What's this?  TWO xanga updates in a week's span?  Unprecedented!

When the school semester is over, I usually take the opportunity to do some serious cartoon watching to celebrate.  This week's lineup included selections from G.I. Joe: Season 1.2, X-Men: Vol. 4, Dragonball Z: Season 4, and my all-time favorite, Batman: The Animated Series.  The late 80s and early 90s were a really interesting time in animation and the censorship regulations became pretty strict for fear of cartoons pushing the limits of violence and mature themes.  In Spider-man: The Animated Series, for example, all characters were forbidden to punch each other, so animators were forced to employ more creative ways to stage the fight scenes.  The first U.S. dub of Dragonball Z prohibited any reference or suggestion that characters could die, so they had to use phrases such as "he was sent to another dimension," and whole cities being blown up were justified with lines like "good thing it's a Sunday or those buildings would have been full!"  In most every show, guns were replaced by laser blasters and it was a rare occurrence when somebody actually got shot.

Some shows got away with more than others.  The 90s X-Men Animated Series got away with one explicitly religious episode in which the mutant monk named Nightcrawler engaged in apologetics with the cynical Wolverine.  The 1986 Transformers animated movie traumatized a generation of kids when they killed off the star of the show, Optimus Prime (at least until he was resurrected in future episodes).

I like to find old magazines with articles on these classic cartoons like Starlog, Animation Magazine, and Comics Scene.  Some times you find some really interesting stuff, like this example of a guide the animators used for Batman: The Animated Series to educate their creative team on how to keep the show within the censorship guidelines.  I think it's a hilarious and informative piece of animation history, but it is a little on the risqué side, so I'll just provide a link to it instead of posting it outright:
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y169/adamwinters/btacensors.jpg

The funny thing about the Batman series was that the show pretty much broke every rule on the censorship sheet at some point in it's run. 
Real guns? Check & Check.
People getting shot by real guns? Check.
Smoking? Check.
Strangling?  Check.
Religious themes? Check.
Drug use? Check & Check.
Violence against children?  Check.
Suggestive themes? Check.

As a weekday afternoon and Saturday morning show, Batman pushed the envelope of dramatic storytelling more than just about any other cartoon of its era.  Maybe that's why it is so fondly remembered by it's fans of all ages

Oh my! Fiction just became reality:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090416/ap_on_re_au_an/as_odd_australia_snakes_on_a_plane

Key part of the article:
"the snakes were not found"

I'm not flying again in Australia till they are.