Entertainment before the Internet: Fewer choices, better qualities!

Daily writing prompt

Do you remember life before the internet?

View all responses

(The credit of the title image of this post: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/where_on_earth_is_carmen_sandiego/s01/e02)

By the time I was born, the Internet had been frequently used among urban residents in my home country, and the regime had not erected that famous obnoxious firewall to block all overseas information. So, I cannot tell you what life was like before the Internet. I spent my childhood in the Web 1.0 era, i.e., one could only read texts and low-quality images on webpages without interacting with a website. Before my school age, most multimedia entertainment still relied on television. There were not many choices on TV in a developing, authoritarian country (even today, although there are hundreds of TV channels in this country, vastly most are repeating the same forms of programmes and news or anti-West propaganda every day). However, a few programmes introduced highly quality cartoons from the US, which gave me much more entertainment than those handsome Internet stars on Youtube, TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. During those years, the communist government in my country was still ambitious to integrate into human civilisation and wished its citizens to understand more about the outside world.

The title image of this post is a poster of Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?, one of the first American animations I watched on TV at 6 PM every day. My curiosity about different countries and cultures started here. The stories introduced the most famous cultural heritages on all continents and also the cultures in related countries. The sister-and-brother pair in this animation were 14 and 18 years old in my memory; I saw them as “old adults” as I was only 5 when this animation was broadcast in my country.

Another impressive one was Duck Tales. It was the first time I saw those ducks in an animation. Before that, I had read the comic magazine Mickey Mouse only. That was one of the very few overseas media permitted by the government. After seeing those ducks on static media for two years, I was amazed to see them in an animation!

A rather extraordinary thing in Duck Tales was Scrooge, instead of Donald, was the hero. Scrooge McDuck was my inspiration and idol purely because I admired his “Money Bin” and wanted to swim in the “sea of money”.

In addition to these two subjectively impressive animations, there were at least 20 other animations, most of which were produced in the US, broadcast on that TV program. They are eternal childhood memory among my peers in my country. Unlike the short videos on TikTok and Snapchat, and Youtubers today, these 90s cartoons impressed and enlightened us with the characters and personalities of the heroes instead of merely showing off the cute faces of young guys and girls, promoting funny guys in love-hunting or ridiculing Asian males. At least, the characters in these cartoons carved their memorable images in our brains, not merely appearing as a crowd of “handsome guys” or “hot girls” having cute faces with similar geometrical features.