Yeah, if you look at a lot of the stuff people think of as "kids cartoons" like DBZ a lot of it is because the animation age ghetto was stronger then and made a lot of shows like DBZ end up getting played in the younger kids time slots. The result is that now we think of them as "kids shows" not because that's what they were necessarily aimed to be, but rather because that's simply what a lot of us saw while growing up (regardless of how appropriate it might have been).
Ah, this reminds me back when animu was still considered "just another cartoons for kids" back in the day.
We once got fully dubbed
Zenki series on one of the more known channels, in a relatively kid-friendly time of day.
The show, while obviously kid-targeted, was also obviously Japanese. It featured skimpy dressed schoolgirl(s) that seldom got trapped by or otherwise got in precarious situation involving many disgusting demons that were no strangers to using tentacles and slime.
Eventually, they all got brought down by the end of the episode by a giant, hulking kid-turned-loudmouthed-demon in a spectacular fountain of blood.
Good times.
Then again, I remember hearing a story how back in the days when "manga" were just "another comics for kids" someone put Bondage Fairies collection next to your regular X-Men or some such in one of the comic books stores.
Good times.
edit:
As we are talking about old cartoon (kinda) anyone wanna help me out? A long time ago I used to watch this animated movie that was basically this: some nerdy modern-times guy is spirited away in a magic land. This land is governed, I think, by four wizards, either color-coded or N-S-E-W coded or both. One of those wizards is of course the big bad black wizard. One of the more remarkable features was also this gigantic horde of dragons, that were somehow a centerpice of the story. Something about being able to control them or something. IIRC one of the dragons also joined that nerdy guy who during the animation got a group of various characters together, including a halfing, and they proceeded to go on a sort of a quest to defeat that evil wizard. The cartoon ended with a dramatic culling of whole dragon horde via magic flute and the big bad transformed in absolutely bloated three headed dragon/demon-beast/something. IIRC he was defeated in the end. But overall I remember it as pretty dark cartoon, with all but the nerdy guy getting slowly killed off.
I remember finding it once on TvTropes, but lost the bookmark and can't find it again.