Were the 90s better for kids' shows?

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If you watched 90s episodes of Sesame Street or Arthur or anything else, then you may know what I'm saying.
It seems like the 90s was the last great decade for preschool shows (a clip on Sesame Street was shown where someone was being rude on the phone and the characters on camera gave the rude person the infamous "blowing raspberries" gesture, and Arthur's parents weren't afraid to be strict or harsh for the right reasons.
It seems as though the mid 2000s changed everything.
Shows started becoming more baby like and ditching anything that parents considered harsh (like those examples I mentioned).
Does anyone else agree?

I agree. A lot of parents these days are too sensitive and fussy about what their kids watch. Also everything's racist, so children's TV writers have to tread really carefully to revolve everything around not being racist or sexist etc, which is difficult when certain people get all offended by any little thing.

Well said!

During the 70's and 80's many kid's shows had the "complainer is always wrong" message, where a character goes off to do something different instead of whatever their friends are doing, then they get in trouble, and then they're all like "I should have listened to you guys all along". It was like you could never disagree have an opinion of your own. Unless, of course, the show was about drugs or stealing or some other form of peer pressure. Also the Moral Guardians didn't want their kids to know about death. You couldn't say dead or die, or show it, even when the Aesop of the show was not to do dangerous things.

Sesame Street was an exception, they managed to deal with the real-life death of Mr. Hooper pretty well. But other actors on the show died later and it's like they just vanished.

The 80's and 90's were the golden age for violent saturday morning cartoons.







The PC police would never allow this if it was made today.

I stopped watching Saturday morning cartoons sometime in the late 90s, because they all started getting really lame.

Cartoon Network had some good stuff for a while, though. I really liked Ed, Edd, n Eddy, but CN kind of gave up on it after a few short years =/

I can't really comment on preschool shows, I always felt like I was too old for them. I did watch Mr. Rogers a bit, though. And Blue's Clues was strangely alluring.

I don't think there's a true kids TV show on TV anymore. TV for kids has gone to the wayside.

Yeah, children's shows are yet another thing that was better some decades ago.

Especially if they were local TV productions.

Unfortunately, the hosts of those kid shows (in my case, they would be Marijane Landis, Chief Ora Traynor Halftown, Sally Starr, W. Carter Mebrier, Bill Webber, Stu Kerr, Royal Parker, and Rhea Feiken) are dead and gone.

In the 90's the censorship eased up quite a bit, so a lot of kid's cartoons started having a more "adult" humor, something I found both awesome and shocking. Like The Ren and Stimpy Show and Rocko's Modern Life, although I never thought Ren and Stimpy was really a "kid's" show.

But shocking just for the sake of shocking doesn't make a good show, which is what too many "adult" cartoons do now. It's like all they try to do is be as offensive as humanly possible without doing any of the things that makes a show good or even watchable.