Los Angeles Magazine: Saturday morning fever: 'SpongeBob SquarePants' is one absorbing classic. . -

AFTER ITS PREMIERE IN 1999, SpongeBob SquarePants became the hip cartoon so fast that you would have to be wary even if the idea of a hip cartoon wasn't a dubious one to begin with. If you're of an age when you don't watch cartoons anymore, you may be old enough to remember the stupefyingly unfunny Ren and Stimpy Show, the hip cartoon of a decade or so back, which was succeeded by other such designees as the cretinous Beavis and Butt-head and then South Park. All of these shared something, which was first and foremost that they were monuments to the cool of their creators, and watching a few minutes of SpongeBob led me to believe it was the same. I might have given up on it altogether if not for the keener perception of my five-year-old-so I suppose I must allow for the possibility that had he been around at the time, he might have changed my mind about Ren and Stimpy, too.

Like all parents, I'm convinced my child represents the next step in human evolution, but his taste isn't infallible. Miles has his phases the way most kids do, and no amount of parental sentimentality will ever make the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! phase, which has lasted the better part of two years, less ghastly This wretched series, about an obnoxious mutt that solves lame mysteries and "talks" in an unlistenable guttural caninespeak that children find charming, also aspired to a certain grooviness when it first aired in 1969; surrounding Scooby was a kind of mod squad that included the Significant Human in Scooby's existence, Shaggy, who was the cartoonists' idea of a hippie. Scooby-Doo has been astoundingly popular, of course, becoming a perennial; my son is growing up on it as my wife did. But I'm cautiously optimistic this phase is nearly over. Sorting through his videos recently he pulled out two he no longer finds up to his standards--Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders and Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School--which I rushed to trade before he could change his mind.

The truth is that when I was my son's age and already taking myself a little too seriously I wasn't particularly into cartoons, except for Mighty Mouse, which spoke to the five-year-old Nietzschean in me. Now, for all the nostalgia that surrounds the cartoons of my childhood, I'm convinced this may be a golden age of TV animation; part of this has to do with the fact that, from the new paternal vantage point, some of those innocent old Looney Tunes are a little alarming. When my wife saw the one where Elmer Fudd plays Russian roulette, she decided it was time to change the channel. I don't know how much it says about my own kid or children in general these days that Miles finds the classic Disney cartoons tedious; Uncle Scrooge is just so 20th century But in that sense, even more than his father, he's a child of the '60s and early '70s, when Disney was the refined cultural standard against which rebelled not only the crude mass-market Hanna-Barbera stuff but stoner "underground" cartoons like Fritz the Cat. Andy Warhol and the Beatles so successfully laid siege to elitist preconceptions of what art can be that animation, like a lot of pop forms, took on a new sense of self-regard; even the Beatles were cartoons in 1968's Yellow Submarine. Sometimes the upside of pretension is ambition. A couple of decades down the road, waiting to greet the exponential explosion of animation styles was an exponential explosion of cable outlets, and now on any Saturday morning Miles careens from the Cartoon Network to a couple of Nickelodeons to an HBO for kids, from PBS Kids to two or three Disney channels to Boomerang and Noggin and the Kids' WB.

Increasingly over the last 40 years the audience has changed along with all this, becoming open to the idea, for one, that there's no reason cartoons can't be for grown-ups, too, even if most of the time they aren't. The Cartoon Network's 'Adult Swim," for instance, is a block of animated series that includes the Kafkaesque Brak Show, aired in the later hours of prime time when all kids are warned to get "out of the pool." On the other hand, what's brilliant about a lot of the series Miles can watch is how they have it both ways, slipping in sly adult wit while still trading in the sort of relatively harmless malevolence any budding young gangbanger can relate to, minus maybe the Russian roulette. Perhaps the most underrated is Courage the Cowardly Dog. Courage lives with a mean old man who hates him and a nice old lady who talks in a lilting brogue, in a house at the psychedelicized end of the world; beset by one alien creature or apocalyptic conflagration after another, Courage is terrified by everything yet constantly surmounts his fear to perform a feat of heroism--which, come to think of it, is the definition of courage. The series' piece de resistance involved mutant gerbils singing an interminable "it's a small world after all" anthem of gerbil manifest destiny climaxing with an eerie, lyrical plummet over a waterfall that recalled nothing so much as the Nazi spy's silent plunge from the Statue of Liberty in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur.

COURAGE THE COWARDLY DOG MAY BE TOO HALLUcinatory and original for its own good. There are no new episodes of Courage scheduled for the Cartoon Network's upcoming fall season, which seems dominated by superheroes and anime, a phenomenon that exploded on our shores in the early '90s and shows no signs of waning. Anime was never really meant for little kids, but by the time it filtered down in the form of Pikachu--a small yellow what sit from the Pokemon universe that genetic science precludes anyone over i6 from understanding--it was more or less benign. Now the airwaves teem with the stuff, from Robotech to Dragonball Z to the mind-calcifying Yu-Gi-Oh!, to which my son was introduced by a subversive 13-year-old cousin. Samurai Jack, cross-wiring anime with a vaguely hip-hop sensibility, is presently my son's favorite because, he patiently explains to a clueless father, "it has cool monsters and cool swords." Even The Powerpuff Girls has a certain anime thing going, although sometimes I think it's as much a parody, with Blossom's, Bubbles's, and Buttercup's eyes bigger than they are, in the style of anime female characters, and Mojo Jojo, the bombastic simian villain who talks like the Japanese colonel in The Bridge on the River Kwai. The muted mayhem of many of these series is somewhat offset by more socially redeeming qualities: Characters of different ethnicities mix without anyone making a big deal about it, and the girls are at least as smart, intrepid, and interesting as the boys. In The Wild Thornberrys, on Nickelodeon, a family of safari explorers (who can be seen in the new feature Rugrats Go Wild) negotiates elephant stampedes with more success than it does the jungle of female adolescence. Before the testosterone kicked in around his fourth birthday Miles wanted to be a Powerpuff Girl, which his parents saw no reason to discourage; soon enough, like his father, he'll be having your basic male-sleazeball fantasies about the va-va-voomish mayoral assistant Sara Bellum, who is always shown only from the neck down.

ACCORDING TO THOSE WHO KEEP TRACK OF SUCH things, Nickelodeon's new show, the shrill The Fairly Odd Parents, now threatens to displace SpongeBob SquarePants as the next hip cartoon, maybe because its premise is that every kid has a secret set of parents way cooler than their real ones. Having now been converted to SpongeBob, though, I'm not buying it: SpongeBob is a classic--worthy of a workshop that was held at the Museum of Television & Radio a few months ago--for some time-honored reasons. Its template isn't The Ren and Stimpy Show or Beavis and Butt-head but The Simpsons, the most acclaimed cartoon series ever, in large part because from the beginning, Bart, Marge, and the ever-dim Homer Simpson have been so fully and irresistibly imagined that they steamroll other more conceptual fare. SpongeBob SquarePants certainly has its eccentric flourishes; above water, SpongeBob isn't an animated figure but is portrayed as an actual sponge. But that's secondary to the other residents of Bikini Bottom, who are all--from the vain, cynical Squidward to the Texan squirrel Sandy Cheeks to Mr. Krabs, who runs the Krusty Krab restaurant--winning creations. SpongeBob is a little bit Pee-wee Herman without the creep factor and Jerry Lewis without the Jerry Lewis factor: naive, conscientious, relatively angst free, inevitably good-hearted. And then there's Patrick, the starfish who's SpongeBobs best pal and, shall we say a few spines light in the radial center. Compared with Patrick, Homer Simpson is Stephen Hawking. The episode that pulled me into the series involved a trip to the fair on Valentine's Day and an elaborate gift SpongeBob kept promising to an increasingly excited Patrick; when the plans went awry; all SpongeBob could offer was a cheery handshake. For the rest of the afternoon, on the Ferris wheel and through the fun house, a decidedly nonplussed Patrick fixed his shaken "hand" (to the extent a starfish has hands) with a witless glare, as though if he gazed at it long enough, something spectacular would happen.

Most of Patrick's episodes, including the one about the "secret" box and the one where he whispers answers through a hidden radio to SpongeBob during a driving test, seem to me small comic masterpieces. A sublimely goofy meeting of line and voice (Bill Fagerbakke), Patrick usually thinks he's as clever as he is moronic, which makes him the funniest character in cartoons today But while my son likes Patrick, too, as with most kids his boredom threshold isn't just low, it's subterranean, and lately I've sensed a growing weariness with Bikini Bottom, especially as the SpongeBob phase gives way to a Spider-Man/Harry Potter/PlayStation phase. Sadly, it's even possible now to glimpse a future in which there are no more cartoons, at least for another 30 years or so; then, what Miles might consider the golden age of TV animation may have more to do with whether he finds his child's childhood more interesting and moving than his own, as I do. At that point I imagine cartoons will be completely different, and at the same time not different at all. God help us, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! will probably still be on the air, in one form or another; in fact there's a spin-off, What's New Scooby-Doo? But I'm guessing that SpongeBob SquarePants will be around, too, if only in reruns, and that Miles will rediscover it, even if his own son or daughter thinks it's so early 21st century.