Toon goon

Perhaps the best feeling in the world is waking up late on a Saturday morning. Eggshell light trickles in through the scant slit in the curtains covering your bedroom window. You flex and stretch the muscles in each limb, one at a time, making sure all systems are fully operational. You sigh. There’s no hurry. You’re not working today, there’s nowhere to be, and there’s nothing to do, really, except feed the cat and eat Fruity Pebbles until your stomach feels like a giant sand-filled snow globe.

The second best feeling in the world is flicking on the TV to catch your Saturday morning cartoons.

And there’s a limited shelf life to this particular pleasure, because past a certain point, cartoons seem about as childish as pacifiers and picture books. The feeling starts to creep in once your age hits double digits, and by the time you’re in your teens, you’re horrified that you could ever endure this saccharine-sweet fare. Talking chipmunks and ducks? Cats that swordfight with ghost pirates? What is this, some feverish malaria hallucination?

Oh, but think of how glorious those days were, when a flying dog with a cape was all you needed to get through a morning. That brief window seems increasingly distant as you hit various stages of life -- college, career, family, mid-life crisis, AARP. It’s entirely possible you have young children at the moment, and now Saturday mornings are all about them and their particular viewing habits. Is there any jealousy there? A feeling that you wouldn’t mind swapping places with them for a couple of hours? These are the kinds of questions I ask myself sometimes when I wonder what it would be like to have kids. Then I realize I have the freedom to curse really loudly and drink milk from the carton and I stop wondering.

Cartoons are created for all ages and demographics now; “The Simpsons” injected its turbo juice into that trend. Yet they hold a special appeal for kids, and it’s easy to see why. If adults are all about hard-headed practicalities -- bills, groceries, premium cable packages with special nudie channels -- then children are all about escapism and fantasy. That’s why girls hold tea parties with button-eyed ponies and boys break lamps re-enacting scenes from “Iron Man.”

Animated offerings tap into that mentality because they’re not confined to any real-world rules. Any cockeyed whimsy can serve as a perfectly acceptable plotline. Let’s say you’re staring at stormclouds one listless Sunday and an idea for a story pops into your head: A powerful king, who also happens to be a giant mutant iguana, passes a law in the animal kingdom prohibiting all species from dancing to Billy Joel songs. This is troubling because Billy Joel is extremely popular among most animals, especially manatees, who can’t dance but are obsessed with intricate piano arrangements. Several animal species band together to form a resistance, and attempt to take down the mutant iguana king with a combination of political subterfuge and mixed martial arts, taught to them by a robe-wearing cheetah who’s allergic to waffles and chain smokes Pall Malls.

This couldn’t be a live-action series without some major changes. Animals have difficulty delivering lines since they’re mostly dumb and can’t talk, so instead of an interspecies political movement, you’d have to re-envision that part of the story -- maybe have disparate tribes on a remote island join forces to stop the evil island king, who can still be a mutant but is probably not an iguana. And the martial arts master couldn’t be a cheetah, which is vexing, since in a perfect world all martial arts masters would be cheetahs.

So the whole thing would be one big compromise, a watered-down shadow of your original conception. It’ll be lame. It’ll be weak. It’ll draw a zillion viewers in the premier.

Make it an animated affair, however, and you wouldn’t have to change a thing. You could make it even more outlandish, perhaps throw in a kamikaze pilot who’s also a hard-drinking hippopotamus. Or a general who can’t salute his troops because he’s a Beluga whale.

Two zillion viewers and a line of action figures and bedsheets. That’s my prediction. Only don’t steal my idea, ‘cause I’ll totally sue.

When I really stop to think about it -- which is probably a bad idea, mental health-wise -- the fare I watched on those distant Saturday mornings wasn’t that much crazier than the mutant iguana king premise. There was “Garfield and Friends,” a show about a housecat who eats mutton chops with his hands; “Ducktales,” about a wealthy, monocle-wearing bird who dives daily into a giant bin filled with gold; “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” about reptiles who gobble pizza and stab robots in the neck; and “Talespin,” about a bear who’s a bush pilot running an air cargo freight business. The common theme among all these shows, if they can be said to have one, is that they feature cartoon animals who do things real-world animals can’t, which means the creators were either loaded with psychedelics or they understood children very deeply. Kids love animals and they love adventure. Like chocolate and vanilla (or chocolate and anything), it’s a winning combination.

Talking to various parents, I can tell that not all adults have lost their appreciation for goofy kids’ fare. Some moms and dads are as obsessed with animated princesses and penguins as their offspring, and this is heartening. It means they’re still in touch with something close to their core. People are like Russian nesting dolls -- the older we get, the more layers we add to ourselves, and the more our gooey centers get obfuscated and buried, lost to time. Those of us who retain a kinship with anthropomorphic ducks have a pipeline to those first couple of layers, which for me were calcified during languid Saturday mornings, wrapped in bedsheets, a remote control in hand. Would the heroes in a half-shell defeat the dreaded Shredder? Probably, but I’d follow their journey anyway, submitting myself to a waking, fantastical dream.

Hey, maybe the iguana king is a fire breather! I can smell the licensing rights already.