Do you think our generation is more acceptive of cartoons and superheroes?
 

I've been thinking about how everyone who grew up in the 80's and 90's still like videogames, cartoons and superheroes...whereas my parents and all the older folk from the 50's and 60's never got into this stuff. In today's day and age its rare to see a 60 year old care about videogames/cartoons/superheroes....but when we're all 60 years old it'll be totally different.

Do you think our generation was the first to accept geek culture? We're all adults and many people in their 20's never grew out of comics, cartoons, TV shows or superheroes. It's so different from my parents generation.

I plan on being 75 years old and playing Mario and watching TMNT and Batman on my deathbed. Can't say the same for my grandparents.

Thoughts?

Pretty much definitely. I'd say the first Superman film and later the first Batman film were crucial in super-heroes and that type of storytelling becoming accepted amongst the mainstream. Before that it was all dismissed as "kids' stuff", where now it's mostly acknowledged as simply a modern analog to older versions of mythology. Other films and media have solidified that view in more recent years, but I'd have to say the first Reeve film was the first time any sort of comic book or cartoon mythology was played mostly "straight" and treated with reverence, and the Burton take on Batman a decade later solidified it.

Cartoons in general, though, I'm not sure they've garnered the same kind of mainstream understanding or acceptance. Kind of like video games, cartoons are still for some reason often dismissed as being "for kids". You'd be amazed how many parents I know let their kids watch Family Guy; these parents don't know what it is, they simply know it's a cartoon and thus they let their 10-year-olds watch it, because for some reason many people still think "cartoons = kids stuff." I have no idea why some people are taking so long to come around to the idea that adult content can and does exist in ALL areas of media, but I think there's still a ways to go yet.

Well, my parents are different in that regard. My dad loved the Looney Tunes cartoons and sometimes still watches them if he catches them or if we tell him about it. They don't really think of cartoons as just kids stuff. They know I like TMNT and don't say a word about it, though Dad sometimes teases me about it in a good-natured way. But I can see how most adults from our parents' generation are the type to dismiss cartoons or who never really got into them because they never wanted to.

I think a lot of it, at least for my parents, has to do with them growing up in rural areas and tv not being a big part of their lives. A lot of the younger generations, from my own experience, kind of had tv as a babysitter. When my parents wanted to do their own thing they would pop a tape into the vcr or let me watch cartoons on Saturday mornings to keep me preoccupied while they slept in. That kind of made me see cartoons as sort of an escape myself. I know with most shows I watched as a kid they still calm me. A lot. To show how it was different, my dad would go help his dad work on cars as a kid, all the time and now my dad isn't happy unless he's in a car, wether under the hood or driving about. I guess our generation is more accepting of that stuff since so many people grew up on it, not like back in the day when fewer folks had seen cartoons. Of course, this is all me going off what my parents and I have talked about so I may be way off.