#streetsharks

Because suddenly, all the TV shows that had disappeared - forever - without closure or explanation - are suddenly available again. You want to know how Rocko's Modern Life ended? just go find out. How about Streetsharks? Click on in. What about the last episode of Silver Surfer which was on Saturday morning's FoxKids for awhile before mysteriously vanishing with no fucking warning or resolution? Sure. Have at it. Do you want to see SWAT Kats? You can. It's out there. And there's a nuanced plot. Biker Rats from Mars? Available if you're willing to do some legwork, probably. Same for the Godzilla and MiB cartoons. You can find all of it with some effort. I just.

Y'all...

If you grew up with high speed internet and youtube, as a kid, not a teenager but an actual child, you do not and cannot understand what I'm talking about. Because there was this glorious ~10 year sweetspot in children's programming where there was a glut of amazing, well-written, well-animated, well-acted cartoon shows full of absolutely unhinged content that filled the airwaves for months or years at a time per show but then? Poof. The property would and did disappear without warning to their audience, the kids. They were just gone. Lost in time.

BUT NOW THEY'RE BACK.

FROM OUTER SPACE.

And I am genuinely a little afraid of how watching those shows, experiencing these moments might recontextualize my childhood and move me personally in time and space. I'm serious. There's actual scientific evidence that implies that observing the universe effects our place in it and the mechanics that are taking place by sheer fact of being observed (at least that’s how I understand it, disclaimer, not a quantum physicist) and that memory is a very real form of time-travel, possibly the most literal form we, in our third-dimensional flesh cages will ever experience as time is quite possibly happening simultaneously past, present and future(again that’s how I understand it, repeat disclaimer, not a quantum physicist). Do I really want to possibly be so forcibly thrust back into the time-stream in a non-linear fashion via experiential and emotional trigger just to find out what actually happened at the end of the never-finished Pirates of Black Water or Aaah! Real Monsters? Should such a thing be done?

I don't know. I haven't decided. Like so many things in the modern world, it lacks precedent and historical conventions of behavior and wisdom don't really apply because these mediums and the effect they have on emotion and chrono-experience never existed prior to about two generations back. It's all a big experiment really.

I'll have to think on it in order to grok in fullness. I'll let you know what I do and write down the results.