9- Antonio L: A Child's Gold Mine, AKA, The Prime Era of CN and Nick

 A Child's Gold Mine, AKA, The Prime Era of CN and Nick

My childhood wasn’t filled with JUST cartoons, I’d watch shows like CSI, CSI: Miami, NCIS (shows that follow this scheme, usually when my parents watched them) but I wouldn’t call them the shows I’d mainly watch.

I spent a majority of my time as a kid watching Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, both of which were the two main networks with lots of recognition about 10 years ago (both kinda fell off though). But enough background, time to see if anyone can relate with me based on their favorite childhood shows.

I’ll start off with the older shows that aired on Cartoon Network like “Dude, What Would Happen”, “Destroy, Build, Destroy”, and “The Hole In The Wall (though I kinda didn’t feel like mentioning game shows, like BrainSurge on Nickelodeon). Right next to the occasional rerun CN aired, they tossed in more reruns in the form of the shows I just mentioned. All were very similar, the way this was done was through destruction, usually of everything surrounding the participants in the shows.

If I had to remember all the cartoons I’ve seen on CN, that I actually enjoyed watching, they would be “Codename: Kids Next Door”, “Camp Lazlo”, ”Chowder” “The Amazing World of Gumball”, “Regular Show”, “Adventure Time”, all the seasons of Total Drama, a lot of seasons of Beyblade, “Over the Garden Wall”, “Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated”, and “What’s New Scooby Doo.”

But CN isn’t that simple, they also have another network called Boomerang, which is full of their older shows that have stopped airing over the years like “Teen Titans”, “Samurai Jack”, “Johnny Bravo”, and other old shows that I can’t remember. All I remember though is the Friday and Saturday nights I spent as a 9 year old watching the old episodes of Teen Titans and actually noticing the large distance between how cartoons were made 10 years apart from each other. Nickelodeon also has something similar to this, that being NickToons, but their choices of what older shows to air are very questionable nowadays. 

Notice how I’ve said all of this, and I haven’t gotten to Nickelodeon yet, and that’s because I realized as I’m writing this that the shows they aired weren’t that significant like “Sanjay And Craig”, “Fairly Odd Parents (the later seasons), and the multiple live-action shows Nick tried to gets people’s attention with, not saying all of them were bad, like “Drake and Josh” and “iCarly”, but the later ones never made me want to watch Nickelodeon, also because the majority of Nick’s airing time was spent towards showing old episodes of Spongebob. 

There are still a choice few that were good on Nick though, like “My Life As A Teenage Robot”, “Three Delivery”, “El Tigre: The Adventures Of Manny Rivera”, “Danny Phantom”, “Jimmy Neutron”, “Back In The Barnyard”,  “Avatar: The Last Airbender”, and “Mighty B”, though most of these I remember watching with my sister when I was like 5.

I’d like to go onto how Disney Channel and DisneyXD have better shows compared to Nick, both cartoon and sitcom types, but I’m just going to cut it off here. Word before I go I do acknowledge how many shows I’ve listed and probably assumed I just Googled these shows, but just believe that I sat in front of a TV a lot after school before. 

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