Well, what happened to spongebob was that all the original writers had either quit or retired. And these new writers were probably trained to write material with jokes and humor that call out to kids even younger than the audience spongebob used to appease...or something.
To be honest, I find cartoons to be better than anime. I like anime, but I don't sit and watch 90-500 episodes of cartoons just to enjoy them XD I think the mass media should focus more on cartoons, because I'm tired of seeing masterpieces like Ben 10 or Teen Titans getting ruined by crappy...
Huh. That's...actually pretty depressing. No wonder Nick didn't give spongebob the boot yet. And now that I think about it, there WAS a lot of powerpuff girl lunch boxes or Dexter's Lab cups they used to commercialize back then. I mean, there might be some that don't focus on selling...
As a child, there wasn't a lot for me to do. And being a boy that hated going outside and had beat Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Red/Yugioh: The Sacred Cards five thousand times, the only thing TO do was just sit down in front of the TV and watch Cartoon Network! Of course, Nickelodeon was cool too...