I feel the bony finger of Skeletor

In a strange pop-culture coincidence, we recently finished watching a two-disc compilation of "He-Man" episodes, right around the time Slate magazine ran an essay on one man's reflections upon the same subject.

While I can't offer the same level of depth and insight on the show (I personally love when the writer laments, "The dialogue is tediously expository."), it did get me thinking about what forms of childhood entertainment hold up when you're an adult. I'm sure the answer is "not much."

Sidestepping cartoons for a moment, let's get high brow and ask whether the best pieces of childhood literature can be enjoyed 20 years later. I haven't found any. They're nostaglic, maybe, but not fulfilling. You really start to wonder how you stomached so much angst and overt emotion as a young adult. That said, I am itching to re-read "A Wrinkle in Time," which I hope to actually understand all these decades later.

Now back to cartoons. (Whew.)

Watching He-Man reminded me that cartoons rarely challenged the viewer. I understand now that they were trying sell toys, but I remember staring hypnotized at the screen each day and actually asking my dad to tape episodes I had to miss. But nothing ever really happened in an episode.

The big exception (to me) was Voltron, which had an ongoing plot that even included one of the main characters dying. Of course, it also had the world's most predictable episode structure: Bad guy appears, a Voltron team member tries fighting bad guy solo in a robotic lion, other lions join in, they're SHOCKED to learn that they cannot defeat bad guy with just lions, they turn into Voltron to fight bad guy and are SHOCKED to realize that they will have to form the blazing sword to cut him in half.

Hrm...maybe Voltron's not a good example. Howsabout Robotech, which was challenging to the point that I never understood what the hell was going on. Now that I'm old enough to watch the whole Robotech series on DVD and catch the intricate plot development, I'm not really interested in doing so.

The first cartoon I saw that really stepped up the intellectual stakes was the movie "Wizards," which obviously was meant for an older crowd. I say "obviously" because one of the female characters spends the whole movie topless. But man, that was a good flick.

I was reminded a lot of Wizards this weekend, when we watched "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind." For one, it's a great movie, even better than Wizards (Nausicaa was made in 1984, Wizards in 1977). But what it really showed me is that there's no good excuse for cartoon movies to be engaging without being an intelligent experience for kids.

So what's your big huge favorite cartoon from childhood? Have you gone back and watched it? Did it hold up? What disturbing things did it teach you about your younger self?