Bam! Mojo Jojo has been defeated once again by the Powerpuff Girls! It’s familiar, waking up Saturday mornings to watch the latest episode of your favorite cartoons are all too familiar. While children television shows such as The Powerpuff Girls, Adventure Time, or The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy may seem harmless, many other shows, like those, contain content geared towards an older crowd.
Take The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, for example. The show is based around a sadistic girl in pink named Mandy, a moronic boy name Billy, and their adventures with their pet,the Grim Reaper. The main characters are constantly killing or simply making other people’s lives miserable. Mandy is the cruelest character, even more so than the Grim Reaper, since she intentionally kills people through malicious schemes and general violence.
Adventure Time is also a prime example. The show follows the adventures of a young boy named Finn and his shape-shifting magical dog, Jake, in the Land of Ooo. The show has an abundant of subliminal messages that can give the wrong impression to children. In the episode, “Slumber Party Panic,” the residents of the Land of Ooo played Truth or Dare and the cupcake was dared to take off its wrapper. It’s a borderline joke that teenagers may get a kick out of, but it may leave some children scratching their heads and asking their parents the meaning.
Then there is Spongebob SquarePants, which should come to no surprise. This show features the undersea life of a sponge who works at a fast food restaurant called The Krusty Krab, located in Bikini Bottom. In the episode “The Paper,” Plankton is caught reading a sketchy magazine called Mitosis. Biology humor anyone? Mitosis is the process of asexual reproduction in which the cell divides in two producing a replica; it’s how plankton reproduces in real life. Sexual innuendos like this are in almost every episode, which should be targeted at a different audience rather than children and teenagers.
Violence, eerie plots, and sexual innuendos are geared towards a more mature audience, and shouldn’t be presented in kids’ television shows.
