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There are lots of things like this in childhood. I caught the ep of Dragonball where they fight Frieza for the first time on a communal tv in the lobby of a hotel in Quebec when I was 7, with no context or knowledge abt the show. It felt like the most dramatic thing I'd ever seen
No one growing up today will know the mingled excitement and frustration of turning a tv on at a time of day you haven't bothered to note in the 90s, to find the X-Men cartoon on and find yourself in media res- it was like finding a precious stone
If you wanted to actually follow a show's continuity then you had to make a heroic effort to note its time in the schedule and follow it religiously- a big ask for a child. Even then, you'd miss episodes- I missed the final ever episode of Digimon bcs my sister had swimming class
A great deal of the present infantilisation in the culture I think comes from the effort to recapture the sense of possibility that seemed to inhere in certain children's media when yr a kid, without understanding that it was an effect of what you *didn't* see
They become images of Imagination but adult engagement with them- driven by the desire to 'find out the story' that was once so elusive- ends in nerdish enclyclopaedism, overcompensating to avoid confronting that it no longer satisfies
It's a way of reasserting power over the past- over your childhood powerlessness. I think this may have quite a bit to do with the creation of on-demand streaming. In the process, you end up binding yr imagination within memories of childhood that are inaccessible to Reality
You have to recognise that the sense of awe, the sense of something old and big and mythical are part of your permanent capacity of response. Preserving this into adulthood is abt seeking it out by engaging with what's older and bigger and more mythical than oneself
Children's cartoons are always ultimately going to be 'smaller' than you, so the way to avoid confronting this is to contextualise them within a 'Universe' of children's cartoons to make an ersatz mythology that more or less *simulates* awe thru sheer size (*cough* MCU)
Unfortunately, on-demand streaming also trains ppl out of the 'negative capability' to withstand the unknown without it returning them to childhood powerlessness. To seriously engage with the canon, with philosophy etc, is to be returned to that child at the mercy of the tv guide
