What defined life before middle school and the dehumanization that ensued? The glory days of the Disney Afternoon, that’s what. Every day at 3 p.m. (following General Hospital), those two hours of cartoons exemplified ABC afternoons long before Disney executives stopped kidding themselves and just bought the fucking channel. Jaded cynicism aside, these cartoons were a godsend for those whose parents had said "enough Nintendo! Do something productive!" And so, as the 1980s drew to a close, we, the lonely children of the self-serving and negligent Baby Boomer generation found solace in the cheaply drawn corporate dreck of our childhood. But, in the end, wasn’t it wonderful cheaply drawn corporate dreck? The answer: hell, yes.

3:00: DuckTales (1987) – DuckTales was the pioneering Disney knock-off that started your afternoon. Originally pitched as "Disney meets Indiana Jones," DuckTales retained this quality for exactly six episodes, at which point the search for the lost city of gold was completed. Sure, the writers never explicitly condemned the insatiable greed of Scrooge McDuck, and tempered it only with vague nods to the ideals of "hard work" and "family," but that never really mattered. The show was always great, even when the last two seasons resorted to the gimmicky Gizmo Duck to break the monotony of Scrooge hunting for gold or, failing that, swimming in it.

3:30: Chip N’ Dale: Rescue Rangers (1989) – This high-concept show mixed an already popular pair of two-dimensional troublemaking chipmunks with elements of Sherlock Holmes, Murder, She Wrote, and Crocodile Dundee. Maybe it wasn’t as literary, elder-friendly, or reptilian as its non-animated predecessors, but the show was racially diverse. The "gang" included a sweater-wearing fly named Zipper and an Australian Rat named Monterey Jack, and one could hardly argue that the characters were mere shallow stock types. Chip was the serious, dutiful, and resourceful one; Dale, on other hand, was fun-loving and goofy. But at the end of the day, you knew that Chip was the one that got to bang Gadget. I mean, come on.

4:00: Tale Spin (1990) – Now here was an anthropomorphic cartoon that you could learn from. Placing characters from The Jungle Book in the shoes of 1930s Pacific Island supply runners, the stories centered around the sexual tension between the pilot Baloo and the perky but plucky bitch that bought his business, Rebecca. She was voiced by Sally Struthers! What’s more, it also had the adopted Kit Cloudkicker, who taught children that not only was it good to run away and live at an airport with a pilot/bear, but that it is possible to surf in the atmosphere, from an airplane wing, atop a retractable boogie board. The show’s defining moment, however, was the sight of the tiger Shere Khan in a business suit, pounding on his desk, screaming about profits. A bit heavy-handed? Perhaps.

4:30: Darkwing Duck (1991) – Darkwing Duck was the last of the classic Disney Afternoon cartoons. It was your best bet if you wanted to see the triumphant return of DuckTales’ Launchpad McQuack as a superhero/detective’s assistant. If that didn’t hook you, there was always the plethora of villains: the burrowing Moliarty, the watery Liquidator, the electrifying Megavolt, and the earthy Rhoda Dendron. And if you still weren’t happy, Disney caved and reintroduced Gizmo Duck. Sigh…

All great things must come to an end, and for the Disney Afternoon, that end coincided, appropriately enough, with the election of Bill Clinton. The nineties brought such ill-conceived knockoffs as Goof Troop and Aladdin to the Disney Afternoon, but they failed to compare to the ill-conceived knockoffs of the late eighties. By 1992 Disney’s old-fashioned charm seemed obsolete before the avant-garde cartoon chic of the Nicktoons. Of course, Ren & Stimpy and Rocko’s Modern Life were pretty damn good, and Rugrats and Doug were not without their charm, but I, for one, shall never forget the images forever etched in my brain by the early, "classic," Disney Afternoon.