I know what you mean about the moral message being dumbed down. Like all the environmental cartons
The Smogies
Captain Planet
Toxic Crusaders
Bucky O'Hare
and so on...
Bucky O'Hare was loaded with morals, in the first episode when the human kid is trying to decide whether or not to help Bucky fight the Toad army (which was actually run by a large computer which used ToadTV to hypnotize the toads into buying - and I quote directly from the show - "Poorly Made, Overpriced useless consumer goods" and enslaving the aniverse (the animals universe) to produce those goods) the following conversation occurs:
Mom: What's the matter? Aren't you enjoying your veggie burger?
Kid: Mom, I have to help someone but it might be risky, I'm not sure if I should do it
Mom: Well some things are so important they have to be done, like making sure the whales survive or stopping nuclear power plants.
Now that's a moral stance for a cartoon to take. Unlike today's cartoons which mostly seem to be based in malls where kids walk around working in the malls to buy stuff in the same mall.
I also liked how in the old environmental cartoons the villains went around polluting, for the sheer joy of polluting.
Interesting side note about the smogies, it was the only cartoon to be named after the villains of the series.
As for anime, it really does just seem to be about fighting everything. Or teaming up with friends (one of whom usually wears googels on their forehead, but rarely over their eyes) to fight things... usually in a swirly background with generic techno music. What really annoys me are the card game based cartoons in which they spend 5 minutes talking about why they laid down the card that they did...
I think the ability to make an animated series on a single computer is probably to blame, back when you had to have Korean slaves draw the cartoons frame by frame you had to be more picky. Plus you got to see a lot more art errors, especially in GI Joe, there's scenes in episodes where the same person will be in both the foreground talking, and in the background standing around.
Catching art errors in old cartoons was half the fun.
