by Catherine M. Harris

Created on: January 23, 2009   Last Updated: January 24, 2009

The Simpsons has been a staple on TV for 20 years and during its run it has been controversial. Its start was on The Tracey Ullman as a cartoon filler, and given that The Tracey Ullman show was for an adult audience, the cartoon was geared to an adult audience. The Simpsons airs in a prime time evening hour, not during the children's morning hours, and does not advertise itself as a children's cartoon.

There is a common misconception about the cartoon film genre that it is a children's form of film entertainment. Cartoon shows and comic books are to a large degree created for children in the present market, however cartooning started out as a satirical art form in the early newspapers. Animation on film dates back to the late 1800s and was a series of cartoon drawings shown on a primitive form of projector. Also popular at the time were flip books, a fun game that people do to this day. The thing about cartooning is that it is an art form that tells a story. Its simple form makes it easy for people with less than stellar drawing ability to create caricatures of people and animals and put in the words they say. Perhaps the most common adult oriented use of cartoons is political satire, found in the editorial sections of newspapers to this day.

The use of cartooning to tell complex and indeed very adult stories has been done longer perhaps than its use for children's entertainment. The book Maus by Art Spiegelman for instance is graphic novel about a Jewish man struggling to survive the Holocaust. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and this novel is by no means intended for children to read.

Early animated film was often risque and some of our beloved cartoon characters were less savoury characters when they first began. Blondie in the Blondie comic strip started in 1930 and she wasn't the lovely housewife she is today - she was a flapper who danced in dance halls. Betty Boop and Fritz the Cat are also examples of comics that were adult oriented (and that became film animation).

Cartoons were run before the main film in the theatres long before television. Our beloved Warner Brothers cartoon characters were also adult entertainment and the ones that are shown from that era on the Saturday morning cartoon time slots have been heavily edited to remove the sexual innuendo. Some you won't even see on television today due to what is now considered to be racist or sexist material, though at the time they were created they were appropriate for adults. World War II saw a series

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