Where have all the Heroes gone?

I miss cartoons!! Where did Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors go? What happened to morals at the end of kids shows and theme tunes the rocked out loud? Since when must all cartoons be "dark" to be good? Don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm taking the greats of today for granted, far from it, I thank the sweet Lord everyday for Samurai jack and Batman of the future to name but two. My point however is that there was a time when good cartoons were the staple of a Saturday morning, and now our young are subjected to rehashed "by comity" stories with no soul and no humour, Jesus even He-Man cracked a smile every now and then. For those of us raised on the likes of M.A.S.K. and Ulysses 31 the cold hard fact is, excluding the work of geniuses like Genndy Tartakovsky, the landscape of toon town is a bleak post-apocalyptic nightmare world of lost innocence and the mangled remains of good ideas treated badly, with roaming packs of feral executives foaming at the mouth and trying to tear any remaining meat off the soft underbelly of the sick and shambolic beast that is all that remains of cartoons. Obviously there was a formula to those cartoons of the old scholl as well, the obvious similarities between Orko of He Man and Oon from Jayce and the wheeled warriors, as well as the mandatory Han Solo knock-off make this apparent, but the shows themselves never felt formulaic, they felt if anything like they were made to a recipe with all the care and attention needed to get the proportions right in the context of the show, never becoming clichéd because their use was tailored to the idea of the show not forced in to attract a demographic. Anyone who know anything knows that most of these shows were created as marketing ploys for various toy lines which were created before the shows themselves, however, for me this does more to highlight the fact that even toy making had a more creative and less commercial feel in this great age of children's programming, as even the merchandise had to have a well crafted story in itself! As I sit ranting over the sickness of one of my favorite artforms, I pray that the sickness does not worsen and turn this post into a eulogy, because for all the flaws of the mainstream toonage these days, there is still the glory of Samurai Jack and Hey Arnold! and Invader Zim along with the few other true gems in the catalogue of western cartoons to keep us smiling through these hard times. But I still miss being told there is "a power that comes from deep inside of me..." and the all around craftsmanship from the opening theme to the end credits which was simply a fact in the world of cartoons, not a rare surprise like a golden Dorito. "The more you know...."