Really? I don't watch them so I wouldn't know.

I have little cousins that I watch over some times. There's even like an entire show about a family of ghosts. I'm pretty sure they never explain WHY they're ghosts but still.

http://nyo22.files.wordpress.com/201...man_ghosts.png
http://www.watchcartoononline.com/th...ep-Boo-Sea.jpg

When I grew up and realised Casper was a dead child, it made my childhood seem a lot darker and more painful than I was aware.

We are less strict then they were in the 90's. In the Marvel cartoons on Fox Kids, they had to change the Punisher, Carnage and Blade to make them less violent. In the first DBZ dub with the ocean voice cast, they had to make sure that characters don't die. That's how the whole "The Next Dimension" nonsense started.

LESS strict? Maybe it's just nostalgia then, but beside obvious examples like Spider-Man with the 'no punching and mercy bullets' business I remember the cartoons of my youth and early teens being much more graphic and less child centric. I remember the blood in DBZ, and when characters in Batman TAS got hurt, they'd bleed. I remember Morph dying in X-Men. Etc

About the only examples of modern cartoons that even feel a touch on those originals are Generator Rex (this deals with some complex stuff, albeit in a kid friendly way), Ben 10 Alien Force (not graphic in the presentation but people actually died in this show) and the Justice League and Unlimited series. Pretty much every other western show I've seen has felt horribly watered down in comparison to what they were like in the 90s.

The problem is that you're naming the exceptions, not the rules. Batman used real guns, but the sheer number of shows that used laser blasters (Including military series GI Joe) is just baffling. DBZ's original dub by Ocean was laughable in how watered down it was, and shows like X-Men and Spider-Man had the primary enemies be robots just so that the heroes could inflict harm without actually inflicting harm.

Oh, they were all I watched as a kid. I didn't even realise they were exceptions. Minus the ones I listed though, do we even have exceptions like that these days?

Don't worry. It wasn't until I was an adult and checked out other 90's series that I learned they were the exceptions, either :lol

For these days, there are a few beyond the ones you named. You have...Um...Well, er...Hmm. You know, I don't know. :lol