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This image worked its way into her head as a young child and she considered it mildly traumatic. We were talking about subtly horrifying imagery in cartoons and this prompted me to plumb my own internals and dredge up several instances of this from my younger days. For instance, the deformation of Aaron Herbst in the Batman Beyond episode "Disappearing Inque" -
or whatever the fuck was going on with this episode of The Scooby Doo Show:
I've spent a fair amount of time reading about Elsagate and that whole world of cartoon evil, and while this isn't nearly as overt as an image of Minnie Mouse with a syringe in her stomach, it feels like a similar world of experience - short, terrifying images that make their way into a child's psyche. I've talked to a few people since that initial conversation and every one of them has been able to reference at least one example from their own past. This is interesting to me as a cultural phenomenon and I want to look more into it.
Does anyone here have experience with this sort of sudden shocking imagery in children's cartoons? Do you think inserting this type of thing into children's media was a case of adults not knowing what would make an impression in young kids, or of something more sinister? Maybe some kind of conditioning?