Nothing lasts forever.

...or, 'the second part of cartoons and stuff'...or something.

To answer the previous statement, I'm not sure why my golden age stopped, but it did. In its place were a number of cartoons that...well, were nowhere near as entertaining. I've found that a number of shows have their moments, but suffer from quite a few common shared traits:

1) Shipping. For the uninitiated, this is the act of supporting the romantic coupling of two characters in a program. For the most part, this had not been done too often. Then came "Hey Arnold!", which gladly sacrificed a diverse cast of characters (kids and adults, alike) and good writing to focus on Helga and her obsession with Arnold. By itself, it was plenty irritating (She pretends to hate him, but secretly loves him. Yeah, she ain't nuts.), but that the writers genuinely believed in it enough to create an episode that, for all intents and purposes, plays like a bad fanfic ("Married") just stunned me.

Sadly, this was not the end of the trend, but the unholy beginning. Other shows decided to pick up on this like it was the only reason to watch cartoons (and, alarmingly, many stories at Fanfiction.net confirm this). Pairings to result from this utterly misguided act of creativity include an adventurous boy genius and his classmate who constantly insults him and turns everything they do into a competition ("Jimmy Neutron"), a sweet-natured girl and her iracsible, dim-witted companion ("Kids Next Door"), a ghost boy and his gothy friend ("Danny Phantom") and a can-do cheerleader and her clumsy cohort ("Kim Possible"). Okay, these last two pairings are all right, but what's not all right is the annoying way the ships are shoved in my face. (A specific example is the "Danny Phantom" episode, "Flirting with Disaster" which, while well-plotted, was just that: a disaster. The side characters - and even the villain! - commenting on Danny and Sam's ignorance of their feelings for each other as if they were a bunch of no-life-having online fanatics. To be perfectly frank, I'd sooner drink battery acid out of an unflushed toilet in a Mexican restaurant than have to sit through those appallingly constructed and executed moments again.)

By having the pairs shoved down one's throat as opposed to letting the viewer judge if they're right for each other, the writers have given birth to a generation of barely literate neo-animation Nazis, convinced that theirs is the only way to be followed. I don't know about them, but I like thinking for myself. It's served me pretty well all these years, and I don't wish to change.

2) Inconsistency. There are quite a few shows that, to me, have a good episode, then another, and then a moment (or episode) that's so ridiculously unbelievable or unacceptable, you're shoved right back to arm's length, yet you end up jumping into the soup again and again. Even worse are shows that seem to espouse the 'comedy of embarrassment' style of writing*, humiliating its (likable) characters in the name of humor. Examples of both debits include "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends", "Ed, Edd and Eddy", "Codename: Kids Next Door" and "Danny Phantom". (* - to present and future cartoon writers, just because it barely works for Ben Stiller on the big screen doesn't mean it will work on the small screen.)

3) Laziness. Now, a show like "The Fairly Oddparents" was well worth mentioning in the same breath as the shows in the first column. Note my use of the word 'was'. In its first season, it was sharp and funny. Apparently unhappy with such a state, its makers bled all the fun out of it with lame (and endlessly repeated) jokes, poor scripts and disastrous character actions until, by its end, it was the same show, by only in name. Remarkably, FOP creator Butch Hartman likened this show to "The Simpsons".

Now, "The Simpsons" was required viewing in my home growing up (and still is to my folks). I generally gave up on the show years ago because of the same reasons already mentioned, but it seemed that, with eighth season episodes like "My Sister, My Sitter" and especially "Homer's Enemy", serpents were infesting Eden long before God declared it uninhabitable (BTW, if you think that that metaphor was too flowery, I suggest turning back, because things are only going to get more arboreal. You see?)

And what's left on the dial? Nothing but these shows with their glaring flaws as well as a bunch of guilty pleasures ("Totally Spies", "Bratz", "Trollz" and maybe some other shows not ending in 'z'), those programs that struggle their little hearts out to entertain ("The X's", "American Dragon: Jake Long", "The Emperor's New School", "Squirrel Boy", "The Batman") and one no-hoper after another ("Viva Pinata", "My Gym Partner's a Monkey").

But wait. Maybe I'm being a mite too cynical. You're probably asking yourself, "Aren't there any truly entertaining shows out there now?" as well as "Whatever became of the shows you mentioned the first time out?"

These questions will more than likely be answered in the third and final column. See you then.