Flashback to a twisted childhood

Ed. note: This did not run this week. Instead of losing it, however, I figured I'd post it online.

OLD TOWN — This column is brought to you today by the letter E and the number 9.
Childhood memories can be fickle things sometimes. Little things, like trips to the zoo or little league baseball, are remembered as being a lot more important than they were. Cartoons and children shows, meanwhile, are somehow remembered as being so much better than you originally thought too.
It was a notion that hit me like Stretch Armstrong slapping me across the face the other day as I watched episodes from the first season of Fraggle Rock on DVD. I remembered that show being one of my favorites growing up, and I thought watching them again I’d get a good laugh out of it.
Instead, I wondered how my generation made it to adulthood without any semblance of sanity remaining after watching these shows— and how I never noticed until now how the Fraggles must have been located in Minnesota given their thick Fargo-styled accent.
I was seriously concerned. I kept asking myself, “What did I learn watching my childhood TV shows?” This thought flooded my mind as I kept watched those goofy looking puppets bounce along the screen during the pilot episode of Fraggle Rock. It was supposed to be a show about world peace. That’s what the DVD box stated, at least. I’m not sure if that was what anyone got from it though.
It appeared that the show taught me only to eat construction pilings and to swing from vines from one cave to the next with no consequences whatsoever when you crashed against the far wall of the cave other than a nasty case of being cross-eyed.
Oh, that, and to always take advice from a singing trash heap.
Add to that, I grew up on cartoons like G.I. Joe, Voltron, Thundercats, He-Man and that strange show Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers (I always was the red one when my friends and I played Power Rangers on the playground) — shows that basically coupled fantasy-like battles with teamwork (and sadly, overly-tight clothing). At least there were those public service announcements at the end of G.I. Joe episodes telling kids not to play next to downed power lines and don’t drink poison that taught me something useful or those hours in front of the TV as a child may have been a complete waste.
Granted not all the cartoons growing up were as strange as this. There were truly educational shows like Sesame Street that went a long way to teaching us about our ABCs, numbers and crabby people only live in garbage cans.
The cartoons helped keep us innocent as children as well. They shielded us from the troubles our parents were going through, like Cold War fears, tough economic times and those 1980 trends that would have seriously stunted our mental growth.
However, I always thought I got more from all those hours of TV cartoons than just a good laugh and getting the Fraggle Rock theme song stuck in my head. After watching the show again 20 years later, I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe I’m wrong.
Then again, I did make it out of the 1980s with only good memories and few mental scars. So maybe the shows did their job after all.
Now if I could only get the Fraggle Rock theme song from getting stuck in my head again.
“Dance your cares away/Worries for another day/Let the music play/Down on Fraggle Rock.”