As I child, I believed that cartoons were real. They were on the television and at that age I naturally believed everything on it had to be real. I never thought anything of it, I assumed it was common knowledge as a child that they were real. It wasn’t until an incident that caused me slight embarrassment and a realization that changed how I looked at them that I left that part of my childhood behind in believing cartoons were real.
When I was nine years old I watched shows such as “Scooby-Doo”, “Looney Tunes”, and other various cartoons. I had seen the movie “Space Jam” where Michael Jordan was pulled through a golf hole to train with Looney tune characters to defeat aliens in basketball from taking over their home. After watching it I was convinced that cartoon characters were in fact real, but just hidden somewhere. So I figured all I had to do was fit some sort of criteria to be in their world.
As my struggle to be accepted into the hidden world of the cartoon characters continued, I figured all I had to do was pay attention to cartoons and I’d find out what I would need to be able to get in. As I was watching the cartoons more closely, I began to realize that there was something different between the characters and me. The Scooby-Doo characters had black outlines on their bodies, which was basically the barriers between the colors. To me, it appeared as if they were holding all their colors on their bodies and keeping them from spilling out. I looked around my arms and in between my fingers confused as to why I didn’t have any black outlines like the characters. I worried that I was some sort of oddity from other people like the cartoons. I did not realize how my family and other actual human beings didn’t have these black outlines.
One day, I was at my grandparent’s house and I was watching the cartoon “Scooby-Doo”. After it was over I ran over to my grandparent’s room and opened up their desk looking for a special tool that would make me, what I...