The storylines of both shows were at their very best tolerably boring and were always predictably self-righteous, even when the characters had a glimmer of genuine promise. The situation worsened in the Eighties. The imagination of most consultants seemed to shrink while their total influence over kidvid dramatically increased. No kid ever learned anything of value from these messages. The moral, whether it was the value of cooperation, saving the environment, obeying your parents, or being honest, always stood out like a sore thumb, an alien and awkward intrusion into the program.
Kids can smell hypocrisy and manipulation a mile away.
We all knew to ignore it, just like today's kids will know to ignore the current transparent, phony and simple-minded cartoon series based on William Bennett's Book of Virtues . A great many of the advocates of 'better quality' would probably run screaming in terror if real quality kidvid aired on television. Kids aren't robots who will learn 'values' merely because some Pod Person radiating unreality out of every pore stiffly voices such values. No matter how you add it up, we're basically in favor of more cartoon violence, not less.