Toon

Toon is an abbreviation of "cartoon". It is a popular way to refer to a cartoon or animated character.

All Toons live in another dimension known as the “Tooniverse,” and the only way into it from the real world is Toontown, an animated city next to Los Angeles where most Toons in the Tooniverse live.

All Toons were put in danger when Judge Doom (a crazy Toon disguised as a real human) planned on destroying Toontown (by using Dip) for commercial trade and a proposed freeway. All Toons were almost completely wiped out until Doom’s plans were stopped by Eddie Valiant, along with Jessica and Roger Rabbit.

Toon Biology and Features
Most Toons tend to have exaggerated, usually anthropomorphic, appearances based on some real animal or object. Some Toons, if intended to look like a human, often have a grossly caricatured appearance (e.g., South Park, The Simpsons). Other Toons (e.g., Snow White) tend to have a really realistic human look. Most Toons also have common physical features (e.g., four fingered hands, floating eyes and eyebrows)

Almost all Toons (depending on their personality) have a innate sense of comedic timing (e.g., Bonkers D. Bobcat). Most Toons also have (also depending on their personality) an intense focus on a single-minded goal, such as hunting (e.g., Elmer Fudd), catching prey (e.g., Sylvester the Cat, Wiley E. Coyote, Humphrey the Bear, Tom of Tom & Jerry), having selfish needs (e.g., Bloo), or capturing the object of one's romantic feelings (e.g., Pepé Le Pew, Johnny Bravo), generally with comedic results.

Most Toons (mostly because of them being from another universe) usually disregard the physical laws that govern the real universe when traveling inside the real world (and a reciprocal disregard of those laws for them). All Toons are also almost completely immune to any serious injury (e.g., being crushed, shot, decapitated, burned, stretched, etc.). This is especially seen in Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, Tom and Jerry, and SpongeBob SquarePants (Who Framed Roger Rabbit exploits this common feature by making Toon characters explicitly nearly indestructible). The only way to actually “kill” a Toon is to dip it in “Dip” (though Eddie Valiant defeated the Doom’s weasels by making them laugh to death).

Some Toons also have the ability to produce certain things to show feelings and emotions (e.g., hearts floating over heads when in love, explosions in eye pupils and/or steam shooting out of ears when angry, stars or birds orbiting heads after spinning around and/or getting smashed). Comic strips are produced by photographing Toon characters. Comic book Toon characters (e.g., Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes) speak in word balloons which appear above their heads whenever they talk.

Toons also never age (e.g., Bart Simpson, Lisa Simpson and Maggie Simpson). Many theatrical shorts and comic strips have characters in both present day and moments of history, and in both examples they don't appear to have ages.

Types of Toons
Some Toons are CGI (Buzz Lightyear, Shrek). Not that much different from traditional animated or anime Toons, and are called "Digital Toons" (or "Digis" for short).

Origins
The origin of the word probably was started by the name of the Looney Tunes series of animated shorts by Warner Brothers (though the spelling is different). It was first used in the 1981 Gary K. Wolf novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? and its film adaptation Who Framed Roger Rabbit. These two works created and established the Toon Noir sub-genre, which features toons and non-toon humans living together, each playing by their own set of physics. The small sub-genre also includes Disney's Raw Toonage, Bonkers, and House of Mouse and Warner Brothers' Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, and Freakazoid cartoon series and the films Cool World (1992) (where Toons are called "Doodles"), The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (2000), and Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), and also the video games Go! Go! Hypergrind, Toonstruck, and the MMORPG Toontown Online.

Other Uses
Toon is often used by animation fans (mainly from the English speaking world) to distinguish characters from those in Japanese anime, even if the latter features comedic "funny animal" type characters (e.g., Doraemon). The English fandom jargon 'hentai' also typically excludes toons.

'Toon' is also a terminology used by players of massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) to describe ones character or avatar within the game. The term is believed to be used again as a shortened form of cartoon, used as the character in the game is often an animated representation of themselves, or a 'cartoon' version. This is despite the fact that the term 'avatar,' a more literally accurate term, had already been in widespread use before 'toon' rose to prevalence.