Remember when the bad guys actually died in cartoons?

I got to thinking about this the other day: throughout my entire lifetime, all the cartoons I have watched that were produced for my generation contained no villain deaths. Back in the day, cartoons like Johnny Quest featured the bad guys snuffing it in almost every episode (save the ones where Dr. Zin was involved). Nowadays, and in my childhood, the enemies hide behind legions of henchmen who are conveniently either robots or some other construct that allows the protagonist to kill them without actually 'killing' anything. Then, in the final confrontation, the villain escapes, though battered. So consider this then: for every superhero/hero, we have an army of masterminds out there all bent on revenge who have not died, but simply gone into hiding. That is a completely unbelievable concept as far as I'm concerned. For example, let's say Spiderman somehow saves the city from Mysterio once again, but of course, he escapes. Now Spiderman has to worry about him coming back again, and again and again. Which is great for the people actually writing the cartoons because they have a ton of 'go to guys' to use as villains without inventing new ones, but as far as realism is concerned, it's laughable. I mean now, you have all of these villains ready to wreak havoc at any second and our hero has to constantly fight them off for his whole lifetime, ultimately making the city no safer than it was before.

Which brings me back to my Johnny Quest example: in Johnny Quest, the villains usually died at the end. True, Dr. Quest never usually directly killed anyone, but the fact remains that the old man in the Turu episode and the keeper of the giant lizards got absolutely killed, definitively. And this forced the writers to actually be creative and come up with some awesome plots and new characters in each new episode. In the rare instance they had nothing, they went back to Dr. Zin, the default bad guy, but like I said, that was a rare occurrence. My whole point is, cartoons have really hit the skids...heck even since I was a kid they have. I mean you would NEVER see a cartoon like Mutant League on anymore.