Splat Boom Pow! traced the influence of cartoon drawings and animation in the mass media—comic books, cartoons, newspapers, movies, television—on the fine arts. The exhibition examined the roots of fascination with these works, which served as an effective measure of the confluence of art and everyday life. Vast, critical changes in American society have taken place over the last half of the twentieth century. Every significant, social, political, and cultural change of the latter half of the twentieth century have been chronicled and documented both in cartoons and in the work of the artists who have appropriated its iconography, techniques, or methods of production. The exhibition not only was an examination of the history and appropriation at the time, but was as well a review of the myriad changing attitudes and actions surrounding these fundamental alterations in society.