I suppose this is as good a point as any for me to wonder what happened to that second 'Golden Age' of animation we had back about 15 years ago. It was weird. Back in the early to mid 90's it was almost like nobody could make a bad show if they tried (I'm sure people will rush to point out examples I've forgotten), but generally speaking, nearly everything Disney, Warner and Nick put out from about 89 to 94, and later in some cases, ranged from good to inspired. And let's not forget The Simpsons.

The Wild Thornberry's, first airing in 1998, is a classic example of what started coming out when those heady days were over. There were still plenty of decent shows about in the late 90's - hell, in the mid 80's they would have been ground-breaking shows - but Catdog and Wild Thornberrys were missing something that Animaniacs, Rocko's Modern Life or The Critic had.

By the turn of century something else which had been bubbling under was now out in the open - TV cartoons aimed totally at adults. So my little thesis, I guess, is this. In the late 80's it suddenly became cool for adults to admit they liked cartoons again, and a suddenly invigorated bunch of writers started putting out stuff which were 'officially' kids shows, but which made no bones about having a track for adults. Or maybe they were adult shows you could play to kids. It doesn't much matter. But by the late 90's the two things were starting to go their own ways. If you wanted to stick a pin in a show to 'blame' for that, I'm thinking it would have to be 'South Park' in 1997.

Now we have shows which make no effort to have a kid's track at all - and sometimes they work, like 'Aqua Teen Hunger Force' - but more often they're lacking something. Maybe the self-restraint and standards that a non-adult rating required. Whatever the case, to me, people need to make shows that meld the adult and the kid-friendly again. Would that recapture anything? I dunno. Maybe the early 90's were like Woodstock. It ain't gonna happen again.

But in any case, after that incredibly long intro - 'Wild Thornberrys' is an example of that process at work. After 'Rocko' finished , Nick gradually started taking the adult humour out of their shows, and by the time of Wild Thornberrys there wasn't really anything left except for kids. Which isn't the end of the world. There are still some kids-only shows I love, but they have to be damn exceptional. Thornberry's isn't. It's just
fairly good.

Well, what is there to say that isn't in the profile? The family wander about the place in their motorhome, making nature documentaries. Youngest daughter Eliza can do a Dr Doolittle and talk to animals. Younger 'brother' Donnie looks like he crawled out of a feral version of 'Rugrats' (actually the whole cast must have been designed by the same character designers as Rugrats, and frankly I find them nearly as ugly). Darwin is a chimp who can talk to Eliza. Marianne is a 16 year-old valley girl who injects some welcome tension into proceedings with her active dis-interest in her family's nature infatuation. Harebrained father Nigel is voiced by Tim Curry, and to my mind sounds rather silly (I mean silly in a not good way). He seems to have escaped from the British Raj in a time machine. Mother is basically the straight man most of the time.

There's nothing terribly wrong with this show. Actually the overall concept is quite clever. There's probably some antecedant to it, but I can't remember what. 'Daktari', perhaps? I really don't like the character designs, but that's a personal thing. Its problem is simply that it's not terribly good , either. The humour is almost never laugh-out-loud funny. Actually, a lot of the time it's just not funny at all. It's not like lines fall flat. It's more like they just don't exist. I think you're supposed to get sucked into the characters and their adventures, but unfortunately there's nothing remarkably memorable about the characters. So you have a decently written show that just isn't very funny, and is too silly to be an adventure series. And to cap it off, has no adult track or jokes for the grown ups. This is a show which you'd put on for your kids, not watch with them.

Not bad, Nick, but pale beside what you were doing only a handful of years earlier.