Yep. Welcome to another "This is so going in my blog!" moment.

As part of Free Comic Book Day, before heading out to partake of Avengers: Age of Ultron and the comics of FCBD, I decided to fire up the ol' laptop and watch episodes of some of my favorite animated comic-book based shows. I even drew up a schedule and everything.

I managed to watch all of one episode. It was of "X-Men: Evolution". It was available in all its uncut glory and, tellingly, it's the only show amongst my picks to be available on Netflix. Strangely enough, the other episodes I tried to watch were either crippled by incompetent site management ("Batman: TAS", "Green Lantern: TAS"), sped-up footage to avoid removal ("Fantastic Four") or overzealous ad placement ("Teen Titans"*; it's one thing to interrupt the show to run an online ad, but running an ad on top of the show as it plays should be grounds for immediate castration).

This experience raises a bigger question: Why do so many cartoons fall through the cracks? You'd think something as well-known and critically revered as "Batman: TAS" would be available on a wider platform, like Hulu or Netflix (okay, it's on Amazon Prime, but as God is my witness, I really thought I had to pay to watch it and I am, for lack of a better word, a cheapskate).

I don't pretend to know what exactly goes on in the minds of people who make the big programming decisions, but I can't help but feel like our generation is coming up on a steady stream of gruel with the occasional steak thrown in for variety. (How many cartoons built around the early "Spongebob" episodes where he and Patrick annoy Squidward can there be? A large number, if you know how to search.)

I remember a time when the steak to gruel ratio was a lot more balanced. Funnily enough, most of the cartoons I tried to watch this morning came up in that era. It would've been so nice to revisit the Saturday morning cartoon watching heyday I once enjoyed.

* - It is truly sad that the only real "Teen Titans" I can get on my television is when Boomerang deigns to air "Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo" while that juvenile rip-off dominates Cartoon Network. It's almost like how they were able to delete any traces of "Sheep in the Big City" from existence, likely thinking that if people can't watch it, eventually, they'll forget it ever existed. Cocksucking motherfuckers.