There's colourful cartoons that are slowly fading

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Hello everyone,

From the TV series Abandoned Engineering, Season 7, Episode 9.

This is how the episode begins:

"In the United States an eerie relic festers in the backwoods of Arkansas. There's colourful cartoons that are slowly fading. It's almost like you can hear the children laughing from like 20 years ago."

It is about Dogpatch USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dogpatch_USA&oldi...

The first part of the episode is about the history of this park.

What does the sentence in question mean in this particular context?

I asked this question on another forum and a native English speaker provided some answers, but because some things are still unclear to me I'd like to hear more opinions.

The main problem for me is that I can't understand why the speaker says "There's colourful cartoons that are slowly fading" when the screen doesn't show any colourful cartoons or cartoon characters at all.

Here you can see the relevant screenshots:

https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/theres-colourful-car...

Thank you.

Responses

3 +2

{it is a metaphor}

Michael Sarni

Discussion

José Patrício Dec 17, 2022: For me, two interpretations: 1. The cartoons are fading because they are getting old or 2. they are subjectively fading for us because of the habituation. Certainly, it has happened to everybody to be hearing a music and gradually our spirit grows in abstraction and we hear it increasingly less.
Mikhail Korolev (asker) Dec 17, 2022: I must add that I've watched the whole relevant part of the episode and still don't understand the sentence in question. Yes, there were cartoon characters, as Wikipedia says, ( Li'l Abner comic-strip characters would roam the park and perform skits for the patrons.), but they were real people.