought about the world and her mannerisms and just everything about her and how she operated. She had to have been neurodivergent of some kind.

 AUTUMN

 60:28

You didn't see autistic people like that portrayed anywhere in any media whatsoever. And so when I saw her, that is why I related to her so much. That strong sense of justice and the routine and the consistent choice of fabrics, because it made her comfortable and her very small social circle and her lack of desire to fit in and her constant bewilderment about the other humans around her. Like, everything was just like, yes, yes. No, I get that.

Honestly, my biggest takeaway from that show was just that there were other humans like me because I didn't understand social scripts. Everybody else seemed to think they were okay, and I thought I was the only one that didn't think that. With Dari, I was like, oh my gosh, there's other people that think this, not just this cartoon character, but people are writing this, other people are watching it. This show is popular. I am not the only one that thinks that the world and society as it is is fucked up. And there are other people out there like me. And that was an amazing feeling to be able to finally relate to anybody in the media at all.

IVY

It's funny because when this show was originally on the air, I did not pay attention to it really at all. It was another one of those things where Autumn was older, and so Autumn commandeered the remote, and so I watched what Autumn watched. I didn't really get a lot of the humor that was in it. I didn't really pick up on a lot of the messages, so I just didn't pay that close attention to them.

As an adult, though, like I said at the beginning of the episode, I want to be just like Daria when I grow up. In a lot of ways, I feel like I already am. I feel like I am naturally evolving into Daria, which is surprising, because I think during the period of time when that show was on the air, Autumn probably would have guessed that I would have wanted to become more like Daria’s sister because I did want to fit in and I was a little bit more, not as superficial and definitely not as dumb as Darius sister, but I feel like Autumn would have expected that that's what I would have wanted to become more like, because I really did want to fit in and I wanted people to like me and I wanted to be one of the popular kids and I wanted to be pretty. And all of these things Autumn didn't care at all about, and that, as I've gotten older, I also do not care about. But it's just interesting because it's not the direction that I think anybody would have expected me to go had they known me at the time that that show was on the air.

I don't think anybody would have thought that at some point in my adulthood, I would lean more towards Daria and being more like her, and they would have assumed that I would have wanted to be like the sister. Not that I was like the sister, because I definitely was not one of the popular kids, and I definitely had the whole ugly duckling thing going on at that period of time in my life, but I wanted to be like the sister.

And so it's funny to me how things change, because now I feel very much like Daria watching those shows. I'm like, God. Yeah. Yes. Everything that you're saying, I agree with you right now, and everything about your whole vibe. I like your aesthetic. I like just everything about you. I want to be just like you. And honestly, one thing that I've always liked about Daria, though, she is completely unfuckwithable. You cannot bully her. You can't bully her. You can't give her shit, because she is pretty flat and monotone. She is unaffected by it. She doesn't care, because if you try to bully her, she just thinks you're stupid. You can't necessarily tell when she's being serious or when she's being sarcastic, either.

And I'm like, I really wish I had been like that when I was younger. Because I would have survived school a lot better. Maybe I wouldn't have even dropped out and taken my GED when I was 16. I don't know. Maybe I would have gotten all the way through high school if I had been that unfuckwithable. But I was very, very sensitive and overreactive, which made me a very easy target for bullying.

 AUTUMN

 64:25

That was one of the pieces I related to with Daria, did make my school life a lot easier. I do find it interesting, though, how things change over time, because while I was in many ways almost exactly like Daria, and I related to her so much and she was a role model. As I've gotten older, I've actually wanted to become more like her friend Jane and let go of some of the rigidity and let go of some of this obsession, almost, that I feel with that strong sense of justice. And be more open and be more fluid and be more creative. But still hold some of those ideas of not being fuckwithable because I am so far above it. So it's interesting how things change over time.

[Little Bear]

So since Ivy keeps accusing me of hogging the remote and watching all the cartoons that I want to watch, let's go ahead and talk about a cartoon that is one of Ivy's favorites, that's near and dear to her heart, which is Little Bear and Ivy. Do you want to talk about that? Because this is so much your cartoon.

 IVY

 65:26

Escapism has always been my go-to coping mechanism. My first one that I always go to is daydreaming and escapism and nothing personifies that to me quite like Little Bear. It is a beautiful fantasy world that's in nature, the animals talk, everybody gets along, everybody's loving. When my world feels like it's crumbling or I'm really depressed or I'm sick in bed, I will almost always watch old episodes of Little Bear because it is just pure escapism to me.

It's this beautiful fantasy world that will never be real for me, at least not in this life. I hope, if there's a heaven, it looks just like Little Bear. I really do. If I go to heaven, I want that to be my version of heaven. Just chill out there with all of those awesome characters where everything is just peaceful and calm and beautiful all the time. That would be the ideal.

 AUTUMN

 66:19

Little Bear was a really peaceful, idyllic cartoon, and it was really sweet and really calming. I didn't dislike it, but in my defense, it was aimed towards younger kids. And at that point I was like 15 or 16 years old, and so it didn't hold a lot of appeal for me.

I always lumped Little Bear together with shows like David the Gnome or these books that my grandma would read to us by Sam Campbell. So these books were a huge part of my childhood. They were actually written back around in actually the 40s.  They were memoirs of this guy who had a little nature preserve. And he was talking about the importance of nature and how we are destroying it and how the city and society and things along those lines can actually be harmful to us, which were really hippie out there ideas for then but this is the kind of hippie propaganda that I was raised with and I love it and I still believe in it.

And so to me, Little Bear was always just part of that idea was that nature was good and calm and wonderful and balanced and that society was the direct antithesis to nature. And one of the lovely things about Little Bear, though, is it was never really preachy like David the Gnome or Sam Campbell could be to some degree, it was just here's a little blip of the wonderfulness that nature could be. And it was so from a little kid perspective. And now that I'm older and can go back to that little kid more so than I could when I was 15, it's a really sweet show.

 IVY

 67:53

That is another thing that I will say for our parents and for our grandma that I will always appreciate is that they really taught us to value nature. That was something that all of the adults in our life at that time really valued, was nature and the wilderness and protecting those things. We are not city folk and nothing against city folk, if you are one. I will always choose nature. I'm saddened by a lot of the damage that technology has done and continues to do and the consumerism and the greed and the constantly needing a new device every two years and all of the waste that that produces and the damage that it's doing to the planet. I would much rather live out in the middle of the woods with Little Bear and all of his friends and David the Gnome and he can preach to me about environmentalism all day and he will be preaching to the choir.

AUTUMN

There are a lot of people out there that actually feel that way, though.  That want that simplicity, even if it's not necessarily getting away from the city. But that idea of getting away from all the complexities and the excess and the responsibilities and the craziness that comes with society. Because I see so many posts on Facebook of, I don't want to do the grind, I want to do whatever this is. And it's little Chipmunks having a tea party or a little toad dancing with a hedgehog. And it's all to me, Little Bear themed stuff. So there's a whole lot of people out there that are very much, yes, let's just screw this. Let's go live in Little Bear world.

[Animaniacs]

Speaking of commentary on society and social values and what have you, let's move on to Animaniacs. So this was a cartoon that was on, I believe it was Fox and maybe also on Cartoon Network at some point. It was one of those kind of like Looney Tunes shows where there were multiple different characters and you'd have like a little two or five minute cartoon of these people, and then it'd switch over to a three minute cartoon of that. It was a variety show cartoon, basically.

And your main characters that were continuous throughout, there were Yako, Wacko and Dot. I have no idea what they were supposed to be. Mice? Cats?  I don't know, some sort of humanified animal. I'm just going to go with that.

The entire show had a lot of social commentary, which even I honestly did not get. And I was watching this during my adolescence, of course. I was pretty disconnected from society and trapped in my own little world. So maybe why I didn't pick up on it, I'm not sure.

I still loved this cartoon, though, because there was so much dysfunction openly shown, like Slappy the Squirrel and Skippy her little nephew. And there was also Rita and Runt, which were a dog and a cat, and none of them were what you would call normal. They'd probably have some mental health issues, in all honesty, but they were just out living their life, doing their thing, having adventures. And I loved that idea that there were these dysfunctional entities that were just existing.

 IVY

 71:10

Even as a kid, one of the things that I did realize while watching that show was that there was a lot of social commentary, but social commentary in a very childlike way. Like, yes, there was adult humor to that show, but a lot of the social commentary, I feel like it was really pointing out the absurdity of a lot of  how society operated.

So many of the rules of society make zero fucking sense, and Yako Wacko and Dot, the way that they made fun of society, made fun of things like government and social scripts and even the medical industry, things along those lines, the way they made fun of everything, I feel like it was like it pointed out the absurdity of society in a way that a precocious child would. And I think that's part of why it did appeal to so many kids was because you were getting the social commentary that normally only adults would be able to understand on any level. But it was framing it in a way that even kids could understand. And it made kids even question how things operated because a lot of it doesn't make sense.

A lot of these things that by the time we're adults, we're kind of indoctrinated to think of as just being normal, a lot of the rules don't make sense. They're stupid, they're ridiculous, they're actually pretty absurd in a lot of ways. And even the things that conceptually speaking should work well, they don't because you have humans running the show and humans are faulty and they have these darker sides to them. And I really liked the Animaniacs because even though there's tons of cartoons out there that have social commentary in them, a lot of it is very specifically geared just towards adults and adult understanding. But I felt like the Animaniacs, they really walked this fine line where there was this adult humor to it, but it also pointed out the absurdity of society, and society's rules in a way that children could, at least in some way, conceptualize and understand.

 AUTUMN

 73:08

I feel like Animaniacs and Daria cartoons like this sort of went hand in hand in that they did really open up that questioning of societal values and that questioning of societal ideas that had so previously been accepted. Maybe that's part of why millennials are who we are today, I would suppose, is because we did have cartoons like this that looked at this thing and said, really? That's what y’all are doing? Because that makes any sort of logical sense? I don't think so.

[Blue’s Clues]

So let's lighten it up. Let's lighten it up and look at the next show on our list, which is Blues Clues. Part of this is live action, I know, but a lot of it was animated. So this was definitely a preschool kid show. And it was all about preschool kids stuff. Learning shapes and colors and things along those lines.

Okay, so this came out in 95, and I don't think I saw this until I was 15 or 16 years old. But I loved Blues Clues so much. I still do. I've not seen the more recent episodes. I still know the original Steve from back in the day, so I have no idea whatever that transitioned to. But the idea of where he would be like, where's my notebook? And all the other kids would be like, “It's in the basket, Steve.” And I, at 16, would be along with the other kids, going, “It's in the basket. Steve!” And I loved it. I love the ability to step back into my childhood, to be four or five again and excited about learning a new shape or what a color was. Blues Clues really taught me that I was never too old to be thrilled by childlike wonder. And that is a lesson I have held onto dearly throughout my entire life

 IVY

 74:57

I think one of the things that I took away from it, and probably the most valuable lesson took away from it was that even adults don't have it completely together. It is okay as a grown ass adult to not know where you left your notebook, to not be able to see the notebook in the basket when it's literally right in front of you. It's okay. Adults are not expected, should not be expected to be perfect and have it all together. We can be absent minded. We can be forgetful. We can be a little dense some times. We can accept the guidance and help from small children and even animals sometimes to help us get ourselves back on track. And that is fine.

I appreciated that about it. And I loved the original Steve. I have no opinions about any of the people who have followed him in hosting that show. But the original Steve, I loved. I felt like he embodied that he was just like a really good-natured person who did not have his shit together, and he had lots of friends who were helping him to figure it out and get his shit together from day to day. And I kind of like that sense of community.

AUTUMN

 76:14

 Even during my adolescence, there was so much pressure to get your shit together, to know what you were going to do with your life, to go on to college, to be an adult. It was nice to just be like, hey, Steve's doing all right. He's got a really cool dog and a sweet ass apartment, and he doesn't have his shit together, so it's okay. I feel like I felt that even at 15.

So let's go from preschool and flip it on up to adulthood really quick. And let's talk about Rocko’s Modern Life. So this was actually a cartoon. It was on Nickelodeon. It was aimed towards kids. But I felt like this was very much adult themed. Not in the idea of, oh, nudity and violence and drug use or anything like that, but adult themed in that he had a job and responsibilities and had to do laundry.

So Rocco was an immigrant wallaby. He came from Australia, obviously being a wallaby, and he had immigrated, and he had a friend who was a cow and another friend who was a turtle. They just went around, in my mind, doing adult things and that's really the biggest takeaway I had from Rocko’s Modern life is like this is what it's like to be an adult. It's always kind of stressful and you're always kind of anxious and there's always kind of things that just need to get done and it's also sort of boring and you don't want to do them. But you're an adult, so adult, my friend.

IVY

 78:00

There were a lot of adulty things modern life to be sure. You mentioned that there wasn't really violence and I'm going to counter you on that because there's actually a decent amount of violence and a decent amount of threats of violence on that show which I feel is also a pretty accurate representation of what it is actually like to be an adult.

I also got the sense from Rocko's Modern Life that that's kind of what life was like because it is slice of life but with a lot of the shitty parts of life in there. I kind of took away from Rocko that nobody has it together. Everything is falling apart and in chaos there's almost always somebody who's screaming and angry. And somehow you just are supposed to keep going and doing things like everything is normal and fine. That's kind of the impression that I got from Rocco's Modern Life is just adulthood is chaos which I feel is very accurate. I do not find that adulthood is as calm as I got the impression it would be from a lot of other shows.

AUTUMN

 78:52

Like you said, there is chaos and screaming and the world is ending and you still have to go to work. I feel like that's the definition of life as an adult in this day and age right now. So, no, I was not disappointed at all by the expectations Rocko's Modern Life built for me. I feel like I wish I could have been a little disappointed, been like, oh, no, adult life is so much more boring and simple and easy. But no, it's not.

 IVY

 79:20

I feel like that is the tragic comedy of our generation and, you know, the next generation, too, probably, is that I wish I could have been disappointed. I don't think any phrase wraps it up as nicely with a bow as that one. I wish I could have been disappointed.

 AUTUMN

 79:41

I think you have to have positive expectations to be disappointed. And luckily, we had cartoons such as Rocko's Modern Life to help get rid of some of those expectations.

 IVY

 79:51

I feel like it actually did prepare us pretty well for the real world. I appreciate the edge of darkness. In almost every 90s cartoon.

 AUTUMN

 80:00

[Invader Zim]

we talked a little bit about adulthood being just chaos and screaming. And if you want chaos and screaming, there's no better place to go than Invader Zim. So, Ivy talked a little bit about this in her fact of the day with Gir. Invader Zim is a Nickelodeon cartoon, and it was about this very egotistical and incompetent, I would say, little alien that came to the planet to take it over. Though he didn't actually get sent here to take it over because he actually got exiled because he had fucked up the home world so bad. And he has a little robot who dresses as such a convincing dog named Gir who is complete and pure chaos. And then there is Dib,  who is the little human boy that sees him for the alien and is constantly trying to thwart Zim's attempts to overtake Earth.

IVY

I think Invader Zim was definitely one of my favorite cartoons when I was a kid. Also one of my favorite cartoons of all time. And it is also the cartoon that I got my first really adult awareness of. So a lot of these shows I'm looking at retrospectively and be like, yeah, there were these underlying themes that I didn't recognize when I was a kid that I recognized now as an adult. And I'm sure it affected me subconsciously. So there's a lot of that with these other shows. Invaders in was like the first time that I really remember watching the show and in real time having these adult awarenesses.

And there were two main things that I took away from Invader Zim one is never just completely  discredit the conspiracy theorists because sometimes they're right. Because Dib seems crazy. Everybody thinks that he's crazy. But Dib's the only one who actually is aware that there's an alien trying to take over the entire world. That's not helpful in any way because he's not really successful at thwarting Zim's attempts. Also, Zim is incompetent, so we don't really need Dib's protection. But there are some conspiracy theories that are true. You should never completely discredit conspiracy theories as a whole because, process of elimination, there's going to be some that are actually real. So never completely discredit the conspiracy theorist outright.

And then the other thing is something that I am actually incredibly grateful for, and that is that there are people with ill intentions who are too stupid to carry out their plans. And I am so thankful for those people with evil and bad intentions who are too dumb to be able to really plan and strategize and put together and execute their ill intentions. I am very, very thankful for that because if every person with bad intentions was smart enough to make those things a reality, our world would be even worse than it is now. And it does not need help being worse.

AUTUMN

I find it amusing, though, because, as we said, Invader Zim that is very incompetent and unable to carry out his bad intentions. And I laugh because in many ways, Ivy compared me to Gir the robot in the beginning, but in a lot of ways, I'm actually more like Invader Zim. So I am an intelligent person. I would say I'm very competent. But I did really learn from this show because, cartoon or not, one of the things I did when I watched any show was try to learn how humans interact and the social rules. Because I had to study that because I didn't know that because I'm autistic. And one of the things I learned from this show, which has served me so well in my life, is that you can make people believe anything if you're loud enough and confident enough.

And I would honestly say that my public persona when I really get going and when I have super high anxiety and I'm just trying to control the room, is Invader Zim 100%.  Just all over the place, super loud, super arrogant. And people love it and they eat it up and they believe what I say. And it's probably a good thing that I don't have seriously bad intentions because I might have the intellect to follow them up. And I am very grateful to invaders him for showing me that if I get loud enough and I get confident enough, people can't tell that I'm an alien because I feel like that's a very real lesson I needed.

 IVY

 84:44

That is a very valuable lesson. Everybody could learn from that. And it is a well-documented lesson, too, that if you are just confident enough, if you speak with enough conviction, people will generally believe you. That is a real thing about human nature. So take that and run with it.

Autumn has now given me one more takeaway from this, and that's not only to be thankful for stupid people with bad intentions who can't execute their plans, but also be thankful for very intelligent people with bad intentions who are too lazy to act out their plans. So now you've given me another thing to be grateful for. I'm still optimistic on some level.

 AUTUMN

 85:29

[Johnny Bravo]

So let's go ahead and move on to the next show on our list, which is Johnny Bravo. I believe this was a Cartoon Network show. This was, oh my god, this show was basically about this muscular dude who lives with his mom and tried to get women to date him, and he usually fumbled it up. The main character was kind of an Elvis Presley/James Dean - supposed to be this really cool guy, but he always buffooned it somehow. This was not a deep show at all, though. It was very popular for reasons I don't quite understand.

 IVY

I actually kind of liked this show, to be perfectly honest. And I was kind of fond of John Bravo when I was a kid, like the character Johnny Bravo. I'm not going to be apologist for misogynist, but here's the thing with Johnny Bravo. What I think he represents is that subset of men out there who are so entrenched in patriarchal viewpoints that they don't realize they are misogynists. They're relatively well intentioned and can be sweet, but they're really oblivious. And I feel like that's what Johnny Bravo represents.

I did not understand that full scope of it when I was a kid. He was always chasing after women, but, like, I didn't think about that really when I was a kid. I was just thinking he was kind of derpy and sweet and misguided and kind of dorky in a lot of ways, very dorky for an attractive man. But as an adult, I look at it, and as I was watching some of those old episodes, I just kept thinking I'm like, oh, honey, you don't even know that you're a misogynist.

But he doesn't actually understand what women are looking for. He thinks he is what women are looking for. It's like he thinks he's being charming, and he's all muscular, and he dresses good, and he's like his hair is always perfect and stuff, and he thinks that's what women are looking for, and it's really not. And he never understands why he keeps getting turned down and not just turned down, but, like, painfully rejected. But he's not really a bad guy.

He's not the smartest guy out there, but he's relatively well intentioned and pretty sweet, but definitely, I think, is, like, drank the Kool-Aid a little bit too much on patriarchal values, and he doesn't really understand anything about women. He just he's just playing the role that he thought he was supposed to play. And it's not working out well for him because women have opinions and they can reject you if they want to, and they don't just take the first guy who shows interest in them.

He's kind of a dinosaur in the age of feminism, in a sense, which is kind of cute and kind of sad. I still have a little bit the fondness for Johnny Bravo. I don't think he's a lost cause. I don't think he's ever completely going to get it. And again, he's not the brightest crayon in the box, but I don't think he's a completely lost cause. He's not ill intentioned.

 AUTUMN

 88:29

My takeaway comes from that concept right there. And it was that the pursuit and personification of cultural ideals is often really extremely harmful. And yes, we usually see this from the feminine perspective of how he's a womanizer and he's all of these things, but he was taught to be those things, and he's not intelligent enough or has enough analytical power to be able to break down these concepts and realize how harmful they are. And not just how harmful they are to others, but how harmful they are to him as well.

And so that was my biggest takeaway from Johnny Bravo overall, because I didn't really like or dislike the character, but it was just like, not only are these cultural stereotypes hurting people around you and denigrating everyone else, but, dude, they're hurting you. And it's so sad, like Ivy said, because you don't know enough to realize that just because it's normal doesn't mean it's healthy, doesn't mean it's okay. And you end up constantly getting hurt and rejected because you are the personification of everything you are told to be.

IVY

 90:00

I think another reason why I give Johnny Bravo a little bit of leeway here is along the lines of what you were saying is not understanding that those things that he learned were not really accurate depictions of reality. And it's not just what it takes as like a pickup artist. Because at first in my memory, I was thinking he was really just a womanizer in the sense of wanting to get laid, even though, of course they're not going to talk about that in the show because it's a kid's show. But he actually does, in a lot of episodes, bring up this idea of true love. And I think in some level, he is actually a romantic at heart. And his mom is actually a very strong female figure, maybe a little bit overbearing, which might be part of the reason he is the way that he is. He's been a little overcoddled too.

I'm willing to give him a little bit of leeway. He has a lot of messed up belief systems that are harming him and harming other people, but I still have a little bit of faith in him. Things could still be fixed, I think. And I feel that way about a lot of men who are also kind of like that, where they're not bad men, they're not abusive, horrible, toxic people, because they're choosing to be that. And most of the time they actually are very well intentioned and they're sweet and they're actually looking for love and they're looking for a real partner, and they're not understanding why that's not happening for them, because they're not understanding that the time have changed and they're probably not going to change back.

And maybe they need to learn new things and they need to learn about women. I don't know from women instead of from books written by men about women because I feel like a lot of times those guys are taking their cues from men and the ideas men have about women instead of listening to women about what women are actually looking for.

 AUTUMN

 91:36

It's kind of sad that these ideas still apply now. What is this, 20 years, 30 years later? Because they do. But maybe you do see a little bit of shifts in this. You do see more men that are open to feminism, that are open to learning about women from women. So maybe Johnny Bravo was a little bit of that start, that little bit of the seed, looking at that, going, oh, my God, that's not going to work. Maybe we should find something different.

 IVY

 92:05

Johnny Bravo has aged about as well as Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus, which is to say, terrible.

 AUTUMN

 92:12

[The Tick]

 So, talking about lovable buffoons that are a little bit clueless, let's talk about The Tick. So this was another one of the cartoons from Fox, and I'm not sure, I think it was aimed a little bit more towards adults, but I feel like it was still somewhat kid friendly. And the idea behind this was basically, the Tick is this really big brawny guy that's a superhero, because he's big and brawny, but he's not really all that smart. And he's a little bit incompetent. But he tries really hard and he moves to the city and he meets up with these other kind of incompetent, little bit bumbling superheroes that do try really hard. But they're human, after all, so they don't always succeed.

That's actually part of why I loved this show. I really, honestly loved the live action that came a little bit after the cartoon, and it had Patrick Warburton in it. That was absolutely hilarious. But the cartoon itself was good, too. And what I loved about this is that it made it okay to not be good at everything. You could be a superhero, you could still be kind of bumbling and incompetent, but it was okay because you were well intentioned and you tried, and that counted for something.

And that was really, really important to me because I definitely had and still have this good enough complex. And the reality is, which a lot of people do not want to accept, but this is the reality: sometimes we are not enough. We are not good enough for a certain objective. But that's okay.

And that's what this show really started, helping to creak that little bit of light in there going, okay, maybe you're not enough to take care of your mother and to raise your sister single handedly and to do all of the things expected of you because I was not enough. And I felt really bad about that because I was supposed to be enough, and everybody said, oh, you are enough. But I wasn't. But that's okay, because that's part of being human, is we can't be everything to everyone all the time, and it's okay to mess up.

And moreover, with that, that's part of why you need friends and you need a circle of associates is so that you don't have to be good at everything, so that you can let the ball drop here, let the ball drop there, and other people will pick it up and that your strengths will complement their weaknesses and your weaknesses will complement their strengths. And so I loved the Tick because it really had so many of these great ideas.

 IVY

 94:53

I really loved The Tick as well. And I have to agree that the live action one with Patrick Warburton was better. It is the superior version of The Tick. I know there was another live action that they made recently, and I just can't get behind it. The Tick was meant to be played by Patrick Warburton. It's just a fact.

But yes, this show was great for all of the reasons that Autumn said, and I took a lot of those things away from it as well. But I also took away from it that you can be a complete and total misfit and still do amazing things. You don't have to be one of the cool kids to do amazing things. And I appreciated that. The Tick was a superhero that would not have been popular in high school. He wouldn't have fit in, he wouldn't have been one of the popular crowd, but he still ended up being a superhero. And he was sweet. Yes, he was really derpy, not a very smart person, but very well intentioned and very loyal, very dedicated to justice, and he just wants to make things better in the world, and I can appreciate that.

I also took away from the Tick that you don't have to be a genius to do amazing things in this world. I like that about The Tick, because he's not the brightest crayon in the box, but he is so well intentioned and he does genuinely care, and he wants to make the world a better place. And he manages to find ways to make the world a better place that do not require him to be a genius and to invent and create amazing things or anything along those lines. He's just real and he cares. He's not real because he's a cartoon and a superhero, which doesn't exist. But you get what I mean.

AUTUMN

[The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh]

So if we're talking warm hearted good feelings, let's also then talk about Winnie the Pooh. So in many ways, this is kind of my Little Bear, because Winnie the Pooh, it was a cartoon, it was on in the 90s, but it also was series of books that I read as a little tiny girl, two year old, three year old, growing up. So I love Winnie the Pooh, both the books and the cartoon.

And for those of you that don't know Winnie the Pooh, like, what rock have you been living under? But essentially, Winnie the Pooh is a little stuffed toy and he's owned by Christopher Robin, and it's Christopher Robin's imagination of all his little stuffed animals. And they live in the 100-acre wood. And you have Winnie the Pooh, who's a bear, and he's sweet, but again, not very intelligent. And you have Piglet, who's anxious. You have Tigger, that is just too much and excitable. You have Rabbit, who is very rigid thinking, very controlling. And you have Owl, who's smart. And you have Kanga, who is the mama, and Roo, who's the baby, who are also very sweet. Also Eeyore the little donkey, who is very depressed.

So I do love Winnie the Pooh. I love him because he was my Little Bear when I was a little kid. But I also love him because I feel like this is one of the original childhood depictions of mental health issues in my mind. There's actually different memes out there that talk about the different mental health diagnoses that the various characters would have, such as Eeyore would have depression and Tigger would probably be ADHD and Rabbit would probably be autistic, things along those lines.

And I love it, though, because everybody just is okay with it. That's just who they are. And it's accepted and it's wonderful. And I loved that. This was my original Firefly or Fruits Basket. It was the original idea that you could have a group of friends loved you and valued you for

 who you are, not in spite of who you are.

 IVY

 98:45

I also really loved that about Winnie the Pooh that there was never -  and I don't ever remember there being an episode - where anybody tried to change another one of the characters. Nobody tried to change their friends. There never seemed like there were any statements made that were gaslighty or suggesting that you really need to fix that about yourself. There was never any of that.

All of them had their issues. It was a thing in the sense that they all understood each other and accepted each other, but it was not a thing in the sense that it was not a topic of discussion. It wasn't really acknowledged like there was no need to acknowledge that these different characters had different issues. It was just they accepted each other as they were and you weren't even really fully cognizant of issues that they had because they were all so accepting of each other and so community and family oriented. 

That I remember as a little kid watching it, I never thought of any of these characters as having issues or problems. Even things that seem like they would be really obvious, like Piglet, who has intense anxiety. You didn't really think about that. At least I didn't really think about that as a kid watching it because nobody really addressed it other than to be supportive of him and loving of him, but they never really made a big to do about it with any of the characters. That's one of the most beautiful things about it, as far as the takeaway that I got from it, was that not only are they all different, and not only are they all accepting of each other, and not only do they all have their own issues, but nobody talked about each other as though they were in issue. They all showed each other a lot of love and understanding and respect.

 AUTUMN

 100:24

[The Simpsons]

Let's move on to some more offensive material. Let's flip that script again. And now we're going to talk about a few of the cartoons that Ivy and I actually did not get to watch as children, because even with the vast amounts of neglect we had, these were forbidden to us for various reasons. First of these is Th Simpsons, which I'm not going to go into because they're The Simpsons. You should know them.

We never got to watch this as a kid. My mom thought this was a very dysfunctional, horrible, rude family, and we were forbidden from it. Honestly, the first time I saw this was as an adult, and I was living in The Netherlands at the time, and I fell in love with The Simpsons because I was so homesick at the time, and I was just really fresh out of the trauma. I was only like 19 or 20 years old and just gotten out of the house a few years ago. So I was really just starting to deprogram, and The Simpsons were familiar. There was a lot of traumatic aspects in there. There was a lot of dysfunctional aspects in there. And I don't know if you like this or not, there was a lot of American societal aspects in there, and so it really lessened my homesickness. And because of that, the Simpsons do have a soft place for me.

 IVY

 101:47

Now, I just want to say before we get a little bit further in here, when we said offensive shows, we are also saying offensive by our mom's standards, and also partially because we were raised Mormon. So some of these are because now, as an adult, now that I've watched a few episodes of The Simpsons, I don't find it particularly offensive. But if you had listened to our mom talk, I'm not going to say it was like of the devil, because my mom wasn't really a fear-mongerer in a religious way like that. She was just like, I guess, disgusted with it. She found it offensively, disgusting. And that's all of these shows that we're going to talk about on this list here are shows that were offensive by our mom's standards.

And it's interesting now to see them as an adult and be able to get a completely different perspective on it, because like I said with The Simpsons, I've watched some episodes of it now as an adult, and I do not find them particularly offensive. In fact, I feel like they actually have a lot of good moral lessons in them. There's a lot of really good social commentary on them.

Not a show that I would actively seek out. I did not fall in love with it, but I will say that with an adult perspective and being able to push away my mom's ideology on what's offensive and what's not offensive, I can look at The Simpsons and see exactly why people like it. I can really understand why children and adults alike really enjoy The Simpsons. There's a lot of entertainment quality in it, there's a lot of good commentary in it, and there is actually a lot of good moral lessons to be had from it. I can really understand why it is such a classic, and I can understand why it's been on TV for such a long time and why people are such devoted fans.

 AUTUMN

 103:40

[South Park]

 I feel like this is my own personal moral standards because this one I still find offensive, and I can't watch it, and that is South Park. It's too grotesque for me. It is. It reminds me a lot of The Office, and maybe that's a weird correlation for people to make, but I can't watch The Office either because they're always picking on the boss character, and it's basically like, here is a person that really wants to belong.  Obviously, let's act like chickens and peck him to death because that's what humans do. And I cannot stand that kind of bullying. It escalates me so much, and I feel like South Park is so much that, and they're constantly just picking on somebody to the point that they probably would kill themselves. And that is much too real of a theme for me to be played out again and again.

IVY

I will say South Park is objectively offensive. I mean, that is kind of their thing. They're aiming for that. They're trying to offend you. That's been their mission statement from the very beginning. I can definitely understand why our mom would not let us watch this show as kids. I will admit that I find it very strange how many of my peers were allowed to watch this show as children. And I probably, if I had kids, would not let them watch this show until they were teenagers.

That being said, I have watched quite a few episodes now that I'm an adult, because Kelvin is very fond of this show. He finds it very funny. And now that I've watched several episodes, I get it. I wouldn't seek this show out, but I have definitely laughed at a lot of things. One of the things that I do like about South Park is that they are always pushing limits and boundaries, and I think that is an important thing to do. I don't always necessarily agree with the way that they do it, but I understand what they're doing, and I can appreciate the need for squeaky wheels in the machinery of society.

They do make a lot of social commentary, and yes, it can get taken to extremes, and yes, it can be offensive and it can seem like bullying. But here's the other thing with South Park to me, that as an adult now, I can understand, well, yes, there is a lot of bullying of public figures and characters in the show and all of that sort of stuff. They pick on everybody. It's not just one person or one group that they're going after. They're trying to push the limits and boundaries on everything. Their goal is literally to offend everybody.

While I may not be on that same page with how I operate, I can also, again, see the importance of having squeaky wheels in our society because there do need to be people that question stuff. And sometimes the way that you question stuff and get people to actually pay attention is to paint it in a very absurd or offensive way. And I can kind of appreciate their social commentary.

I can see where Autumn draws the correlation with The Office, but one of the reasons why I can actually handle watching South Park and I can't handle watching The Office is because, again, they're picking on everybody. And also the main bully in South Park, Eric Cartman, he picks on everybody, and he's awful, absolutely awful, but he is a classic example of, like, hurt people. Hurt people. Also, it's easier for me to wash it than it is for me to watch The Office because Eric Cartman dishes it out, but he ends up taking a lot of it, too.

So if South Park is going to be offensive, at least it offends everyone and picks on everybody pretty much equally, except for Scientology. Really goes after Scientology, but I'm not going to hold that against them because . . .

 AUTUMN

 107:35

Well, if their intent was to offend everyone, they did achieve it with me. I guess I'm still just too sensitive. It's too hard for me to take, and there's a lot of things I just can't handle with it. So I will steer away from that show.

[Beavis & Butthead]

Another show I will steer away from, that categorically was, I think, intended to be offensive as well is Beavis and Butthead. So if you were watching MTV in the 90s, you would have seen that one. It's a couple of slackers, just not very intelligent. A lot of low brow humor. I just didn't get. I wasn't really offended by Beavis and Butthead when I watched it. I just don't find it amusing. I just look at it and I'm staring at it like, I don't know, it's some sort of mutated frog. I'm like, that's just weird and not appealing. I also honestly don't understand the appeal of Beavis and Butthead.

 IVY

 108:22

I've watched some of it with Kelvin because it's another show that he likes. I can understand how it would be mindless entertainment and mindless comedy to people. And I also understand the importance of having that because there are definitely times when I don't really have to think that hard and I do want to be entertained and I do want to laugh. It's just Beavis and Butthead, that particular type of comedy is not a type of comedy that appeals to me. There are no moral lessons to take away from it. From what I've gathered, there's really nothing thought provoking in it at all. It really is just completely mindless entertainment, which I'm fine with. If that's other people's brand of mindless entertainment that they're into, it's just not personally my thing.

 AUTUMN

 109:11

[King of the Hill]

I'm not exactly sure why we weren't allowed to watch it because I didn't think it was really all that offensive. And I kind of like it now as an adult: King of the Hill. I like it from a voyeuristic perspective because I feel like King of the Hill is very slice of life and very like, in my mind, this is what normal people look like. Yeah, they all have their issues. They're a little bit off. Yeah, there's a lot of things that are probably highly dysfunctional, but it's accepted as normal. So nobody calls it out and nobody does anything about it. And so I'm like, yeah, that's what normality is. And so I like it from a voyeuristic viewpoint.

And I also liked it in my younger days, my early twenty s or whenever I was watching it as like, a masking tutorial. It's another one I looked at and saw, okay, this is how they interact in this relationship. That's how they interact in this scenario. Okay. So when you encounter that person, that's the appropriate social interaction. I learned a lot about masking from it. Whether that was good or bad, I don't know, but it seems to work fairly decently for me.

 IVY

 110:16

I can tell you exactly why mom didn't want us to watch this. Mom had an extreme distaste for normal. Mom really loved different and unique and quirky and weird and outcast. And King of the Hill did not fit that bill. It was just a bunch of normal people. I feel like that was unappealing to mom. And I only know that because when she was married to her second husband, he really liked that show and mom was really resentful of being made to watch it.

I just found it boring. It's fine. There's a lot of good moral values in it. There's family aspects in it which I guess are cool if you dig family stuff. I just mostly found it boring. The characters don't really appeal to me. I don't find it offensive in any way. It's just not really my shtick. It's just suburban life. I don't understand the appeal of living in the adverbs. So to me, it's just kind of boring.

 AUTUMN

 111:12

[Family Guy]

And so the very last show we'll talk about, which. I feel like a lot of people would find us very remiss if we didn't at least touch on it, is Family Guy, which has held a lot of appeal for reasons I don't understand. I guess it's offensive in some ways. I could see why our mom didn't want us to watch it as I've seen it as an adult.

I honestly just don't understand it. Why do we stop in the middle of an episode to fight a chicken while Conway Twitty plays music? I am just baffled for the most part by The Family Guy. I do not understand this humor. Ivy talks about King of the Hill and suburbia being foreign. This is beyond foreign to me. This is completely other universe alien to me. I don't get the Family Guy at all. I don't understand why it's funny. I just look at it the whole time, trying to analyze it and understand what's happening that people are laughing at.

 IVY

 112:08

 I liked the first few episodes of Family Guy. I've kind of lost interest in it as the seasons have gone on. All of the characters are just becoming caricatures of themselves, really one dimensional, and a lot of them have just become garbage people. At least in the first few seasons, everybody had some depth, and I feel like all of the characters have lost depth and a lot of them have just devolved into shittier people instead of becoming better people, which does not appeal to me. I did enjoy the first few seasons and I did find it funny.

One of the things that I think makes it difficult for Autumn and I to understand a lot of the humor in Family Guy, though, is that Family Guy does reference a lot of things from different shows and movies throughout time. So some episodes of Family Guy I've watched, and I'm the only one who gets the reference because they're referencing a musical from the 60s that was a relatively obscure one. But I got it because I was raised on a lot of obscure musicals and so I get that. But there's so many things that I don't understand because I don't watch a lot of TV and I don't watch a lot of movies and so Family Guy references so many different things that I often miss what the joke is really supposed to be or it might still be funny to me, but I don't really understand the full context of it. And I'm guessing that's probably part of the reason why it's difficult for Autumn to understand is because we are not pop culture people.

 AUTUMN

 113:41

So having said that, of course, that does point out the fact that we probably missed out on a lot of iconic 90s cartoon shows or maybe even just 90s cartoons that you particularly liked that possibly just had a small cult following. We would love to hear from you to know what cartoons influenced your childhood and what did you learn from them. We would love if you would reach out and tell us what we missed and tell us about your iconic 90s cartoons that had an impact on your life and. Your journey. Ivy, do you want to give them our connecty bits so that they can reach out and do so?

 IVY

All right, so you can find us at our website, www.differentfunctional.com. There is a contact form on there. You can send us a message there. You can find us on Facebook as different functional. You can find us on Instagram and TikTok as different_functional. So leave us a comment. Drop us message in our DMs as the kids say. I think 2 you could email us if you're old school about it differentfunctional@gmail.com. I think that's all the ways to get in contact with us.

Unless you want to become a patron. You can find us on Patreon as different functional. And we are just one tier now. It's $4 no, $5. I don't even know anymore. It's $5 tier. So you can join our Patreon and get access to all of our bloopers and bonus content and all of those goodies. And obviously you can message us privately on there, too, if you wanted comments on our posts on there.

And if you could do us a solid and leave us a rating, a review, that'd be great. If you could share our posts on social media, if you could tell your friends about us and your enemies about us, tell your teacher and your boss about us. Well, probably don't tell your boss. I don't know. That might not go over well if he actually listens to the podcast. We're pretty anti corporate around here. So, yeah, don't tell your boss about us. We don't want to get you guys fired, but tell other people about us and tell us your thoughts.

 AUTUMN

 115:55

Or just reach out and leave a little heart. I like little hearts. I've heard the little hearts of different colors mean things. I don't know what they mean. So no matter what color heart you leave me, I will just be very happy about it.

 IVY

 116:10

Oh, I've just been sending hearts to people in text based on what color I like that day.  I hope I haven't offended anybody or sent weird mixed signals.  Wow!

 AUTUMN

 116:23

Yeah, I don't know what they mean. In the  2000s, there were these little plastic bracelets that kids used to wear. And I don't know, maybe it was just the mental health kids I worked with, but they were all referred to as sex bracelets because the various colors meant different sex acts you had done. I don't know, somebody compared the various hearts to, like, that thing. So I don't know. I'm scared. And I just use the red heart now because I don't know what any of it means or if that's just an urban myth they tell the old people. But just in case, I just like hearts, though. So send me any color heart.

 IVY

 116:55

I'm going to have to look that up now, because now I'm genuinely concerned I may have propositioned somebody for sex and not realized what I was doing. If you do send us a heart, we're down for all the colors. But if you do send us a heart and you know what the meaning of that color is, please include it in the message so we can be better informed. I’m scared now. I don’t know what I’ve done. What have I done?

 AUTUMN

 117:13

And if Ivy has sent you a heart.  Know that it just means heart and the color is meaningless, ok?

 IVY

 117:16

 The color was just my favorite color for the day.

 AUTUMN

 117:22

So on that ridiculous note, we will go ahead and wrap up for the day. Thank you, everybody, for listening. And as always, remember, different does not mean defective.