In the Saturday morning cartoons I grew up with in the 80s and 90s, I feel like the main characters never died, but there were always the NPC types that would fall during battle and you never really knew if they were knocked out or actually dead, because they were like one of dozens of an army or something that all looked the same, so you never know.
In the cartoon movies I grew up with however, there was plenty of actual death. I remember watching Optimus Prime die in the original Transformers movie and I cried my eyes out (I was like 4 or 5 at the time). And let’s not even talk about Watership Down…
I’m not as familiar with cartoon shows from the mid-2000s, but I can say that in Transformers Prime, which aired from 2010 to I think 2014 or 15, they killed off Tranformer characters right from the getgo, and also killed off human characters as well.
In the Saturday morning cartoons I grew up with in the 80s and 90s, I feel like the main characters never died, but there were always the NPC types that would fall during battle and you never really knew if they were knocked out or actually dead, because they were like one of dozens of an army or something that all looked the same, so you never know.
In the cartoon movies I grew up with however, there was plenty of actual death. I remember watching Optimus Prime die in the original Transformers movie and I cried my eyes out (I was like 4 or 5 at the time). And let’s not even talk about Watership Down…
I’m not as familiar with cartoon shows from the mid-2000s, but I can say that in Transformers Prime, which aired from 2010 to I think 2014 or 15, they killed off Tranformer characters right from the getgo, and also killed off human characters as well.