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Guest Column by Abbas Momin: Pop goes the culture
On October 14, 2022, Cartoon Network Studios and Warner Bros
On October 14, 2022, Cartoon Network Studios and Warner Bros. Animation announced a merger, which led to an unfounded rumour on social media that this was the end of Cartoon Network. Within hours, social media was rife with “RIP Cartoon Network” and “Thanks for the memories” posts. Peculiarly, most of the people sharing these messages were in their late twenties and mid-thirties. I was one of them. The official Cartoon Network Twitter handle has since dismissed the rumour in a series of humorous tweets, but this little drama made me wonder: Why does Cartoon Network matter so much to millennials?
To answer this, let’s travel back to the early 1990s.
Time travelling
I chanced upon Cartoon Network in 1995. That second word made all the difference: Network. Up to that point, kids’ shows were relegated to an hour or two on weekends or in the evenings. The fact that an entire channel was dedicated to cartoons blew my seven-year-old mind.
The programming was genius. Tom & Jerry from the 1940s and Scooby-Doo and The Flintstones from the 1960s sat as comfortably next to The Centurions from the 1980s as they did next to Swat Kats and Dexter’s Laboratory from the 1990s.
I’m pretty sure the first metal guitar riff I ever heard was the theme song to Swat Kats. The Powerpuff Girls broke the idea of “boys’ cartoons” and “girls’ cartoons”. My eyes learnt how to differentiate the angular lines of upright warrior Samurai Jack, from the squiggly lines of the pre-teen con artists Ed, Edd n’ Eddy. When the network switched to Hindi, it weirdly helped me sense the nuances of language. Like how the animated series for The Mask was titled Naqaab, a more colloquial Urdu word, and not Mukhota, the dictionary word for a mask.
Network settings
Local language dubbing brought a wider audience to the shows. One of my most fun activities is to find a fellow millennial from a different linguistic background and discuss how the cartoons dubbed in their languages translated western cultural references. My favourite is still the translation of ‘donut’ to medu vada.
Thinking about this, I realised something important. That when Indian millennials romanticise the 1990s, we’re not just romanticising one decade. We’re celebrating the pop culture of all the previous decades that we gained access to in the 1990s.
Abbas Momin is a writer, and podcaster by day and stand-up comedian by night
I Say Chaps is a column that allows passionate, creative people a platform to have their say.
From HT Brunch, November 12, 2022
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