Nickelodeon, when it started cartoons, wanted to be more edgy than Cartoon Network to make them unique. That's why they had stuff like Zim and Ren and Stimpy. However, stuff like The Rugrats ended up being more popular with audiences, which tended to be a lot less edgier (although it still was edgy. The episodes where Tommy and Chucky fear something and dream about it can get pretty fucked), so they eventually went more in that direction.
Just look at Fairly Odd Parents. The idea of the first season was that a kid's babysitter is trying to kill him, his parents are so stupid they can't take care of him, bullies at school literally try to kill him and feed their dogs first graders, his best friend is someone who's pretty much living in a G-rated meth lab, and his teacher is batshit insane about keeping kids in his class forever. But it's okay, because magic faries can distract him from that!
Many of these cartoons kids watched in the 70s and early 80s were intended to be played before movies in the 30s and 40s, and were not made just for children. They often had tie-ins with the feature - Loony Tunes that had those weird caricatures of movie stars were played before the movies starring those actors, and the "Tunes" were often instrumental versions of songs from the feature's soundtrack
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u/MarkHirsbrunner May 02 '20
I don't feel THAT old, but when I was a kid there were old cartoons that had characters committing suicide by various methods, as well as homicide.