How did one oddball TV-Y7 cartoon portend a fraying landscape for Western cartoons in the streaming age? What does it have to do with a CEO strategy of cleansing out a repertoire of cartoons?"The Amazing World of Gumball" is one bizarre crossbreed on the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned Cartoon Network. When I compiled The 10 Best Children's Animated Series Of The [Last] Decade, I had zero hesitation deciding on "The Amazing World of Gumball," which ran from 2011 to 2019 on Cartoon Network for six seasons, for its visual eclecticism and comedic minefield. The brainchild of creator Ben Bocquelet, the cartoon revolves around the exploits of the 12-year-old anthropomorphic cat Gumball Watterson and his brother Darwin Watterson (an adopted sibling who originated as a pet goldfish who grew legs). Their environment of Elmore is a wonderland of different mediums. Living in real-life photo-based environments, the 2D Watterson family interact and clash with a medium-blended world: characters comprised of CGI, flash animation, puppetry, or stop-motion. It brandished an out-there aesthetic that made it a companion to its zany contemporaries like "Adventure Time" and "Regular Show." To understand "The Amazing World of Gumball," and its WTF series finale prophetic to a CEO business decision that compromised its future, you need to appreciate its unorthodox form.

The day they shattered the fourth wall

Armed with a witty script, the cartoon encapsulated a range of meta humor. The team also infamously crafted a biting response to the China-animated "Miracle Star" knock-off in the form of an episode where the Wattersons outwit a "copycat" family. But the cartoon reached its apotheosis in its variation of the "no money means literally no animation" act (a trope performed by "Chowder," where the main characters overspend and their world is stripped down to show the live voice actors in their voice booths). In "The Money," Gumball debated his family on whether to "sell out" to a Joyful Burger commercial to escape debt — a critique of commercialist and capitalistic impositions on art.

And then their entire house gets carted off by debt collectors. Suddenly, Gumball and his family are drained of their color. His sister's mouth flaps goes wayward. Darwin devolves into a sloppy doodle. The epiphany hits hard to Gumball: "When you don't have money, your whole world falls apart." Their photo-based neighborhood disintegrates and the details strip away into nothingness. This culminates into a race across the destabilizing landscape: a CGI character convulses, houses become gray and de-render into geometric basics, the CGI bus glitches and throttles out of control, the Wattersons' bodies dissolve into doodles on post-it notes, and their chase becomes a series of storyboards with scratch voices. The world returns to its colorful stability just as the Wattersons sign the commercial contract — while Gumball remains in his doodle form because he has refused.

South Park ... for the kids!

There's a particular quote by Gumball's mother in the 2018 episode "The Parents" during the Trump administration."I guess times [in the '60s] were easier then. If you're a man, and not a minority and more comfortable with the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. How things have changed, huh?" A handful of episodes waved a funhouse mirror to topical events in U.S. and global politics. It really sunk its cartoon fangs into whatever subject matter it tackled. Its memorable lampoons happened toward and during the Trump administration: the generational gap between media illiterate adults and media literate kids (they bitterly sing "stupidity is hashtag trending" in this song), a school election that's an unsubtle satire of the 2016 election (Gumball standing in for Donald Trump and his sister for Hillary Clinton), the existential gloom around climate change, reactionary parents banning video games and books, a Donald Trump-expy mayor scheming to gentrify Elmore to move in rich white human families. Although Elmore is not set in a fictionalized United States, it is a contender for "TV-Y7 South Park" or "The Simpsons for Kids!"