If I had known at the age of five that the Internet would be invented, I never would have bothered to get up at six in the morning to watch Beast Wars or Pokemon. As it happens, I was not a precognitive wunderkind. While this may have something to do with the fact that I would often eat the little rubbery sealant on the back of book pricing tags at the mall, it may also be related to how many shows like Kong: The Animated Series that I watched.

Truth be told, Kong was a little after my time; I was more of a Godzilla connoisseur myself. (Oh, hush Gamera, you know we can never be together!) In the end I had to do this thing everyone called “growing up” and I pretty much missed out on the Kong show entirely except for a couple of reruns I caught on Saturday afternoons. Now, of course, I am an adult, and nobody can tell me not to watch poorly animated, badly plotted children's entertainment! Which is, of course, why I must do it.

Kong, like its main attraction the big blue monkey (Blue? WTF?), is in a way the last of its kind. It snuck onto the small screen around 2001, right before most cartoon-based channels switched entirely to CGI with occasional dashes of the purest nightmare fuel (go watch Flapjack if you don’t understand what I’m talking about.) And while re-watching it purely for the purposes of retrospective and without any sort of giddy man-child glee, I realized there’s a reason shows like Kong went extinct.

The premise is the stuff overblown hyper masculine childhood dreams are made of: this kid with a cool haircut like, connects his brain to this monkey, and then he like controls it or something! Also there’s a guy with a robot hand. (I’m pretty sure that was the exact pitch the show presented to the network. That was it. They didn’t need anything else.) But of course, in the end, it’s a kid’s show. In America. And that means certain things can’t happen. Like Kong snapping tyrannosaur spines, for one thing.

For another thing, it means cheese. Glorious, beautiful cheese. Now when I say cheese, I’m not talking “man-in-a-rubber-suit” cheese. (That shit is so 1950’s.) In these new-fangled modern times, cartoons like Kong are bursting with stale 90’s clichés like absurd transformation sequences, magical DNA, and...smart phones?

Yeah, Kong gets prophetic a lot. One of the spunky young adult male protagonist’s major tools is a “portable PC that can connect to the Net, and has GPS!” Because back in 2000, technology was a marvelous thing and it could make us all heroes if we tried! Or, you know, we could just play Angry Birds. That works too. I guess.

All in all Kong is a nostalgic thrill-ride in the vein of the ancient Hanna-Barbara cartoons of the 70’s. While it overflows with cheese and (of course) gratuitous amounts of street pizza, Kong is still a kitschy bit of fun for anyone with a boring Saturday afternoon to cure.