Tartakovsky - I have a

Tartakovsky - I have a couple of shameful admissions to make here.

First - I have almost no nostalgia for the Saturday Morning Cartoons - the stuff people my age (and not much younger) used to watch every weekend morning. (Or, for that matter, almost any other TV from the seventies). The nadir, of course, was the endless parade of wretched Hannah-Barbera cartoons of the sixties through the eighties - artless, witless, pointless drivel that can be summed up by saying that "Scooby Doo" was the best of the lot, and I even hated that with a passion by age ten or so. Flat, hackneyed animation, interchangeable story lines and shrill, dull characters that made Barney the Dinosaur seem relatively engaging (then and now) - by the time they inflicted Hong Kong Phooey and Wacky Races and Scrappy Doo on us, I'd learned the joy of playing outside on Saturday mornings, never to return.

Perhaps it was the style of animation; a lot of the old Tex Avery Warner Brothers' animated shorts weren't a whole lot better in terms of story, but their animation was relatively glorious, and forgave a lot of writing sins (and sometimes the writing wasn't bad, either). But after about the age of eight, I pretty much hated every single cartoon.

The new wave of cartoons hasn't done much more for me, either. I love The Simpsons, of course - and I've seen maybe twenty episodes in all the years the show's been on. As to most of the others; I hated, Hated, HATed Ren and Stimpy, and the occasional clever moment in Spongebob Squarepants can't quite get over the show's lousy animation and twenty-something fratboy mien. Still, they're all works of art compared to the rest of the dreck you find on the Cartoon Network - garbage like the execrable Hey Arnold, the putrid filler like Cow and Chicken or CatDog, and the vile Ed, Edd and Eddie, all of which vie for space with the endless bilge-scrapings of from the Hannah-Barbera vault (and, Good Lord, they've even exhumed Captain Caveman, heaven help us).

And yet, just when I'm about to block the Cartoon Network from my TV, along comes Genndy Tartakovsky.

Dexter's Laboratory and The PowerPuff Girls, are nearly alone among recent cartoons in that they don't fill me with a desire to find those responsible and have them hewn down on the street - they're actually clever enough that they don't make me bitterly regret the time I waste watching them. They're clever, full of in-jokes that keep me laughing along with (and even ahead of) the kids, and genuinely fun to watch.

Perhaps best of all, though, is Samurai Jack. It's drawn in the same flat, headache-inducing style that all cartoons of the last 40 years have shared (except the Disney film epics and their video spinoffs), but there's a cleverness about all three of them that make me ignore it. And Samurai Jack is best of all; they mix very clever action and some fascinating post-Matrix-style animation style with some incredibly literate, engrossing story lines. Last night, for example, was a futurized telling of the story of the Battle of Thermopylae (Spartan king Leonidas and his 300 heroes who died to a man holding off the Persians in antiquity). Simultaneously wierd, styllized, funny and literate, it's the first time I've sat still for a half hour of cartoon since...

...well, since I was eight, watching the Saturday morning cartoons.