My kids watch everything. But we never had the opportunity to show them real cartoons. My kids have sampled the works of Jay Ward, Tex Avery, Walt Disney Productions, Hanna-Barbera, Harvey Cartoons, Max Fleisher, and of course Warner Bros. Productions and they couldn't leave the TV.
My son asked me why I never let him see the good stuff before.
Quality never dies. Neither do royalties.
Many good cartoons have lapsed into the public domain because their original terms of copyright were never renewed. Unfortunately, the omnipresent cheap DVD's one sees of them tend to be hit-or-miss based upon the quality of the film prints the vendors had on hand. Some look like they were made from a decent 16mm print; others look they were made from a crummy Super 8 print that was put through a washing machine.
One frustrating aspect of this is that it's hard to judge whether a particular work was transferred from a good or bad print compared with what's out there. Some works exist in excellent form, and so a faded or scratchy copy would only be a poor excuse for the original. Other works, however, no longer exist in anything close to a pristine form. The copy that somebody found in the attic may be the only copy that still exists.