Both, That completely depends on the show but i don’t recall many kids show really coveting themes of death. Mostly just a vague “defeat” which doesn’t happen because they need to escape for another time.
Scooby-doo was clearly about containing.
In the Saturday morning cartoons I grew up with in the 80s and 90s, I feel like the main characters never died, but there were always the NPC types that would fall during battle and you never really knew if they were knocked out or actually dead, because they were like one of dozens of an army or something that all looked the same, so you never know.
In the cartoon movies I grew up with however, there was plenty of actual death. I remember watching Optimus Prime die in the original Transformers movie and I cried my eyes out (I was like 4 or 5 at the time). And let’s not even talk about Watership Down…
I’m not as familiar with cartoon shows from the mid-2000s, but I can say that in Transformers Prime, which aired from 2010 to I think 2014 or 15, they killed off Tranformer characters right from the getgo, and also killed off human characters as well.
The second, but that’s a very upsetting way to describe pokemon.
The latter
Well, the characters were trying to knock them out, because the creators couldn’t show them killing people.
Even in GI Joe where everyone had deadly weapons and their own attack jetski submarine, nobody died.
So it’s not like they always decided knocking out was the best plan, it was just a replacement for killing them.
Batman TAS showed guns, but they used 1940 weapons that couldn’t relate to the current times
I’m convinced this why the foot in the cartoon TMNT were robots instead of people.
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So they are covertly killing them? Like how alcohol in Zelda is milk sorta hehe?
Actually makes sense, cuz the crazy person was liable to mix up the plot and think their team were the baddies and they needed to “save the day”
