[Opinion] Cartoon Network’s Website Was Deleted. That Should Scare You All.
[Opinion] Cartoon Network’s Website Was Deleted. That Should Scare You All.
Warner Bros. Discovery is deleting some of our most beloved movies and TV shows—and some may be gone forever.
I know most people here will be fine with pirating and most of these shows and movies will not actually be lost. But as this thread proves, even modern shows can be lost. And there are 2 things here I find especially sad:
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As mentioned in the article the CN website had a lot of digital games. I think most of them will be lost. This is something we've seen a lot throughout the history of web based games.
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"I’m more frustrated at the continued removal of online spaces for kids. It leads to them going to media spaces for adults, and that never ends well." from This reddit comment.
Regarding 2, it feels to me as time wears on there are fewer and fewer online spaces in general. I fear it won’t be long before the internet is just a handful of “competing” social media companies and that one outlier group running the “Fediverse” that the propaganda says is the “Dark Web”.
I agree. I may be young but the internet feels like it's being engulfed by the big corpos. The spaces made by different kinds of people seem to be fading away, or suppressed by those major companies.
Regarding point 1, I have not checked but I would not be surprised if Flashpoint has them archived. They have so much. https://flashpointarchive.org/
Even if you're on Mac or Linux, I totally recommend getting a virtual machine running Windows just for this. It's amazing being able to go back and not only play your favorite cartoon network flash games, alongside ones you never knew existed outside of your country, while also being able to play other games outside of that sphere.
Even if you don't like flash games, you can find countless flash animations as well and view them in all their original glory. I know you can find some ones like I think the Ed Edd n' Eddy highschool van What Is Love? animation is in there. That, or I'm thinking a fan series EEnE highschool spin-off intro being there. Regardless, it's absolutely worth checking out.
Edit:
Felt as though I had to share these ancient Internet relics.
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Man, cartoonnetwork.com was the first website I ever frequented. When my family first got an internet connection, I didn't know about search engines, so I would just type things I liked into the url bar, put a ".com" at the end, and hope for the best. Speeds were super slow on our dialup connection, so I'd often have time to make and eat a sandwich while waiting for a flash game to load.
Aw yeah, I remember the days seeing what the president was up to at whitehouse dot com.
David Zaslav will stand by, burning more cash and trashing more titles, only to keep failing, and making our culture—as well as our history—all the poorer for it.
To quote Bugs Bunny, "what a maroon."
I checked because it got briefly mentioned in the article: WBD stock price is down 40% YTD!
I wonder if it will keep crashing until they get bought out by the Mouse for some loose change they found in the fountains at Disney World.
That would make Dot Warner a Disney princess.
Finally, someone to give the Alien queen a run for her money.
Damn
I remember enjoying this ed ed and eddy car crash durby game on their and a teen titans game (not tt go as that is horrible)
When there's trouble you know who to call Teen Titans. From their tower, they can see it all. Teen Titans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL75mtNZ6PA
Edit: Three hours later and I still have this theme song stuck in my head. Thanks a lot. Lol
Everything ends someday. It might be something we thought we’d move past with the digital age but, even digital requires resource input to keep going and that means it can and will end.
This does not surprise me at all. What were they supposed to do? Flash is dead, which broke most of the games on a site like this anyway. And kids, even young ones, go straight to Fortnite level video gaming these days, not flash sites.
It’s sad for those of us who grew up on this kind of thing, but like many other relics of the past the world moves on to something new. The Internet Archive and Flashpoint Archive will museum whatever functions without a server connection and the rest is lost to history, revered in our memories.
It’s just the nature of things. Like how a mere handful of social media websites today replace an internet once flooded with personal websites and small communities. I’m sure the next Cartoon Network sponsored game will just be a Fortnite event or Metaverse room.
Okay but we do have to realize you're talking about all of the articles and videos and everything else just gone.
It does not cost a lot of money to keep a website running. They could have archived the flash videos. They could have put up a big banner that said this website will not receive any more updates but we're keeping this information available to the public for historical purposes.
They could have reached out to archive.org and said hey we want to shut this down but we think people would feel bad about that so how about we'll give you a nice little donation and you guys can put up an archive link?
There are a lot of options other than just destroying something simply because it provides you no value.
Someone in about five years time should buy up the old cartoon ip sitting around somewhere doing nothing and put it on a streaming platform, taking the profits and invest in new cartoon talent making awesome new stuff.
Just saying
Wow. Childhood dreams? Boom. Gone