h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'd like to first suggest that all Good Old Days talks must be relative to the writer's age.
I'm a 16 year old guy and I consider the Good Old Days to be epitomised by one film: Digimon the Movie (2001). These were the times when you could have an evil thingy destroying the web and launching nuclear missiles at Japan and it was still a children's show. They destroyed the second enemy using spam email. WARNING: the preceding bit contained spoilers.
Hundreds of fans remember it as the "one with Terriermon and Kids in America/ All Star in". It was one of the greatest films ever made and has a childlike naivety to it that makes it timeless.
This is probably rosetinted as it has numerous flaws, such as the dialogue, how many bad jokes can there be in a film, but as the film progresses the combination of bad jokes, bad dialogue, ridiculous plot and shapechanging monsters creates an air unlike any other, pure, unrefined nostalgia.
I'm a Children's tv junkie and i need help.
In a final comparitive note: Modern cartoons. These bland plotless featureless domains seem deprived of what made my generation what it is today. This mystical magical ingredient is epitomised in the most ridiculous line of Digimon's time. "Look honey, there's a wild elephant going on a rampage through the city. Isn't that nice."

I'm with you on the cartoon front, Timdiana, although I'm considerably older than 16 with kids of my own.

My own kids - both under 7 - obviously love Pixar and Bob the Builder and Nemo and all his CGI chums, but they also love the cartoons I used to watch as a child, such as Scooby Doo and Wacky Races.

But the strangest thing is how much they love really old stuff - Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, classic Goofy. Some of these cartoons are more than 50 years old but there's something about them - their unhinged nature and the unfettered violence - that has them rapt.

There's a wit and irreverence that you just don't get in modern cartoons. Of course there is also smoking and dubious xenophobia, of the sort that wouldn't be allowed today, but these are the cartoons they watch and rewatch.