I justified it, finally, by working in television. I watched a lot of cartoons, and I read a lot of comics which I justified by growing up to do the same thing. I really love cartoons and things associated with cartoons because they're over-looked. There are a lot of people out there who are trying to get cartoons to be taken more seriously and call it art. To me, that's not important.
Cartoons are cartoons, and they work on their own, by their own standards of excellence.
I don't need to justify them as being more important by some other more serious standard. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Road Runner . I was also a big fan of Droopy by Tex Avery and the Fleisher Brothers' Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons. Of course, Disney features, shorts, and I think the biggest influence as far as my work in animation was Rocky and Bullwinkle . Rocky and Bullwinkle was a cartoon that was very cheap looking, but it worked anyway.