Warner Bros. tries turning back the clock in Baby Looney Tunes. © Warner Bros. Animation.

Perhaps it’s inevitable; when cartoon characters reach a certain age, they must undergo transformations equivalent to the animated version of the fountain of youth. There are numerous ways to do this: They can be completely reconceptualized, as in Cartoon Network’s presentation of Flintstones: On The Rocks. They can be bent to postmodern humor, as Michael Ouweleen and Erik Richter have done with Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law. They could be simply dusted off and brought back with a shiny new coat of digital ink; witness He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Transformers. Sometimes they can depict prehistories in which the original protagonists have been recast as their juvenile or baby selves. This option gained wide acceptance during the 1980s and has proven to be the most flawed and aesthetically questionable choice of those listed above.

The Babyfication
Why should this be? Everyone loves little kids and babies, and what better way to build identification with a core audience that consists mostly of children? Both these assumptions may be true, but the concessions are far too great. The first victim in the “babyfication” of cartoons is usually continuity. One of the clearest examples occurred in The Flintstone Kids (1986-1988), a series that featured the complete revision of a shared history by the characters; they have now known each other since childhood. This twist is in contradiction of backstory provided in a 1964 episode of the original series. Taking a regressive approach to shows also constricts the range of characterization: the players are frozen in developmental lockstep, their futures (and future personalities) already established.

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe gets a digital do-over. © Cartoon Network.

If Reggie Mantle, for example, is a selfless tyke without manipulative tendencies in The New Archies, then what indeed happened to him in the intervening years? Could a fearless prepubescent Shaggy, rather than Fred, truly lead the gang of A Pup Named Scooby Doo through their antecedent adventures and then behave as he did in later years? Probably not. These children will never be exposed, as teenagers are, to the perils of drugs, sexual abuse, satanic or religious cults, skinhead literature, or other murky threats of adolescence. We already know that they have made it through these tumultuous years with their ink-and-paint skins intact. So it goes, through cartoons such as Muppet Babies, Yo, Yogi, and Tom and Jerry Kids.

Perhaps the dreariest feature of these “throwback” series is the underlying realization that they are less attempts at revisionism than they are vehicles for marketing cuter, alternate versions of established characters. They are also an admission that, bereft of original ideas, studios will copycat each other’s concepts even if they are less than ideal in the first place. Underscoring this point: The six shows listed above all appeared in the period between 1984-1990. They were all finished as first-run programs by 1993 (or earlier). Happily, the trend of infantilizing cartoon shows gradually died out. The proliferation of animation studios, the rise of creator-driven product, and the availability of cable television markets led to a greater diversity of ideas, helping to kill the much-imitated genre of “babyfied” cartoons. Well, almost.