90s Cartoons Quotes

94 was a good year to be twelve. Star Wars still had two more years as Box Office King, cartoons were still hand-drawn, and the Disney "D" still looked like a backwards "G." Words like "Columbine," "Al Qaeda" and "Y2K" were not synonymous with "terror," and 9-1-1 was an emergency number instead of a date. At twelve years old, summer still mattered. Monarch caterpillars still crawled beneath every milkweed leaf. Dandelions (or "wishes" as Mara called them) were flowers instead of pests. And divorce was still considered a tragedy. Before Mara, carnivals didn't make me sick.

Q: Why do you like to do cartoons? How long have you been in this activity? Cartoon is the fun way to express opinions and communicate, that's why I like it. When I illustrate textbooks I also try to make them have humor...I've been publishing professionally since the early 90's, I was lucky enough to get to work in a newspaper and that was a great school, like a second university. (Interview on irancartoon.com)

Although it’s mostly just annoying, self-infantilisation’s pervasive existence in the culture could also be the harbinger of something more sinister. Last year, the comic book author Alan Moore suggested that the popularity of superhero films represents an “infantilisation that can very often be a precursor to fascism”. This might sound hyperbolic, but it’s true that a certain kind of kitsch infantilism was always a feature of Nazi art, which was hostile to moral ambiguity and formal complexity. Hitler himself was a Disney adult. If the desire to relinquish responsibility for your own life can be considered an infantile trait, it’s easy to see why this would make you more susceptible to authoritarianism. Today’s white nationalists – with their cartoon Pepes and their ‘frens’ – are as smooth-brain and babyish as any online community, while right-wing reactionaries have recently taken to eulogising 90s video games, Blockbuster and Toys R Us – a glorious past that has been robbed from us by wokeness.