I'm sure those of you with a childhood have watched the old Cartoon Network show Ed, Edd and Eddy. It was a cartoon centered around three similarly-named kids called Ed, Edd and Eddy who lived in a col de sac with some other kids. Now I know there are a lot of theories out there about the kids in the show being trapped in purgatory and what not, but this is a different theory, the totally legit one.
Have you ever noticed that you never really see any adults in the show? How about the fact that they rarely ever leave the col de sac except for school and maybe some other things? Still, all of that seems to be relatively close to the col de sac that they seem to cling to. The truth is that it wasn't a very large town to begin with, as there were only a few houses, a school and maybe like one or two stores. Well that was just what they aired. In truthful truth, the town was actually quite large until a nuclear war happened that destroyed most of it.
It was a Saturday afternoon when the bombs fell and most of the adults were all over town, shopping and other business, leaving quite a few of the children, the main characters, alone in the col de sac. There was also a crazy old janitor cleaning up the school at the time, but nobody knows what happened to him. Most of the town's population died when the place was nuked except the kids who were at home, who were mutated by the high levels of radiation coming off the ruined buildings in the worst off parts of town. This caused mental retardation in Ed, Edd's hat to be fused with his head and Eddy to shrink. I think you can put together what happened to everyone else in the col de sac yourself.
Trying to cope with the loss of all of their families, the children learned how to make methamphetamine to which they all became addicted. They did eventually quit when they ran out of shit to make meth with, but the mental affects stayed, as everyone was plagued with crackhead hallucinations that lead them all to believe that their families were still alive and their teachers still taught the school and what not. The rest of the world around the col de sac was a nuclear wasteland, but the kids thought nothing of it and that everything was normal and that their lives were just fine.
"How do you know this?" you may ask. Well, I used to be a writer for Cartoon Network and they even tasked me with writing the pilot for Ed, Edd and Eddy. I originally wrote the first episode to tell the story of the nuclear apocalypse and their meth addiction crackhead hallucinations, but they were disturbed by it and immediately had me fired and admitted to an insane asylum. That didn't work out, however, because I'm too awesome ... and they didn't have any proof that I was insane rather than trying to write a decent pilot.
It's not what they aired, but it's the fucking truth.
Hell, maybe it isn't. Maybe I'm just an insane sociopath with a long history of violence and attacked several people at Cartoon Network when they didn't give me a job as one of their writers. I'm still less insane than whoever wrote those stupid ass shows that they air nowadays.