Mainline 90s nostalgia with the forgotten cartoon channels of YouTube

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Forget cultural signifiers like "millennial" or "Gen Z." You can really only define generational experience through Saturday morning cartoons.

No matter how old you are, hearing the first few notes of those iconic theme songs can jolt you immediately back to being in your jammies, buzzing with empty caloric energy from sugary cereals, just you and the TV, and some mind-numbing content.

There are the classics — '00s kids had their Spongebob, '90s kids had Animaniacs, '80s kids had He-Man.

But we're not gonna talk about those. Once the holy trinity of Cartoon Network, Disney, and Nickelodeon took over as the behemoths of children's animated programming, lesser-known shows from other networks never got into syndication or home video release.

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For every Batman: The Animated Series there's a Street Sharks. Did you know that Kid 'n' Play had their own cartoon? There could practically be a whole genre called "musicians or professional athletes fight crime." Shameless video game and movie tie-ins were the norm. Even Free Willy had a cartoon with a Captain Picard-looking cyborg villain.

Where's all the love for those old cartoons? Surely they were a memorable part of someone's Saturday morning block, right?

Well YouTube has hit the rewind button again, this time with playlists and channels collecting entire seasons of forgotten cartoons from the late '70s to the early '00s.

It's a weird and wonderful rabbit hole to go down. These playlists are for Gen X-ers wondering if that show you saw one season of once in 1991 was just a fever dream. They're also for Gen Z-ers discovering the wacky concept cartoons and thinking "how in the hell did this get made?"

What's even more fascinating is that most of them somehow manage to evade YouTube's notoriously strict copyright claims. True, some channels pull the ol' "cropping the video" trick, or split the episodes into three like many anime series posted on YouTube back in the day. But honestly, it seems like they could care less if anyone's watching full episodes of the Dennis the Menace cartoon.

The point of these channels is not to capture quality — it's to preserve a cultural moment. Most of the shows on these channels are, well, not good. Even with a lack of distribution, certain cartoons just stand the test of time better than others. It's cliche, but iconic cartoons are remembered for good reasons.

But these that's exactly the fun of getting lost in these channels. The shows themselves are so of-their-time that it can be painfully awkward. But most of them fall right in the sweet spot of being so-bad-they're-good, or so-80s-they're-essentially-just-animated-mullets-and-drum-machines.

For that, they deserve to be remembered and immortalized (at least until YouTube gets wise and brings down the ban-hammer.) For at least one kid at some indeterminate point in time, the shows brought them joy. No matter how terrible the animation, or voice acting, or storylines might've been. If you've ever had a babysitting gig, you will know — kids will watch almost anything.

Our standards nowadays seem to be higher. We are arguably in a golden age of children's animation, with stories like Avatar: The Last Airbender and Adventure Time that are more innovative and don't talk down to kids about difficult subjects. Representation and diversity, especially for LGBTQ folks, is getting better as well.

But nostalgic cartoons are like the bowls of sugary cereal milk we used to wash down as kids — probably not full of a ton of substance, but colorful and sweet nonetheless.

So leave your emotional maturity and all sense of good taste in media at the door. For everyone who's a kid at heart, or just looking for a blast from the past, hit the play button for a few hours of unadulterated fun. And synths. Lots of synths.