CARTOON NETWORK’S PARENTING PIZAZZ

The adventures of intersectional TV programming for early 2000s kids.

Words by Sarah Dolgin Art by Matt Latvis

Your “Ben 10” calendar tells you it’s another Sunday morning in 2008, so you head downstairs to grab a box of Apple Jacks and turn on the tube to indulge in your Cartoon Network diet.

The past week in second grade was a bit rough because you don’t like running around as much as the other kids and prefer making art creations indoors. But that’s okay, you think to yourself, as you watch your favorite show “Chowder.” The “Sniffleball” episode comes on. The nine-yearold, bright purple, rabbit-esque creature typically spends his time as an apprentice for Chef Mung Daal, but Mung Daal decides in this episode that Chowder needs to go play sports games with the other kids instead of spending all of his time in the kitchen. He’s subject to advances by Panini, a girl whom he has no interest in, and is picked on by bully Gorgonzola. You see yourself in Chowder, and see how he triumphs through the woes of elementary school.

Cartoon Network raised early 2000s kids on tales of anxious characters with real-life worries in mystical settings that challenged societal norms and made us better people because of it. In Chapman University alumnus Carl Suby’s thesis, he explores the liberal outlook embodied by the network: “The slant of this ecosystem, while remaining throughout its trajectory, evolves from emphasizing the performativity of gendered identities to presentations of gender egalitarian cultures and the difference of experience between racial and cultural groups.”

In Suby’s work, he discusses an episode of “The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack,” “Beard Buddies,” in which Flapjack aids his mentor K’Nuckles in a beard-growing contest that is meant to represent the toughest adventurer. At the episode’s closing, the stereotypical, buff, malepresenting contestants are revealed as women in drag. While elementary schoolers at this time may not have known that what they were seeing was “drag,” it was introduced as normal, exciting, and whimsical.

As our brains developed, Cartoon Network illustrated them with diverse body types, fluid gender identities, and friendships that transcended the typical, setting our kid minds up to acknowledge and accept differences between ourselves and the people we would encounter in the world.