I'm sure I watched cartoons as a child, for when I see the movie The Shining, some of the cartoons the little boy is watching are period pieces of the seventies, old
Road Runner and
Bugs Bunny. I also recall
Jem and the Holograms and it being a pretty big deal to see them when I got home from school. But the most memorable times of watching Saturday morning cartoons was in college when I found myself living off campus. The line up was, I think:
Spider Man,
X-Men, and
The Tick.
Saturdays always held so much promise, if you could only stay awake. You had 2 whole days before you had to start worrying, two whole nights still left of freedom. To crawl into the communal living room as sunlight, poorly timed and pouring in yellow, lit up the back of the TV like a halo, was to admit the day had begun and that you would ease into it, like a hot bath. Those morning smokes on fledgling tough guy lungs, and the prop of pale ankles on some sturdy leg stand now littered with crumbs, ashes, and pennies.
The walls were yellow, but thinking now I'm not sure, and surely the TV was a newer model, but I forget where it came from. The VCR I know I put on layaway, my first and only purchased appliance. And the reason I was living there, well that's all over now.
Being in college is enough of a cartoon in and of itself, depending on how much psychadelic drugs you had available. I remember sometime that year my friend Chris (along with maybe 6 other friends all tripping at our house) stomped around our side yard at 11 at night with a makeshift spear yelling in a gruff voice, I AM THE MAXX!!! This is the sort of thing that happens when you hang around with arts and theatre majors almost exclusively.
Saturday morning cartoons were then what NPR on the drive in to work is now, a slow way of owning up to my day.