Yet another post about the weekend’s television viewing, which is really an acknowledgement that I did a lot of it this weekend – a consequence of having the worst type of cold (defined as one that gets steadily worse but only gets really bad on Saturday and Sunday, leaving you well enough to go to work on Monday, having wasted the weekend)

Anyway, Saturday night found me watching Channel 4 again and 100 Greatest Cartoons. Not only one of those naff ‘100 greatest’ list shows with Jimmy Carr, but one which I had already seen and which annoyed me the first time round.

My instinctive reaction when asked about my opinion of cartoons is to dismiss them, but this is really a result of exposure to the appalling crap our kids watch on channels like Toonami (Pokemon, Dragonball Z, etc.)

If I stop to think about it, I have to admit that there are plenty of cartoons I really like, and that some of my favourite shows and films are animations.

The surprising thing about this ‘100 greatest’ programme was how many of my favourite cartoons were in it – usually I get more wound up by the absence of masterpieces than by Jimmy Carr. In fact the only good cartoons I can think of which were not in the 100 are Happy Tree Friends, The Hangman, When The Wind Blows, American Dad and the Clerks animated series. (That reminds me; I saw When The Wind Blows in HMV recently, right in the children’s section. Pity the poor 6-year-old who gets shown that! They need to learn that not all cartoons are suitable for children.)

All the rest were there: The Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy, Roadrunner, Belleville Rendezvouz, Family Guy, Tom & Jerry, Spirited Away, South Park, Jungle Book…

I do wonder at their loose definition of what a cartoon is. Much as I like Wallace & Grommit and the Magic Roundabout I think they are animations and not cartoons. I might be a bit of a purist here, but I think cartoons are 2D drawings and not stop-motion models. I’m not even sure whether CGI films like Toy Story are really cartoons, and as a Flash animation even Happy Tree Friends has to be borderline.

I do suspect that a lot of the cartoons were there purely because they were around when the producers were growing up, rather than for any intrinsic quality to them (Thundercats? Battle of the Planets? Ninja Turtles?) but is it possible to be totally objective about a medium which , by its very nature, involves getting viewers attached to particular shows at an early age?