It's strange and wonderful to have a deep connection to these old cartoons. Like KJ mentioned about Sweden, Ferdinand and others were also shown in Norway every Christmas. I just rewatched it and got that Proustian deep sense of remembering and identification. It felt like I felt a lot like Ferdinand growing up - which might be me projecting, but I do picture myself slumped over a couch at my grandma's place, feeling gently happy that something validates my flower-smelling. Lambert the Sheepish Lion was another cartoon that went deep deep deep (those screams at the end!), but that one ends up telling pretty exactly the opposite story of Ferdinand, and not as comforting.
When I saw these in my childhood, they didn't feel quaint or ancient. They felt part of a continuum, part of the same aesthetic I was fed on through Cartoon Network (Scooby Doo, Flintsones, Jetsons, even though those were made later). I wonder if it's the same now. Thirty years have made them seem very different. Growing up, watching something like Lambert wasn't a choice, it just happened to be on television, which meant that between watching it there could be years (if I ever got to see it again), and the images became ossified in my brain and mingled with my own thoughts and made into something different and big and strange, and eventually blended in with a vague sense of the totality of my childhood. "Grandma + couch + lambert and/or ferdinand" is a pretty good container for what I feel my childhood was. Now I've seen Lambert five times on youtube the last five years and all the mystery has been sapped. So. I don't even know what I'm rambling about here. I didn't mean to go all "IN THE AGE OF GOOGLE", and I'm sure there are plenty of mysteries, but I wonder if...oh my god kill me now.