Where Are They Now?

 I don't know if it was just my generation, but kids TV was fucking shit.
 When I look at old clips of Bagpuss, or The Clangers, I can see a genuine warmth and charm in them.
 My generation didn't get much of that.
 I think it's largely down to cable TV. With 24-hour kids channels suddenly available, network heads had a lot of space to fill, and stuck on any old shite they could think of.
 Who can forget that thing with the Japanese kid who had the big robot? Or that series with the thing and the stuff in it?
 I can, evidently, and I'm willing to bet the rest of you probably have, as well.
 My personal bugbear was the Super Mario cartoon they used to air on - I think - ITV, in which every episode the evil King Koopa would enslave a world, and Mario and his entourage would arrive and thwart him.
 Then, with the bad guy defeated, Mario would pause to deliver a long speech, at which point the bad guy would sneak off. This was the point where that dozy bitch who was always getting kidnapped would cry "Oh, no! He's escaping into a Warp Zone!" and the whole cycle would begin again. Next episode, Mario and co. would arrive in the next dimension, logically only a few seconds behind Koopa, to find that Koopa had already managed to enslave everyone.
 This "escape into a warp zone" bullshit happened every single fucking episode.
 I'm not an expert in capturing runaway dinosaur overlords (that'd be my cousin, Turok Haines) but it would seem to me that after the second or third time he'd escaped during your soliloquy, you might want to consider tying him up whilst you give a speech. Or just being quiet. Or, fuck it, I don't know, hitting him over the head with a spanner so he can't get up; you are a plumber, after all.
 Anyway, kids programmes weren't overly concerned with quality when I was growing up, is my point. Most of them fell into a sort of beige, mulchy middle ground where they were just sort of "on."
 They weren't quite crappy enough that you'd leave the room and go and play outside, but they weren't diverting enough that anything ever really came of them. They were just something to look at that provided a distraction.
 One of the more popular (by which I mean ubiquitous) examples of this style of programming was "Rugrats", which dealt with the adventures of a group of infants who could talk to each other, but never spoke to adults.
 Imagine my surprise, then, when last night I was trawling through Netflix and found out that Rugrats actually had a follow-up series.
 Entitled "All Grown Up", it looks like this, and I warn you now, if you're my age, this will melt something deep inside your brain:

 Something about that just seems deeply, deeply wrong to me.
 Cartoon filler material should not be aging in real time. These aren't real, living people, and they shouldn't be treated as such. The bland filler on my TV shouldn't be making me think about mortality.
 Cartoon babies shouldn't be getting older, in the same way that nobody likes to be reminded that the Marlboro Man is probably somewhere in an iron lung, right now.
 This is also baffling from an in-universe standpoint. At what stage did the kids actually acknowledge to their parents that they were capable of speech?! Or is this a show about a group of 10-year-olds who are constantly pretending to be mute? Or communicating solely through gurgling noises? Either way, those are probably more entertaining ideas than what's actually being broadcast.
 I did a bit of wikipedia-ing (wikipeding?) on this one, and the show seems both as bland as you'd expect and inbued with that irritating, relentlessly upbeat quality that American kids shows in particular always have. All of the characters are apparently special and gifted, and none of the background characters from Rugrats have died in the interim decade.
 As an antidote to this, and in the spirit of "All Grown Up," I've decided to start making my own sequels to the Kids TV lineup of the mid-nineties, as I remember it...


Doug: The Later Years.

 Terminally bland cartoon creation Doug has hit the glass ceiling in his career as a postal worker and spends most of his evenings lonely, playing the banjo and wishing his dog Porkchop hadn't caught rabies and mauled his family to death.
 He still loves Patti, whom he had a brief relationship with before she ran off with his best friend, Skeeter, saying only "Once you go blue, with white guys you're through."
 Series ends when Doug is arrested, drunk, whilst tearfully trying to burn down a tank top factory.



Sister Sister (And One Lucky Mister)

 Hardcore porn hi-jinks as Tia and Tamera are reduced to debasing themselves sexually for the niche twin-porn market.
 Will Tia's mom Lisa find out about their naughty shenanigans?! No, because Tamera's father Ray shot her years ago for being a nagging bitch, before turning the gun on himself...



Hey Arnold! Stop Gay-Bashing!

 Arnold is all grown up and mad at the gays. After his first (and only) sexual encounter in high school, it turns out Helga, the butch, muscular girl who had feelings for him, was actually a lesbian.
 Breaking off their affair, Helga leaves town to become a welder, devastating Arnold leaving him sexually confused and angry.
 Now in his early twenties, Arnold divides his time between right-wing Christian rallies and late-night truck stops, his life beginning to unravel as he struggles to understand himself. Finally pushed over the edge by his inability to find a hat that fits, Arnold becomes a serial killer, targeting women on the urgings of his invisible friend, a talking cow (played here by Heifer from "Rocko's Modern Life.")


Drugrats: Life Turned Out Shit.

 Tommy Pickles, now in his late twenties, is a dreamer who longs to escape the drudgery of his I.T. career and make something of himself, but who finds solace only in a bottle. His best friend Chuckie is long gone, his inherent fear of the world causing him to spiral into drug addiction and leaving him a crack-addict living in an abandoned building which is about to be demolished by the company owned by Angelica, who is herself now addicted to vicodin and beginning to hallucinate the ghost of her old rival, Susie, who was killed before her music career could take off after her first time using MDMA.
 The twins, Phil and Lil, are the main competition for Tia and Tamera in the niche twin-porn market.


Super Mario: Behind Bars

 Mario is doing fifteen years to life after King Koopa tried to escape during a monologue and Mario, on the advice of an internet hack, beat him to death with a length of pipe, screaming over and over again that he just wanted to go home, he just wanted to go home.
 Unfortunately, Mario got his wish when the mushrooms he'd been taking wore off and he realised he had in fact beaten to death a man in a Barney the Dinosaur costume at an amusement park.