Now almost everyone has grown up watching cartoons of some type, be it classic Hanna Barbara series like Scooby Doo and The Flintstones, the series of the nineties like X-Men and Spider-Man, or the twenty-ten series like Gravity Falls and The Amazing World of Gumball. But one fact remains true: cartoons are dying off. The factors at play here are how cartoons were back in the day, it all became ratings mainly for two channels, and now parents are just letting their children consume nothing but slop on youtube or cartoons just reuploaded there with little care put in, where unfortunately the slop kids consume nowadays is typically just one click away from the “quality” content presented to them.

I want to first look at how cartoons were in the past, specifically from 1958-1998 shows, now this might be a massive range of shows; but I want to examine more how they grew over time. Examples of kids shows back then that are some favorites include “Ultimate Spider”, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012)”, and “X-Men: The Animated Series”, among many more from the eighties to the modern day. Now all of these shows I directly named have a few things in common: they are slow paced, tech lessons, and most importantly had time to grow. This allowed for kids to better understand what was going on and enjoy the shows since they didn’t cut from shot to shot. Since they were able to teach lessons such as acceptance, not overexerting oneself, and how to be gentle. Unlike modern cartoons such as every kid’s “favorite” series “CoComelon” which changes scenes about every two seconds, and not really teaching lessons that kids should be learning. This is completely frying and overstimulating the brain of a developing child. But I think this idea of quick transitions, bright colors, and most importantly hyper active animation that started the downfall is when Spongebob’s nautical nonsense attacked.

Now you might be wondering why I’m putting the blame on “Spongebob Squarepants” for being patient zero towards the death of cartoons? Now it’s not fully on him, but he’s the start of the downfall era of toons. Fully premiered in July of 1999 he quickly grew into popularity and averaged 3.5 to 6 million viewers in regular episodes (for the 6th and 7th season). Yet the biggest issues came in 2025 with Spongebob’s Summer of F.U.N., an event that started June 6th and went to September 8th, where they played nothing but Spongebob on the regular and toon’s sister channel showing a dependency on him. Now Cartoon Network is also at fault here for overplaying a show, that being “Teen Titans Go” which premiered April of 2013. In these almost thirteen years they for a time exclusively played this most notably in 2017 if you look at TV guides from that year. Now Cartoon Network has done several manathons themselves most recently being the “Every Episode Ever” where they played all 400 episodes back to back to back for a week from November 24th to December 1st. These were done mainly since these shows give the viewers and leave very little room for other shows to grow, which I’d like to talk about now.

Finally the big reason as to why cartoons are dying is to be blamed on YouTube. Now why do I make this claim? Well, simply put, parents are using it as a babysitter for their child, just put on whatever you want and let the kids watch. This is bad since they could easily click on slop content from something more “genuine” like reuploads of “Bluey” episodes on the Disney Youtube channel. So why do parents do this? Its simple scenes are basically an easy way to get kids to be quiet and allow them to do work. From Lurie Children’s Hospital they found that 71% use screens to manage the behavior of their children and how parents believe that 4.5 years old is the ideal tim to introduce screens to children. I won’t disagree, but I think it should be managed as the study says it should be 9 hours a week of screen time. So is animation going to die since TV only gives attention to a few shows, streaming which I didn’t mention is killing TV, and how Youtube is seen as an easy out. Well no cause I’d like to give one last highlight in animation.

Now the last thing I’m going to highlight is the realm of Indie Animation. To many now indie animation is carrying the weight of most other studios’ lack of care in the space. Some examples of great indie animated series include “The Amazing Digital Circus”, “Strawberry Vampire”, and “Pain Girl” among many more. These are all made by real artists and people who have a passion for making a cartoon, but don’t have the ability to pitch it to a big name studio, so they turn to the internet and let it grow from there. Glitch Productions is one of the biggest studios for indie animation and as of April 2nd 2026, The Amazing Digital Circus, one of their biggest series has a total of 8 episodes and a mass of over a billion views across the whole series. It’s insane that this silly indie animated show based on the book “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” that has month-long gaps between episodes was able to get that many people to watch it. So I think that mainline studios with a few exceptions are soon going to be casted aside and make way for more indie productions to become the main things everyone loves, after all everything has to die to make way for the newest gold mine. So if indie’s the future count me in.