Adult Swim's cartoons are designed to shock and awe us, there here to use adult related humor to make us laugh. They were created for that purpose alone. What shocked me about toons like from Disney was that being designed for children, it's amazing at what was so "dark" about some of their content.
Tale Spin had a character actually lined up for a firing squad, Darkwing Duck has someone sell his soul to a an animated version of Satan, hell in Pokemon the main character DIED and was a ghost during an episode and Pokemon is about as tame as anime as you can get.
The trouble is older cartoons were able to get away with more due to their child like nature thanks to the fact we didn't have so many anal restrictions and guidelines. The cartoon "The Tick" was about as adult as you can get, half the jokes in there are more along the lines of Family Guy level weird humor then kiddie friendly.
Alot of toons are adapting anime-esque styles into their shows like Witch, Totally Spies, Teen Titans, and even The Batman. What's nice about Foster's is that it not only is incporating an entirely new way of making a TV series, an original storyline (something I still haven't seen for a long ass time).
But most importantly it has SHARP writing, it has powerful enough dialouge, and vareity in humor. Very few modern day toons that I have seen have been truly original and witty in their designs of the story, characters, and dialouge. The only ones that have come to mind are Foster's and Kim Possible.
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