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Do cartoons rot your brain?

Well, yes - but not the ones you'd expect, accoring to Jon Kricfalusi, the Canadian-born creator of the icky-cool cartoon favorite The Ren and Stimpy Show and creator of the upcoming series The Ripping Friends.

Kricfalusi said yesterday that he grew up watching and copying cartoon classics like Bugs Bunny and Popeye - which were written to appeal to both kids and adults - but by the time he broke into the animation world in the early '80s, cartoondom was in danger of being killed off by political correctness.

"For years, I had to work on shows like Care Bears and the Smurfs, where everybody cared so much about each other and they were always hugging," he recalled. "(Those) cartoons were not made by cartoonists; they were made by executives...It resulted in the worst generation of young people ever. I blame those darn cartoons I worked on in the 1980s, and I see this (The Ripping Friends) as my chance to cure this, to help raise a generation of manly men."

The Ripping Friends, for the record, is a rather outrageous cartoon about a foursome of exceedingly macho super heros named Craig, Rip, Slab and Chunk.

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One wonders if a few extra-smurfy hugs would have helped Kricfalusi's disposition somewhat...