Does it seem like more adults are watching cartoons now than in previous decades?

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Spengbab

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For example, all the kids from the 80's and 90's have now grown up. Yet for some reason, it seems like a lot of the 80's and 90's generation of kids still like both animation, videogames, and anime.

Meanwhile, my parents who grew up in the 60's and 70's don't really care for cartoons, even though they enjoyed Flintstones, the 60's Batman, and old Hanna-Barbera shorts. In that same manner, they do not enjoy videogames much.

Meanwhile lots of the people from the 80's and 90's, who grew up when games, cartoons and anime were becoming more mainstream, still follow it, even though not as much as they used to. Just look at how many people on this forum and others are 20 or older.

Is there any proof of this?
 
Well look at what shows they have for older audiences. Reality shows are boring, and the other shows have been on for years and aren't good anymore.
 
Well, there are a lot more high-quality cartoons (both on televison and at the movies) out these days than there were back in the 80s or 90s. I grew up in the 80s "half-hour toy commercial" doldrums, and can honestly say that I enjoy watching cartoons more now than I ever did as a kid.
 
I think that because in the 70's and 80's there weren't very many cartoons with adult appeal to them. It was all just Scooby-Doo clones and toy commercials.
 
Today's animated movies are top notch (the ones from Pixar anyway), but animated TV series, not so much IMO. Most of today's toons are unfunny and don't tell a good story save for a select few. I'll take the toy commercial toons and the classics on Boomerang over today's stuff easily.
 
Cartoons today are so much more diverse than they were 20-25 years ago and I do believe that more and more adults are watching cartoons, especially stuff like the Fox Sunday night lineup, Spongebob and Adult Swim. Back in the 80's cartoons were basicly 30 minute toy commercials and the stories that were told were so basic that only a child could identify, now we have anime's that are aimed toward adult viewers and animated comedy shows that have humor that most children may not understand.

I do think more and more adults are watching and enjoying animation over the past 10 years than ever before, I just hope that animation as a medium can continue to be as diverse for the long run as it has been recently.
 
The cartoons of the 70's and 80's didn't really offer much in the way of crossover adult appeal; heck, I was a kid during those decades and I wasn't into most of the cartoons from that era myself, save for the Charlie Brown and Nelvana specials, some of the Rankin-Bass stuff and the classic Warner Bros., MGM and Disney shorts, which came from decades earlier.

Many of the cartoons from the 90's onward work on more than one level and are clever and self-referential enough to entertain older audiences as well as younger ones. Plus, there's just a wider selection of animated programming to choose from now than there was then, what with the internet, 24-hour cable and satellite channels and access to toons from around the world.

So if more adults are watching cartoons now, I can't say that I'm surprised.
 
:p Well duh. Anyone born in the 80's would have experienced KidsWB, FoxKids and Toonami growing up and came of age in time for Adult Swim and adult animation expansion. And don't forget the anime boom that is still pretty strong today compared to where it once was. Speaking at 22 years old, yes it does seem that way. :p
 
Do more adults watch cartoons today than they did in the 60's-80's? Without a doubt. However, we still probably have a long way to go before cartoons become as much seen by adults as they were prior to the 60's, when short cartoons were shown at the cinema.
 
I honestly don't know what you guys are seeing. Other than the TV-MA toons and some of the stuff on Adult Swim, I don't see much adult appeal in today's toons at all. I still laugh big time at shows like Scooby-Doo, Tom & Jerry, Looney Tunes, The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, and the like. But shows like Chowder, Flapjack, Sponge Bob, Adventure Time, Stoked, 6Teen, and the like and the like don't do it for me at all. I've tried to get into them, but just can't. Chowder comes off to me like a poor man's Garfield, and Adventure Time is poorly animated and tremendously overrated. I can see why a kid would like it though. The only original CN/non-Adult Swim toons I've really ever enjoyed were Justice League, Star Wars:The Clone Wars, Megas XLR, Teen Titans, Johnny Bravo, and Dexter's Lab.

I guess to each their own, I'm just glad I was born in the era I was.
 
You've made this comparison before, and I just don't see it. How is Chowder anything like Garfield? Chowder is a culinary take on The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Aside from the protagonists of each being food lovers, Chowder is nothing like Garfield, at least I don't see any similarities.

In any event, lets' not turn this into an "old cartoons VS new cartoons" debate, because that's not what this thread is about. The question being posed is "does it seem like more adults are watching cartoons now than in previous decades?", and judging by the number of responses in this thread alone, I'd say the answer is a resounding "yes".

The fact that this very forum exists and is so active on a daily basis proves that adults today are indeed watching plenty of cartoons.
 
Some would say that the current Garfield strips are the poor-man's Garfield (I'm not one of them).

Anyway, I would have to agree with the majority of us so far. I'm only 23 and I think I watch cartoons now more than ever before. When I was younger, I just knew that I liked the cartoons that were funny and didn't question why, and I assumed that these shows would be around forever and a day. Not once did I find it weird that adults watched cartoons. Even going back and re-watching all the stuff I grew up on, I actually find it much more entertaining because I know why it's funny, and why some adults watch the shows. I pick up on little bits of adult humor ("I intend to do the opposite of fail!" "You mean succeed?" "No! No one will be sucking seed!") and every other little detail that I was just too impulsive, too unfocused, too whatever to notice in even my late teens. (Well, except for one joke that was obviously a reference to masturbation in an Angry Beavers episode. That one I picked up on right away.)

What's more, I agree that most cartoons from the past 20 years are written to work on both child and adult levels. There's just far more effort put into them than in the 1970s or 1980s, and in general, there seems to be more of a desire to push the envelope -- perhaps because the creators are hip to the fact that adults seem to be watching more cartoons! There's also more of a desire to make quality animation, and more technology to do so. Something like The Penguins of Madagascar probably would've cost a lot more even six or seven years ago.

tl;dr: Adults can too watch cartoons, and I think I see why.
 
A lot of cartoons of today have more irreverent humor, which is why I think they get a pass as far as being accepted. You can be a 20 or 30 something year old, and have Spongebob on the tube, and most people that are in the same age range wouldn't think anything of it. Go on any college campus lounge and you'll more than likely find it on CN or Nick.
 
Absolutely. Though there is still the stipulation that cartoons are for kids while The Flinstones set the bar years ago The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Futurama, Family Guy, South Park and the edgier toons on cable have made the statement that cartoons aren't just for kids though that was never really the case it was just what many generations assumed.

Meanwhile kids cartoons in the 90s and 00s are considerably more mutli-faceted than the cartoons of the 60s, 70s and even a lot of the toons in the 80s though all of those generations had their gems.

The other factor is for many years people just accepted that when you grow up you stop watching the things of your youth for the most part. Several generations have chipped away at that and now society embraces the things of our youth a lot more than it used to.

Years ago it was not ordinary in the US for parents to watch cartoons with their kids out of maybe a few select programs that were established as entertainment for the whole family.

And of course it's not just with cartoons. It's the same with comics, video games and other "youthful" media.

At some point people realized that even after you grow up it's not terrible to enjoy those sorts of media still.
 
But if you believe that cartoons were better during the 70's and 80's than they are now, then how do you explain the fact that so few adults back then cared to watch cartoons? Granted, i was born in 86 and therefore cant say i have any first hand experience of the "cartoon community" the way it was back in those days, but from what i have heard from several animation fans who were already grown up by that time (including from some people on this very site) it seems clear that the cartoons produced in those decades really didn't have a lot of grown up fans. For instance, from what i can gather, when it came to action cartoons with tie-in comic book series, like Transformers, GI. Joe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the comic books usually managed to score big enough among adult nerds (it's okay for me to use that word, cause i am one myself :P) while the cartoons were largely ingored by people over the age of 14 or so.
 
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