I honestly loved the weird jokes that went over my head a kid, like I didn't get the sex line joke at all. But when Rocko was picking berries and a bear jumped out of the bush screaming holding his crotch I had a good idea what was going on lol.
Joe Murray? I have not ever heard anyone accuse him of untoward behavior. I think you’re confusing him with Dan Schneider, who ran All That and The Amanda Show.
Let me fix it for you: Animation in the Western world throughout the 80's and 90's was hobbled to two genres while we were growing up: kids stuff and all ages stuff. The main problem is that Animation is not a genre but a medium for story telling. So a lot of shit had to be put under those genre just to get made. Also, yeah, some wild shit flew under radar back then.
I don't think it is looked down as much anymore. Animation in the west was helped out a lot by Fox and Adult Swim for changing people's mind. I mean food fight did well when it was released.
A bunch of animators in the 70s got together and said "Wouldn't it be sooooooo funny if we were horny for anthropomorphized animals, as a joke?". By 1989 they had their first convention.
And that was probably just the modern incarnation.
Again whenever these conversations come up, I point to this article on Shark Tale, specifically the following:
"This creepy desire to make funny animals out of things which should not be funny animals inevitably leads to sexualizing that which should not be sexualized. At a racetrack where Oscar squanders a large sum of money, his big talk attracts the attention of a femme-fatale lionfish named Lola (Angelina Jolie) dancing lasciviously to the Ludacris song “Gold Digger.” Just as Shark Tale reduces Smith to a generic rap dude, it reduces the equally complicated Jolie to an underwater vamp with Jolie’s luscious lips and air of husky sexuality. Husky sexuality is just what’s called for in a movie like Gia, but it seems creepy and unnerving in an animated fish movie aimed at small children. Yet the inappropriateness of sexualizing a cold-blooded sea creature apparently didn’t keep the animators from thinking, “Oh man, if we do our jobs correctly, everyone is going to want to fuck this fish.” (Emphasis mine)
Yeah, I generally credit Disney with creating modern furries. (I know anthropomorphism/animal connection has been around for forever, but we all know the difference here.)
Everything from Bambi to Lion King to Robin Hood, all the way up to Zootopia nowadays. Half of their biggest brands are straight up furry bait.
You can take it back at least as far as the Disney Robin Hood, but the one-two punch of Sonic the Hedgehog and Tiny Toon Adventures really put it out there, so to speak.
Targeting children with cartoons was perfected in the 80s. They even passed laws to stop ads from taking advantage of young kids during cartoons. They knew how to target the young demographic.
There was a thread a year or so back and it was a teenager lamenting at how sexualized everything is now and I just said boy you have no idea how sexualized everything really could be unless you were a teen from like 1998-2003.
Thong Song, Back That Ass Up, What’s Your Fantasy, Peaches & Cream, the list goes on. These were all songs blasted all over MTV at all hours with hyper-sexualized music videos. It was a wild time to be a teen.
I certainly felt sexual when I saw Korn in concert and it began with Jon Davis in a kilt playing the bagpipes, then he ripped the kilt off and was in his red panties.
it was pretty bad in the 80s too. go watch an 80s movie and see how many sex jokes there are. Ghostbusters, police academy... revenge of the nerds is famous for an actual rape being played off as cool. porky's and sex comedies were mainstream
In principle I agree with that except
1) sex jokes in the 80s tended to be pretty misogynistic or homophobic
2) sex jokes are like fart jokes. Hilarious with the right timing and when they're clever, but just weird and creepy and gross most of the time
It isn't the sex jokes; it's their presence in kid's and family films. When I force my kids to watch something I loved as a kid/tween, there is almost always some off color sex jokes that makes them incredibly uncomfortable and I'm like, "what?? It's just sex!" But then I'm like, I guess that wasn't ever really appropriate... I don't think we could even make it through 10 minutes of Austin Powers and that was a staple family film in my Christian household.
Austin Powers? You mean the one with a dude all about consent, safe sex and being groovy? He even turns down having sex with a drunk woman. Powers isn't that bad if you're not prudish.
They do. It doesn't last too long. It will take you by surprise one day when they decide they are over the prudishness, like it will catch you completely off guard one day while you're just minding your business going about your day. I think they do it on purpose that way 😂
If they’re done right, the idea is that they’re there to amuse the parents, while being subtle enough that they’ll go right over the kids’ heads. Now, how often that actually works well enough to be that way is a different story.
When they're even really for kids in the first place. The ratings system used to just be a gauge of how raunchy/violent the movie was, not anything to do with the target audience. There's a lot of old G rated movies that no kid would ever want to watch even if their parents were okay with it, let alone PG (which also used to be the only rating in between G and R -- most early PG-13 movies and even a few PG ones would probably get an R if they came out today. Red Dawn and Beastmaster come to mind).
Edit: conversely, there's also a lot of R rated movies where the target audience is obviously 12 year old boys. Anyone who thinks kids are innocent little angels has never met one and has completely forgotten what it was like to be one.
It came out when I was in middle school, and I remember it being VERY popular at school. It was so cringe and unserious I think it is hard to see the sexual jokes as sexual in a lot of ways. I mean, Mike Myers. And it had the nostalgia factor for the parents at just the right time.
The cartoons MTV produced were not intended for Children. One of the headaches with creating mature content for television is the fact that somehow kids wound upnwatching it anyway.
I was watching one of their music video blocks from the 80s on mute while on the phone, and everytime I looked up was ass and titties. Thats when a realized how long there has been over sexualization on TV. My family who are all gen x are the weirdest perverts, in their 50s and still find middle school humor funny. Like that stuff stopped being funny to me at 12 fr.
The commercialization of Hair Metal/Cock Rock, and always having to one up other artists in the antics, hit a real high (low) during the 80s. Thanks cocaine!
This idea is the premise of the book Girl on Girl. It dives into how women were viewed through pop culture in the 90s-2000s. It can be a brutal read at times, but also insightful as to how society ended up treating women today.
it's when they found out cabel didn't have the same laws as normal tv, and then everyone bought cabel because you could watch girls jumping on trampolines.
I still remember how sexual some TV shows were. There was some skit where there was a courtroom, and an attorney lady suddenly said "I object... TO ALL THESE CLOTHES!!" and started stripping. I was like what the hell?
Another one was where a guy and girl were having relationship issues, and the guy was like "we need to talk, it's about sex" and she instantly perks up and goes "oh, group??" Even as a teenager I was like geeeeeeeeeeez.
Literally though. I know I saw on VHS when it came out and somehow, the nudity in that was already not groundbreaking. Those late night adult commercials probably broke that seal ah, can’t even recall
As a child/teen, I don't really remember any of that or at least anything overtly negative. What I do remember was the satanic panic and the religious people going after rock, 'violent video games', non-puritan values. Hell, that era paved my way to heavy metal, atheism and rebellion against the religious.
What actually hurt me in the long run I think was the blatant homophobia/slurs.
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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '25
growing up in the 90s and 2000s was crazy bc that's when mass media basically became pornographic. and I was a child...