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by CivBase 936 days ago
> While it looks and feels like a children’s show, Salad Fingers does not conform to the norms of children’s television.

What part of Salad Fingers could the author possibly be referring to that "looks and feels like a children's show"? Every part of it - colors, character designs, animation, voices, music, story subject matter, everything - is designed to be extremely discomforting.

5 comments

> What part of Salad Fingers could the author possibly be referring to that "looks and feels like a children's show"?

Between the Hays Code (1968) and the Simpsons (1989), most Americans had no exposure to adult animation. So even in 2004, for a subsantial number of adults, animation meant children's television.

Also, a lot of 90s kids' television played with the boundaries of what is and isn't disturbing.

“Courage, the cowardly dog” was horrifying.
I was looking for someone to mention this. When I saw the Ramses scene for the first time, it scared the living shit out of me for some reason. Just something about him slowly approaching from the distance was absolutely terrifying
I was thinking of that and Rocco's Modern World.
The episode where Rocco sits in his bosses chair is burned indelibly into my brain since I saw that as a child. Real fever-dream material.
♫ The man in gauze, the man in gauze. ♫
That baffles me as well. Nothing about Salad Fingers gives that vibe to me. Does the author also think that Akira looks and feels like a children’s show?

There were other shows that went for that vibe only to subvert it (happy tree friends or what it was called, I was not a fan of it at all), but Salad Fingers is not that.

Very unimaginative adults believe that all cartoons are for children.
Bear in mind that "children's" shows like Ren & Stimpy were still fresh in people's minds when Salad Fingers appeared.
It is simply that it is a cartoon, and as we all know, cartoons are only made for children.