At Wit's End

Cartoons No Longer Laughable

By Erma Bombeck

The saddest thing I have read all week is an editorial in a school newspaper by a young girl who deplored the Saturday morning cartoons of the '50s and '60s.

She noted with disgust that every weekend, people

used to spend wasted hours hanging over a bowl of Cheerios watching Hekyll and Jekyll, Wylie Coyote, Top Cat and Mighty Mouse.

"Bullwinkle and Rocky, the flying squirrel, were a couple of bunglers," she wrote, "who kept busy outmaneuvering Boris and Na-

tasha and their phony Russian accents.

"Heroes were insects like Atom Ant, Flicka and Tom Terrific and his wonder dog.

"Did TV executives doubt our intelligence level back then?" she asked. "Did they think there was

about

something challenging or thought-provoking Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo? "They did nothing to raise our intellectual consciousness. Maybe in the future we will progress from the level which we knew.”

WELL, you've progressed. The future is to-

day, and all the animals have grown up. The funny little cat who used to get outsmarted by mice and was always smoking a loaded cigar has been replaced by Fritz the Cat.

Unfortunately, you can't see Fritz. He's X-rated. (The first X-rated cartoon ever.)

Mighty Mouse no longer changes clothes in the sewer and emerges to save towns anymore. His name is Ben and he attacks and kills on command of Willard.

The talking frogs of Disney's world are no longer gentle baritones singing three-part harmony: They, too, are leading men on the silver screen snacking on human flesh.

And, lest we forget the newest star, a vicious snake called Stanley who proves once again that evil triumphs over good.

OUR cartoons today are certainly thought-provoking. Remember when you opened the pages of a book and Spot was chasing a stick?

Today's animals have meaning. In a gentle spoof of children's books, Martin Levin, in the Saturday Review, posed the likely story of Willy, a guppy who was the only boy in a family of 14,000 children.

His father was swallowed by his mother, and the story tells how Willy manages to grow up in a large family of females without developing homosexual tendencies.

DO me a favor, child. Don't worry about my intellectual consciousness. Already I have been raised to such glorious heights that I may be sick to my stomach.

If I am to spend my life in this world (which is sometimes less than perfect), let it be with a porpoise who is smarter than my kids, Gentle Ben, a live-in bear, and an eagle who gets airsick. Leave me something less than real and more than fantasy.

As for challenges. It's enough for me to wonder if Lassie is going to make it over that fence every week.