Right. Soulless cash grabs existed as did zero budget trash recycling frames but it wasn't everything. Even something that was really trying to sell toys like Transformers or GI Joe had effort behind them.
When did we go from "80s cartoons were the best! modern cartoons suck! my childhood was awesome!" to "80s cartoons were shitty soulless toy commercials that were never good"?
>Deregulation
you mean overregulation, right? that shit has not been decreasing. like, ever. and they have super tremendously heavy restrictions on what little advertising is allowed. because of the 'kids cannot help anything they do, so seeing things can harm them' paradigm.
No, the Reagan administration did cut down some significant regulations about how TV programs could sell products to kids. The 80s action figure shows would not have happened under regulations put in place during the 60s, as parents were becoming increasingly annoyed by their kids pestering them to buy the merch peddled by early TV shows.
As time went on, the same parental frustrations that pressured the old regulations into place started calling for new restrictions. So by the mid 90s the mom lobbyists were starting to get their way again. But the era of deregulation certainly happened, and it helped fuel the boom of animation in the 80s and 90s since corporations could generate more revenue from toy sales with the laxer rules.
Going back with old eyes can be a lot of fun though. Sure, you aren't going to be able to stomach a lot of what you sat through as a kid but when you find things that are still good it's a treat. I know I rented The Great Bear Scare more than once as a child and holy shit is it awful but the first few seasons of Ghostbusters are way better than they have any right to be.
Seven year old me was pretty inconsistent when given the responsibility of picking a VHS. Compilations of Disney shorts or Winnie the Pooh (good) got watched along side Cartoon All Stars to the Rescue. The box cover for that one fooled me twice.
>80s cartoons were the best! modern cartoons suck! my childhood was awesome!
The people saying this only have a lingering memory of the actual cartoons, 90% of the time just the well animated intro
If anything it's the opposite, we started out shitting 80s cartoons for being toy commercials, then the kids who grew up on that stuff were adults and praised it, then 90s kids grew up and shat on the 80s, then Y2K kids grew up and have a romanticized image of the 80s from their parents, and it's just a neverending cycle of overthinking the 80s.
Were 80s really ever considered a good time for cartoons? The 90s were the golden age and if you wanna go further back you look to boomer times like the 40s-60s
Late 80s for just about everyone. Rogger Rabbit kind of lit a fire under everyone's asses to actually start trying again. while Disney and WB wanted to remake a lot of their higher quality 40s era stuff. There was a whole back to the 40s ting going on, also at the same time Ted Turner got his hands on the 40s Looney Tunes catalog and started playing that on his channels.
Really stiff competition had the major networks actually putting up bigger budgets for saturday morning lineups so those got a lot better too. They figured out they could spend the same budget on anime companies to animate their shows, and often it looked better.
That was big for movies, but on the television side, Eisner got the ball rolling before that with Gummi Bears, DuckTales, and The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.
>The 90s were the golden age
That's a very millenial take, a lot of the classics are 80s toy commercials. I guess animators might prefer the 90s though.
This. Ren & Stimpy pretty much changed the animation industry and allowed cartoons to be creator-driven again. By the mid 90s, kids would rather watch CN/Nick shows than 30 minute toy commercials.
80s stuff really did not have any kind of rewatchable quality at all for adults. They really were just made for kids 12 and younger. It was later Disney Afternoon, Warner Afternoon and Nickelodeon stuff of the 90s and after that started adding in jokes for adults.
Love of 80s cartoons is 99% just nostalgia and love for the toyline. But that's the thing they were really really heavily merched. The 90s shows not nearly as much if at all. So those had to stand on their own without merch backing it up. Transformers and Thundercats were free to be as dumb or pointless as they wanted since all they really needed to do was feature a character or vehicle. Who cares if some MOTU episode made sense or even fit in continuity, as long as Moss Man was there and the shark tank thing did something cool. But kids fricking LOVED that shark tank, and 30 years later want to see that episode again because the tank brought them hours of joy when they were 7.
The thing is toy commercials had to appeal to children to get children to buy the toys. Cartoons nowadays don't appeal to anyone but manchildren on the internet and pushing politics.
The thing is toy commercials had to appeal to children to get children to buy the toys. Cartoons nowadays don't appeal to anyone but manchildren on the internet and pushing politics.
Toy commercial shows definitely have their place. I really don't see why it is so inherently evil at all here, they make for huge franchises that people still love a long time after. And we have seen that they can be turned into viable media that can stand on its own and not just a vehicle to sell figures.
80s cartoons = soulless commercials was something John K wrote about his blog in the mid 00s so the ideas been around for awhile. He dropped some real life stories from how soulless working in the industry was at the time.
John worked on Bakshi's Mighty Mouse which certainly wasn't soulless. In fact he got fired and got it cancelled because Ralph wasn't keeping a close enough eye on him.
>soulless
Does it have to do with how over-the-top and somewhat fugly his cartoons always were, except for the girls?
Animation school in 2014, it was generally expected that everyone there was going at some point be able to pitch a series. We had special classes on how to pitch a project to executives.
Now....that's just not true any more.
That kinda happens with every area... then again, it's almost like some cartoon trends managed to burn that bridge.
Kids are getting older and you're slowly but surely becoming irrelevant to online discussions. I'm experiencing this for video games and it fricking hurts seeing the zoomers take over.
Both opinions have always been around. It's also possible to acknowledge they're toy commercials while also thinking they're awesome. Just because they were made for toys doesn't mean the people behind them didn't sometimes care and make actually cool shows.
Let's see here: >Half-hour toy commercial
This is objectively true. He-Man, Transformers and TMNT were sponsored by Mattel, Hasbro and Playmates for that exact purpose, TMNT is quite literally the only one of these shows with real source material and adapting that was the least concern.
>Boring
Yes. They were cliché to the point of literally having the same scripts and weirdly tended to pad out time in frustrating ways.
>Preachy
Not entirely sure about this one, Captain Planet and such maybe, but I have a hard time imagining the straight up disguised commercials being preachy outside of forced of "knowing is half the battle" segments.
>Characters don't move
Yes, the animation is notoriously shit for making outsourced crap way faster than what would be reasonable. I'd say generally more choppy than unmoving, but the criticism is still valid.
At least 3.5 out of 4. Not a bad score for good points, good job Calvin's dad!
>but not anything afterwards
This is a lie. Rocko's modern life, Hey Arnold, Ren & Stimpy, Rugrats, PowerPuff Girls, Samurai Jack, Ben 10 and Adventure Time have seen reboots and revivals. While Fairly Odd Parents and Spongebob have lasted so long it didn't matter if there was a reboot or revival.
Also Tiny Toons and Animaniacs now. The reason they didn't get them sooner is because the kids who grew up with them are only now in the position to be rebooting their childhood shows.
>The reason they didn't get them sooner is because the kids who grew up with them are only now in the position to be rebooting their childhood shows.
The people working on the new versions of those clearly don't care for the originals.
The biggest reason why reboots exist is because they're a safe bet legally. Some prick could sue you because your original show shares some vague elements to another different show, but a reboot? Anything goes with reboots and that prick who wants to sue you is going to have a harder time justifying why your reboot is a ripoff of their show.
you mean like how no one rebooted Powerpuff Girls, Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, Ren & Stimpy, Rugrats, Beavis & Butthead, Carmen Sandiego, Futurama, or X-Men 97?
>Was shit >also shit >shit no one ever wanted ever >we will see how shit that is >3D shit >woke shit >Groening leftover zombie shit >probably will never happen post writer strikes
Wow it's almost like you don't have a point and are talking out of your ass by listing fricking awful shows everyone hated.
The post he was responded to didn't mention quality in the slightest, the frick are you sperging out about. Yes they were shit, they were all reboots of cartoons post-1980s and that's what the anon he was responding to claimed didn't exist. Not good reboots of post-1980s properties, just reboots of them in general.
Pretending to be someone else? And no you don't get points for posting awful slop that everyone hated. You don't have a point to make if it required pure shit that failed miserably.
4 months ago
Anonymous
I'm a different anon and I'm not even sure if he's in the thread. Those shows are indeed fricking shit and I'm glad they failed, but the post he was responding to suggested that post-80s IPs haven't been rebooted. They have been even if they've been fricking dogshit, a lot of 80s revivals have also been dogshit like Thundercats Roar. I legitimately do not understand what you are getting upset about.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Simple, if they all failed then you are grasping at straws. Frick off already
4 months ago
Anonymous
But they're post-80s reboots, and I'm not him, again. How is mentioning reboots from the era asked about "grasping at straws"? It's literally what the post he was responding to suggested irrespective of quality. The frick's got you so mad dude?
4 months ago
Anonymous
Simple, if they all failed then you are grasping at straws. Frick off already
They're shit but they're post-80s shit, that's all the post was saying. I fricking hate those shows too but you're kind of being a sperg right now.
I'm guessing it's about David Wise re-using the same idea for multiple episodes spread across several different shows, to demonstrate how alike all of them are?
"Preachy" likely refer to the canned Lesson of the Day segments many of the shows were required to air at the end of episodes to ensure the program had some educational content. It was part of some law, if I recall.
>Not entirely sure about this one, Captain Planet and such maybe, but I have a hard time imagining the straight up disguised commercials being preachy outside of forced of "knowing is half the battle" segments.
No, some shows really did have a dedicated segment to teaching the lesson of the episode about how stealing or drugs are bad, GI:Joe, Silverhawks, She-Ra, and Brave Starr had them. It mostly ended around 89-90 when channels just started airing old School House Rocks or some other dedicated learning segment to fit the government mandated learning aspect of cartoon timeslots.
I prefer toy commercials to whatever the frick we're getting now. With toy commercials they have to at least try to make something that looks cool enough that a kid would want, and preferably also do something cool.
Everything in cartoons today is just fricking gay and cringe.
>Muh nostalgia
>Cartoons were better when they had two frames of animation per minute and no plots and a preachy message at the end
Is the half hour toy commercial actually a bad thing?
TMNT, He-Man, Transformers, GI Joe and several others managed to evolve into something well beyond the original toys anyway. People seem to genuinely like them anyway regardless of the advertising origins, are they actually the evil inherently bad thing people love to screech about?
They are easy low hanging fruit when you want to be self righteous and complain about evil corporate capitalism since it has an extra added Helen Lovejoy styled >Someone please think of the children!!
angle in there. But you might be able to make an argument from all the adult collector weirdos that might have turned grabbing every Optimus Prime variant into a crippling addiction. Even though overwhelming majority of kids grow the frick out of it and become functioning adults. Not every Nintendo fanboy became Moviebob and wrote books about Mario 3. But I'm pretty sure that guy would have laser focused his life on something else and equally fricked up if Nintendo was not a thing in 1990.
>But you might be able to make an argument from all the adult collector weirdos that might have turned grabbing every Optimus Prime variant into a crippling addiction.
You could argue that Star Wars was the beginning of adult nerd (AKA manchildren) consoomerism culture in the 70s way before He-Man and Transformers. But yeah you're right that most people grow out of it. The nerds on the internet are the outlier, not that majority.
Everyone looks at the 80s toy or Star Wars collectors, but no one ever thinks about the insane frickhuge bullshit that is the Barbie and Toy Car collectors. They have been around scouring toy aisles, fighting each other bloody over a single toy, building massive hoards, and holding giant conventions to resell their collectible good since the 60s.
These two groups are the actual fricking bane of the toy store employee.
Card collectors are the fricking worst. Any time I find out Disney has a new card game or some shit it's because a 42-year-old man cracked open a little boy's skull for the last pack
people with no taste or frame of reference that have only consoomed american slop love them, sure
but there's a reason zoomers revisit old mangas and animes, but don't care about these shows
He read some 60s Batman when he was a kid. He didn't remember much about it (I assume at the time he read it because he was aware of the character through the TV show). He read DKR as an adult and had mixed feelings toward it. He was still more of a comic strip guy.
He also read Mad when he was a kid but as an adult felt like only some of it held up.
he's mixing two stereotypes
cartoons WITHOUT toylines to fund them were just standing around blinking. Starting with Gummi Bears in the mid-80s, Disney finally started the idea of a high-quality cartoon that would make its money back in syndication, rather than from toy sales. Which they made work for an entire decade before falling back into making garbage.
This. People who claim every cartoon was He-Man style recycled animation are full of shit. A lot of cartoons back then were outsourced to studios that did really fantastic work, even though it obviously wasn't theatrical quality.
hell I mean even he-man had decent action for its day. but it was not nearly as impressive as the real toy powerhouses like transformers and ninja turtles. which in turn were still not to the level of "both merchandise AND syndication" shows like your BTAS or Gargoyles, and even those tended to have rough episodes when they had no choice but to use the crappier studio. the redheaded stepstudio.
The one where he tees off on 80s sitcoms is classic too. Can’t remember the exact wording, but he called them something like “nothing but a bunch of snappy put-downs and pat one-liners”. TV generally sucked in the 80s, I was there and now I am testifying to that truth. Listen to my boomer wisdom all of you
I struggle to think of any watchable 80s sitcoms. Whereas lots of 70s shows still hold up. I love the music and aesthetic from that era but the tv shows make you cringe so hard you’ll suffer skin failure
Saved only by the Adventure Time tie in. It started out semi-ok but the soap opera bs once Kirstie Alley joined the cast was so tiresome
4 months ago
Anonymous
>Saved only by the Adventure Time tie in
The fricking hell you on about? Frick off.
4 months ago
Anonymous
You’re right. I was being too generous, nothing can save Cheers
4 months ago
Anonymous
Cheers was largely a 70s era show anyway, it was just still on when the rest of the networks shifted things to boring perfect family sitcoms.
Even then it's whole setup couldn't last. The entire show was built on culture clash with snooty rich cultured educated girl dealing with crass, low class everyday lugs. After a year or so it was just Dianne being a judgmental b***h to everyone for not being wealthy New England elite. Frasier did a better job of this formula.
80s sitcoms had that back to the 50s, family friendly shit going on. They even realized they were too bland back then and started adding in aliens, muppets, and robots to bring some life into the shows.
Syndicated shows were all pretty much the same thing too. Just really strong sense of justice guy rolls into town, sees small town is under the thumb of some corrupt land developer, mayor, or sheriff, fights them with elaborate tricks, rolls out of town. It was A-Team, Knight Rider, Fall Guy, Macguyver, They were all westerns, but in rural California.
I don't really agree but it is funny (not always ha-ha funny) how many hit '80s sitcoms were watered-down versions of edgier 1970s shows. E.g. Family Ties is a reverse All in The Family, except none of the characters take a controversial position on anything; Night Court is Barney Miller but with all the gags that the same writers refused to do when they wrote for Barney Miller (eg women in bathing suits getting arrested).
Cheers is an offshoot of Taxi but it had one thing that Taxi didn't have, which was a developing relationship/story arc throughout a season. That made it new and influential, even though that part of the show ran out of steam very fast.
I think Family Ties is supposed to be 80s Dobie Gillis but the roles reversed with the teen being the straigup responsible one. Cosby Show was Father Knows Best, but black. and I think night Court actually was meant to be a moralistic Barney Miller.
Oh? Was Married With Children in the 90s already, or late 80s?
And what the hell from the 70s still holds up except from some almost 80s movies, is it opposite day or something?
80s sitcoms had that back to the 50s, family friendly shit going on. They even realized they were too bland back then and started adding in aliens, muppets, and robots to bring some life into the shows.
Syndicated shows were all pretty much the same thing too. Just really strong sense of justice guy rolls into town, sees small town is under the thumb of some corrupt land developer, mayor, or sheriff, fights them with elaborate tricks, rolls out of town. It was A-Team, Knight Rider, Fall Guy, Macguyver, They were all westerns, but in rural California.
A-Team was mostly nothing like MacGuyver, though. I was even gonna bring up A-Team ill holds up.
>And what the hell from the 70s still holds up except from some almost 80s movies, is it opposite day or something?
You need to watch more movies from the 70s
4 months ago
Anonymous
Life's too short for that, 70s pacing is PAINFUL
4 months ago
Anonymous
>I can't sit through 2 hour movies!!! >muh pacing!!!
least-ADHD-riddled zoomer
4 months ago
Anonymous
>>I can't sit through 2 hour movies!!!
This is hilarious because weren't a lot of modern movies 2 hours
4 months ago
Anonymous
>>I can't sit through 2 hour movies!!!
This is hilarious because weren't a lot of modern movies 2 hours
You homosexuals are assuming I'm a zoomer and/or like modern movies
And that 70s pacing isn't a bigger problem than the movie length
No no, he's right. The 80s was mostly toy commercials whereas the 2000s was genuine fun cartoons.
The 00s was the golden era of the creator driven series where they just got to make a funny show for the sake of making a funny show.
Cartoon Cartoons, Oh Yeah Cartoons, Nicktoons and Disney Channel wanting to invest in more original series all at the same time made for a huge chance at animators getting their own series made. There was really no environment like it before or after that.
It's weird how people pretend that toy shows and creator driven shows didn't co-exist at the same time in the 90s and 2000s. You can have both and both were good.
No one is pretending that. But they were incredibly rare and barely anyone had the impression they were going to get the chance to pitch their own series. That was not even considered to most people who went into animation in the 80s. Only a handfull of shows were picked up in the 90s, but a lot were picked up in the 00s and early 2010s.
Animation school in 2014, it was generally expected that everyone there was going at some point be able to pitch a series. We had special classes on how to pitch a project to executives.
One of Watterson's favorite tricks is to put his own opinions into the mouth of Calvin's dad or even Calvin's grandpa, and have a joke about what a fuddy-duddy he is.
Basically if you're going to put your own opinions in, be sure to at least not have everyone agree with them.
Well that's also to illustrate the difference between adult pessimism and childhood optimism. Calvin wouldn't complain about that stuff because for the most parts kids tend to accept things for what they are without thinking too much about the negative aspects.
I love Calvin’s ten-second rule. Straight line from that to Homer’s “if something is hard to do, then it’s not worth doing”. I live my life by this philosophy every day and it has never steered me wrong
I was young in the 80's. I will admit that most of are cartoons were 99% untapped potential. They blew their load during the opening credits, and then things get very cheap.
Wonder what Watterson's reaction to Space Runaway Ideon would be considering Tomino said that the companies making the toys don't actually look at the stories being attached to them
In my country they used to print these strips alongside Palomita for a while, I always found them awful
I just wanted to see Palomita's ass, not this SHIT
I prefer toy commercials to whatever the frick we're getting now. With toy commercials they have to at least try to make something that looks cool enough that a kid would want, and preferably also do something cool.
Everything in cartoons today is just fricking gay and cringe.
>Cartoons were better when they had two frames of animation per minute and no plots and a preachy message at the end
Neither of those have anything to do with being toyetic.
I'm not sure how someone raised on 60s era toons can have much of a shit opinion on 80s cartoons. His era was all poorly drawn, even more poorly animated Jay Ward and Hanna Barbera stuff. One really can't make the complaint of characters just standing around talking.
He's kind of right on the preachy though, 80s shit is filled with PSA messages if they did not dedicate a segment to specifically preaching to the viewer in the last 5 minutes.
>if they did not dedicate a segment to specifically preaching to the viewer in the last 5 minutes
2 or so, but hey, they were good messages.
>Not entirely sure about this one, Captain Planet and such maybe, but I have a hard time imagining the straight up disguised commercials being preachy outside of forced of "knowing is half the battle" segments.
No, some shows really did have a dedicated segment to teaching the lesson of the episode about how stealing or drugs are bad, GI:Joe, Silverhawks, She-Ra, and Brave Starr had them. It mostly ended around 89-90 when channels just started airing old School House Rocks or some other dedicated learning segment to fit the government mandated learning aspect of cartoon timeslots.
>Silverhawks
No, that had astronomy class segments instead. You missed He-Man out of the important ones, too.
I remember Real Ghostbusters had a segment teaching kids to better handle fire hazards and M.A.S.K. had some safety stuff, too.
They were intended to sell toys, but to do so effectively they relied on powerful character archetypes, striking visual design, clear character roles, nearly mythological settings, and classic moral themes that have a timelessness today's cartoons don't.
depends, early 80's was shit but the late 80's was when animation started leaving behind the limited animation from the 70's and went for overseas animation from korea and japan that really improved things.
Oh boy here comes the surgery where an anon gets mad about something not even implied and others can't help but reply to him, derailing the whole thread. Gotta love that modern Cinemaphile, can't even tell the trolls from the spergs from the schizos anymore.
I mean… yeah he is. Most of the time the idea came first before the toy line, but the tv show wouldn’t get made or not last long if it wasn’t selling toys.
Well what about the soviet and central eastern European cartoons produced at that time? I think hungary has son of white mare and hungarian folk tales?
Some of them, but not all.
Right. Soulless cash grabs existed as did zero budget trash recycling frames but it wasn't everything. Even something that was really trying to sell toys like Transformers or GI Joe had effort behind them.
Stuff like GI Joe and Transformers actually has some budget put into them
Expansive voice casts and having the animation done in Japan.
Versus, say, the rapid fire semi-incestuous offering ls of Hanna-Barbara
Looked incredibly cheap compared to the action cartoons of the 90s and 00s.
When did we go from "80s cartoons were the best! modern cartoons suck! my childhood was awesome!" to "80s cartoons were shitty soulless toy commercials that were never good"?
People have been saying that since the 80s.
Never listen to nostalgiagays.
When 90's kids grew up and replaced nostalgiagays.
It happens to everyone after a certain age. Most of them were objectively garbage but kids have no context for judging quality.
Thundarr was kino tho,
Ironically Thundarr was one of the few 80s cartoons with no merch because it came out before the deregulation of television.
>Deregulation
you mean overregulation, right? that shit has not been decreasing. like, ever. and they have super tremendously heavy restrictions on what little advertising is allowed. because of the 'kids cannot help anything they do, so seeing things can harm them' paradigm.
Advertising targeting children was heavily regulated until the 80s. So, no, he meant deregulation.
No, the Reagan administration did cut down some significant regulations about how TV programs could sell products to kids. The 80s action figure shows would not have happened under regulations put in place during the 60s, as parents were becoming increasingly annoyed by their kids pestering them to buy the merch peddled by early TV shows.
As time went on, the same parental frustrations that pressured the old regulations into place started calling for new restrictions. So by the mid 90s the mom lobbyists were starting to get their way again. But the era of deregulation certainly happened, and it helped fuel the boom of animation in the 80s and 90s since corporations could generate more revenue from toy sales with the laxer rules.
This is why Yugioh cards didn't look like the TCG in the US
Going back with old eyes can be a lot of fun though. Sure, you aren't going to be able to stomach a lot of what you sat through as a kid but when you find things that are still good it's a treat. I know I rented The Great Bear Scare more than once as a child and holy shit is it awful but the first few seasons of Ghostbusters are way better than they have any right to be.
Seven year old me was pretty inconsistent when given the responsibility of picking a VHS. Compilations of Disney shorts or Winnie the Pooh (good) got watched along side Cartoon All Stars to the Rescue. The box cover for that one fooled me twice.
I haven’t seen animation that cheap since early 2000s Flash toons
Real Ghostbusters was written by Straryzincki
How ironic you posted a "voice of Tom Smothers" image today of all days.
two different kinds of people.
>80s cartoons were the best! modern cartoons suck! my childhood was awesome!
The people saying this only have a lingering memory of the actual cartoons, 90% of the time just the well animated intro
If anything it's the opposite, we started out shitting 80s cartoons for being toy commercials, then the kids who grew up on that stuff were adults and praised it, then 90s kids grew up and shat on the 80s, then Y2K kids grew up and have a romanticized image of the 80s from their parents, and it's just a neverending cycle of overthinking the 80s.
Maybe when they start making better cartoons than back then.
The moment moronic b***hes started remaking 80's cartoons and making them worse.
DESTROY THE PAST.
BUILD A NEW DEATH STAR
>Is Calvins dad right about 80s cartoons?
Yes.
Have you read any contemporary responses to 80s cartoons?
Were 80s really ever considered a good time for cartoons? The 90s were the golden age and if you wanna go further back you look to boomer times like the 40s-60s
The late 80s, when Disney started spending big money on animation again which led to others doing it as well.
Late 80s for just about everyone. Rogger Rabbit kind of lit a fire under everyone's asses to actually start trying again. while Disney and WB wanted to remake a lot of their higher quality 40s era stuff. There was a whole back to the 40s ting going on, also at the same time Ted Turner got his hands on the 40s Looney Tunes catalog and started playing that on his channels.
Really stiff competition had the major networks actually putting up bigger budgets for saturday morning lineups so those got a lot better too. They figured out they could spend the same budget on anime companies to animate their shows, and often it looked better.
That was big for movies, but on the television side, Eisner got the ball rolling before that with Gummi Bears, DuckTales, and The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.
>The 90s were the golden age
That's a very millenial take, a lot of the classics are 80s toy commercials. I guess animators might prefer the 90s though.
They were in the 2000's because that's when the kids who watched them were the most active people on the internet.
This. Ren & Stimpy pretty much changed the animation industry and allowed cartoons to be creator-driven again. By the mid 90s, kids would rather watch CN/Nick shows than 30 minute toy commercials.
But mighty mouse exists
80s stuff really did not have any kind of rewatchable quality at all for adults. They really were just made for kids 12 and younger. It was later Disney Afternoon, Warner Afternoon and Nickelodeon stuff of the 90s and after that started adding in jokes for adults.
Love of 80s cartoons is 99% just nostalgia and love for the toyline. But that's the thing they were really really heavily merched. The 90s shows not nearly as much if at all. So those had to stand on their own without merch backing it up. Transformers and Thundercats were free to be as dumb or pointless as they wanted since all they really needed to do was feature a character or vehicle. Who cares if some MOTU episode made sense or even fit in continuity, as long as Moss Man was there and the shark tank thing did something cool. But kids fricking LOVED that shark tank, and 30 years later want to see that episode again because the tank brought them hours of joy when they were 7.
The thing is toy commercials had to appeal to children to get children to buy the toys. Cartoons nowadays don't appeal to anyone but manchildren on the internet and pushing politics.
Toy commercial shows definitely have their place. I really don't see why it is so inherently evil at all here, they make for huge franchises that people still love a long time after. And we have seen that they can be turned into viable media that can stand on its own and not just a vehicle to sell figures.
80s cartoons = soulless commercials was something John K wrote about his blog in the mid 00s so the ideas been around for awhile. He dropped some real life stories from how soulless working in the industry was at the time.
John worked on Bakshi's Mighty Mouse which certainly wasn't soulless. In fact he got fired and got it cancelled because Ralph wasn't keeping a close enough eye on him.
>soulless
Does it have to do with how over-the-top and somewhat fugly his cartoons always were, except for the girls?
That kinda happens with every area... then again, it's almost like some cartoon trends managed to burn that bridge.
Yeah but John K is also a huge superfan of 60s era Terrytoons. Who cares about his opinion.
When soulless post-modern goblins tried revising history to justify their garbage remakes
Kids are getting older and you're slowly but surely becoming irrelevant to online discussions. I'm experiencing this for video games and it fricking hurts seeing the zoomers take over.
Both opinions have always been around. It's also possible to acknowledge they're toy commercials while also thinking they're awesome. Just because they were made for toys doesn't mean the people behind them didn't sometimes care and make actually cool shows.
pretty much
Calvins Dad is always right.
Let's see here:
>Half-hour toy commercial
This is objectively true. He-Man, Transformers and TMNT were sponsored by Mattel, Hasbro and Playmates for that exact purpose, TMNT is quite literally the only one of these shows with real source material and adapting that was the least concern.
>Boring
Yes. They were cliché to the point of literally having the same scripts and weirdly tended to pad out time in frustrating ways.
>Preachy
Not entirely sure about this one, Captain Planet and such maybe, but I have a hard time imagining the straight up disguised commercials being preachy outside of forced of "knowing is half the battle" segments.
>Characters don't move
Yes, the animation is notoriously shit for making outsourced crap way faster than what would be reasonable. I'd say generally more choppy than unmoving, but the criticism is still valid.
At least 3.5 out of 4. Not a bad score for good points, good job Calvin's dad!
If any of your points were true then why do they still keep rebooting 80s shows but not anything afterwards
To sell more toys to new kids.
>but not anything afterwards
This is a lie. Rocko's modern life, Hey Arnold, Ren & Stimpy, Rugrats, PowerPuff Girls, Samurai Jack, Ben 10 and Adventure Time have seen reboots and revivals. While Fairly Odd Parents and Spongebob have lasted so long it didn't matter if there was a reboot or revival.
Also Tiny Toons and Animaniacs now. The reason they didn't get them sooner is because the kids who grew up with them are only now in the position to be rebooting their childhood shows.
>The reason they didn't get them sooner is because the kids who grew up with them are only now in the position to be rebooting their childhood shows.
The people working on the new versions of those clearly don't care for the originals.
The biggest reason why reboots exist is because they're a safe bet legally. Some prick could sue you because your original show shares some vague elements to another different show, but a reboot? Anything goes with reboots and that prick who wants to sue you is going to have a harder time justifying why your reboot is a ripoff of their show.
you mean like how no one rebooted Powerpuff Girls, Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, Ren & Stimpy, Rugrats, Beavis & Butthead, Carmen Sandiego, Futurama, or X-Men 97?
>Beavis & Butthead
Not reboots, just new seasons, though.
>Was shit
>also shit
>shit no one ever wanted ever
>we will see how shit that is
>3D shit
>woke shit
>Groening leftover zombie shit
>probably will never happen post writer strikes
Wow it's almost like you don't have a point and are talking out of your ass by listing fricking awful shows everyone hated.
The post he was responded to didn't mention quality in the slightest, the frick are you sperging out about. Yes they were shit, they were all reboots of cartoons post-1980s and that's what the anon he was responding to claimed didn't exist. Not good reboots of post-1980s properties, just reboots of them in general.
Pretending to be someone else? And no you don't get points for posting awful slop that everyone hated. You don't have a point to make if it required pure shit that failed miserably.
I'm a different anon and I'm not even sure if he's in the thread. Those shows are indeed fricking shit and I'm glad they failed, but the post he was responding to suggested that post-80s IPs haven't been rebooted. They have been even if they've been fricking dogshit, a lot of 80s revivals have also been dogshit like Thundercats Roar. I legitimately do not understand what you are getting upset about.
Simple, if they all failed then you are grasping at straws. Frick off already
But they're post-80s reboots, and I'm not him, again. How is mentioning reboots from the era asked about "grasping at straws"? It's literally what the post he was responding to suggested irrespective of quality. The frick's got you so mad dude?
They're shit but they're post-80s shit, that's all the post was saying. I fricking hate those shows too but you're kind of being a sperg right now.
What the hell is that chart about anyway?
I'm guessing it's about David Wise re-using the same idea for multiple episodes spread across several different shows, to demonstrate how alike all of them are?
>Captain Planet
Everyone forgets this was 90s.
Nah, everything about it yells 90s. "Political correctness", the show.
"Preachy" likely refer to the canned Lesson of the Day segments many of the shows were required to air at the end of episodes to ensure the program had some educational content. It was part of some law, if I recall.
>Not entirely sure about this one, Captain Planet and such maybe, but I have a hard time imagining the straight up disguised commercials being preachy outside of forced of "knowing is half the battle" segments.
No, some shows really did have a dedicated segment to teaching the lesson of the episode about how stealing or drugs are bad, GI:Joe, Silverhawks, She-Ra, and Brave Starr had them. It mostly ended around 89-90 when channels just started airing old School House Rocks or some other dedicated learning segment to fit the government mandated learning aspect of cartoon timeslots.
Is the half hour toy commercial actually a bad thing?
TMNT, He-Man, Transformers, GI Joe and several others managed to evolve into something well beyond the original toys anyway. People seem to genuinely like them anyway regardless of the advertising origins, are they actually the evil inherently bad thing people love to screech about?
They are easy low hanging fruit when you want to be self righteous and complain about evil corporate capitalism since it has an extra added Helen Lovejoy styled
>Someone please think of the children!!
angle in there. But you might be able to make an argument from all the adult collector weirdos that might have turned grabbing every Optimus Prime variant into a crippling addiction. Even though overwhelming majority of kids grow the frick out of it and become functioning adults. Not every Nintendo fanboy became Moviebob and wrote books about Mario 3. But I'm pretty sure that guy would have laser focused his life on something else and equally fricked up if Nintendo was not a thing in 1990.
>But you might be able to make an argument from all the adult collector weirdos that might have turned grabbing every Optimus Prime variant into a crippling addiction.
You could argue that Star Wars was the beginning of adult nerd (AKA manchildren) consoomerism culture in the 70s way before He-Man and Transformers. But yeah you're right that most people grow out of it. The nerds on the internet are the outlier, not that majority.
Everyone looks at the 80s toy or Star Wars collectors, but no one ever thinks about the insane frickhuge bullshit that is the Barbie and Toy Car collectors. They have been around scouring toy aisles, fighting each other bloody over a single toy, building massive hoards, and holding giant conventions to resell their collectible good since the 60s.
These two groups are the actual fricking bane of the toy store employee.
Card collectors are the fricking worst. Any time I find out Disney has a new card game or some shit it's because a 42-year-old man cracked open a little boy's skull for the last pack
>are they actually the evil inherently bad thing people love to screech about?
It's just a bunch of commies.
people with no taste or frame of reference that have only consoomed american slop love them, sure
but there's a reason zoomers revisit old mangas and animes, but don't care about these shows
What did he grow up with that makes him so critical of 80s cartoon?
According to the strip, Astro Boy, Godzilla and Batman (by the way Batman is the only comic book Watterson has ever read)
Frickin weeb
No wonder why Calvin and Susie feel like a Takahashi couple
I'd say it's more that they're both fishing in the same archetypal/referential/tropey/however you want to put it pond.
>Calvin get that He-Man shit off the TV, I just got these Hokuto no Ken tapes from Japan.
Based. The 80s anime and toku mog 80s cartoons so much it's unreal.
>by the way Batman is the only comic book Watterson has ever read)
which batman specifically?
He read some 60s Batman when he was a kid. He didn't remember much about it (I assume at the time he read it because he was aware of the character through the TV show). He read DKR as an adult and had mixed feelings toward it. He was still more of a comic strip guy.
He also read Mad when he was a kid but as an adult felt like only some of it held up.
Are we talking about Watterson or Calvin's Dad? Because I can't see Calvin's Dad being into Godzilla without nerding out with his son sometimes
Watterson. He's said that he finds comic books stupid due to the violence and sex in them
methinks the author is using his comic to soapbox
pretty accurate, Calvin should've watched some 80's OVA's
he's mixing two stereotypes
cartoons WITHOUT toylines to fund them were just standing around blinking. Starting with Gummi Bears in the mid-80s, Disney finally started the idea of a high-quality cartoon that would make its money back in syndication, rather than from toy sales. Which they made work for an entire decade before falling back into making garbage.
This. People who claim every cartoon was He-Man style recycled animation are full of shit. A lot of cartoons back then were outsourced to studios that did really fantastic work, even though it obviously wasn't theatrical quality.
hell I mean even he-man had decent action for its day. but it was not nearly as impressive as the real toy powerhouses like transformers and ninja turtles. which in turn were still not to the level of "both merchandise AND syndication" shows like your BTAS or Gargoyles, and even those tended to have rough episodes when they had no choice but to use the crappier studio. the redheaded stepstudio.
I think the third panel describes modern animated sitcoms better than the old toy cartoons.
The one where he tees off on 80s sitcoms is classic too. Can’t remember the exact wording, but he called them something like “nothing but a bunch of snappy put-downs and pat one-liners”. TV generally sucked in the 80s, I was there and now I am testifying to that truth. Listen to my boomer wisdom all of you
>TV generally sucked in the 80s, I was there and now I am testifying to that truth.
Generally bullshit.
I struggle to think of any watchable 80s sitcoms. Whereas lots of 70s shows still hold up. I love the music and aesthetic from that era but the tv shows make you cringe so hard you’ll suffer skin failure
Frick you I love Cheers.
Saved only by the Adventure Time tie in. It started out semi-ok but the soap opera bs once Kirstie Alley joined the cast was so tiresome
>Saved only by the Adventure Time tie in
The fricking hell you on about? Frick off.
You’re right. I was being too generous, nothing can save Cheers
Cheers was largely a 70s era show anyway, it was just still on when the rest of the networks shifted things to boring perfect family sitcoms.
Even then it's whole setup couldn't last. The entire show was built on culture clash with snooty rich cultured educated girl dealing with crass, low class everyday lugs. After a year or so it was just Dianne being a judgmental b***h to everyone for not being wealthy New England elite. Frasier did a better job of this formula.
80s sitcoms had that back to the 50s, family friendly shit going on. They even realized they were too bland back then and started adding in aliens, muppets, and robots to bring some life into the shows.
Syndicated shows were all pretty much the same thing too. Just really strong sense of justice guy rolls into town, sees small town is under the thumb of some corrupt land developer, mayor, or sheriff, fights them with elaborate tricks, rolls out of town. It was A-Team, Knight Rider, Fall Guy, Macguyver, They were all westerns, but in rural California.
I don't really agree but it is funny (not always ha-ha funny) how many hit '80s sitcoms were watered-down versions of edgier 1970s shows. E.g. Family Ties is a reverse All in The Family, except none of the characters take a controversial position on anything; Night Court is Barney Miller but with all the gags that the same writers refused to do when they wrote for Barney Miller (eg women in bathing suits getting arrested).
Cheers is an offshoot of Taxi but it had one thing that Taxi didn't have, which was a developing relationship/story arc throughout a season. That made it new and influential, even though that part of the show ran out of steam very fast.
I think Family Ties is supposed to be 80s Dobie Gillis but the roles reversed with the teen being the straigup responsible one. Cosby Show was Father Knows Best, but black. and I think night Court actually was meant to be a moralistic Barney Miller.
Oh? Was Married With Children in the 90s already, or late 80s?
And what the hell from the 70s still holds up except from some almost 80s movies, is it opposite day or something?
A-Team was mostly nothing like MacGuyver, though. I was even gonna bring up A-Team ill holds up.
>And what the hell from the 70s still holds up except from some almost 80s movies, is it opposite day or something?
You need to watch more movies from the 70s
Life's too short for that, 70s pacing is PAINFUL
>I can't sit through 2 hour movies!!!
>muh pacing!!!
least-ADHD-riddled zoomer
>>I can't sit through 2 hour movies!!!
This is hilarious because weren't a lot of modern movies 2 hours
You homosexuals are assuming I'm a zoomer and/or like modern movies
And that 70s pacing isn't a bigger problem than the movie length
M.A.S.H., the only sitcom that ever mattered. Back to the Three’s Company appreciation thread with you 80s apologists
I'm literally watching M.A.S,H. on tv right now,and it's ok. Hogan's Heroes beats it by a fair margin.
I think GI Joe still holds up if only for how it occasionally does subtle satire to hilarious effect.
>does subtle satire to hilarious effect.
any examples?
He kind of has a point.
>millennials grew up on Ducktales and Rugrats
>zoomers grew up on Spongebob and Teen Titans
The 2000s was the real golden age of cartoons.
>t. dumb zoomie
>t. millennial
No no, he's right. The 80s was mostly toy commercials whereas the 2000s was genuine fun cartoons.
Well I would say it ware actualy 30's and 40's
t. Zoomer
The 00s was the golden era of the creator driven series where they just got to make a funny show for the sake of making a funny show.
Cartoon Cartoons, Oh Yeah Cartoons, Nicktoons and Disney Channel wanting to invest in more original series all at the same time made for a huge chance at animators getting their own series made. There was really no environment like it before or after that.
It's weird how people pretend that toy shows and creator driven shows didn't co-exist at the same time in the 90s and 2000s. You can have both and both were good.
No one is pretending that. But they were incredibly rare and barely anyone had the impression they were going to get the chance to pitch their own series. That was not even considered to most people who went into animation in the 80s. Only a handfull of shows were picked up in the 90s, but a lot were picked up in the 00s and early 2010s.
Animation school in 2014, it was generally expected that everyone there was going at some point be able to pitch a series. We had special classes on how to pitch a project to executives.
Now....that's just not true any more.
One of Watterson's favorite tricks is to put his own opinions into the mouth of Calvin's dad or even Calvin's grandpa, and have a joke about what a fuddy-duddy he is.
Basically if you're going to put your own opinions in, be sure to at least not have everyone agree with them.
Well that's also to illustrate the difference between adult pessimism and childhood optimism. Calvin wouldn't complain about that stuff because for the most parts kids tend to accept things for what they are without thinking too much about the negative aspects.
I love Calvin’s ten-second rule. Straight line from that to Homer’s “if something is hard to do, then it’s not worth doing”. I live my life by this philosophy every day and it has never steered me wrong
Happy for you anon but I really don't think that strip is advocating for the 10 second rule or showing it positively in any way
> I really don't think that strip is advocating for the 10 second rule
Your cynicism is shockingly corrosive
>cynicism
More like reading comprehension. What about that strip portrays the 10 second rule as something that should be strived for?
strips like this are the ultimate proof that we didn't change as much as clickbait discourse makes it sound like
I know it's really cheap but I love when they do stuff like this, I fall for it every time. Self aware anime that do it are also hilarious
I was young in the 80's. I will admit that most of are cartoons were 99% untapped potential. They blew their load during the opening credits, and then things get very cheap.
The 70s ans 80s had shit toons.
frick you b***h scooby doo is the bomb diggity
>muh saturday morning cartoons
they played every day of the week you frickin casuals
Reminder that Calvin and Susie will never become friends and Calvin will never change
he's a cartoon that's the point
He's talking about anime bro.
Wonder what Watterson's reaction to Space Runaway Ideon would be considering Tomino said that the companies making the toys don't actually look at the stories being attached to them
>comic is boring and preachy
>i-it's supposed to be shitty on purpose!!
You mean like yourself?
>no zoomers/ESLs caring enough to ask who Gene Siskel is
I’m just happy I avoided this cringe.
Maybe they all know/google'd it?
So nothing changed? Got it
G1 MLP is kino.
Only the pilot
No, all of it.
It's fine
In my country they used to print these strips alongside Palomita for a while, I always found them awful
I just wanted to see Palomita's ass, not this SHIT
Nice
80s cartoons had significantly better animation than 60s and 70s cartoons due to outsourcing animation to Japan.
I prefer toy commercials to whatever the frick we're getting now. With toy commercials they have to at least try to make something that looks cool enough that a kid would want, and preferably also do something cool.
Everything in cartoons today is just fricking gay and cringe.
because what we need now is more funko pop owners
>because what we need now is more funko pop owners
Kids don't give a shit about funko pops.
but kids being exposed to nothing but advertising creates funko pop owners
>but kids being exposed to nothing but advertising creates funko pop owners
A lack of a father creates funko pop owners.
>Muh nostalgia
>Cartoons were better when they had two frames of animation per minute and no plots and a preachy message at the end
>Cartoons were better when they had two frames of animation per minute and no plots and a preachy message at the end
Neither of those have anything to do with being toyetic.
Doesn't that describe cartoons now?
>Doesn't that describe cartoons now?
No, now the plot revolves around the preachy message.
...how is that different from what we have now? Except now it's poorly drawn noodle brown girl magical isekai adventure
I'm not sure how someone raised on 60s era toons can have much of a shit opinion on 80s cartoons. His era was all poorly drawn, even more poorly animated Jay Ward and Hanna Barbera stuff. One really can't make the complaint of characters just standing around talking.
He's kind of right on the preachy though, 80s shit is filled with PSA messages if they did not dedicate a segment to specifically preaching to the viewer in the last 5 minutes.
>if they did not dedicate a segment to specifically preaching to the viewer in the last 5 minutes
2 or so, but hey, they were good messages.
>Silverhawks
No, that had astronomy class segments instead. You missed He-Man out of the important ones, too.
I remember Real Ghostbusters had a segment teaching kids to better handle fire hazards and M.A.S.K. had some safety stuff, too.
60s cartoons weren't as good as the golden age, but they were still good. Cartoons didn't get bad until the 70s.
They were intended to sell toys, but to do so effectively they relied on powerful character archetypes, striking visual design, clear character roles, nearly mythological settings, and classic moral themes that have a timelessness today's cartoons don't.
Case in point
It's just like anime and anime merch!
Pretty sure it's showing how Calvin's father wastes time making up strongly held convictions on something that should never ever matter to him at all.
That's right, anon! Never care about anything. You're so enlightened, I bet you shit gumdrops.
Calvin's dad is right about everything.
depends, early 80's was shit but the late 80's was when animation started leaving behind the limited animation from the 70's and went for overseas animation from korea and japan that really improved things.
Oh boy here comes the surgery where an anon gets mad about something not even implied and others can't help but reply to him, derailing the whole thread. Gotta love that modern Cinemaphile, can't even tell the trolls from the spergs from the schizos anymore.
I mean… yeah he is. Most of the time the idea came first before the toy line, but the tv show wouldn’t get made or not last long if it wasn’t selling toys.
Well what about the soviet and central eastern European cartoons produced at that time? I think hungary has son of white mare and hungarian folk tales?
Yes, but that doesn't make them bad. Shows exist to sell you products.
>it's meant to be a commentary on comic strips
>Calvin's dad complains the characters don't move
Do you live in Harry Potter or something?
No
Yes. The 70's and 80's were a dark age for cartoons. They underwent a renaissance in the 90's-early 00's and are currently in another dark age.