What really killed action cartoons?
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What really killed action cartoons?
What really killed action cartoons?
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Target demographic age shifted away from toys into video games/gadgets. Toys are now for toddlers or collectors who want stuff to display. Action cartoons only get greenlit to sell toy merch
It couldn't compete with anime on a visual level, companies weren't willing to pay what was necessary to meet japanese market quality.
Dude, anime was hardly on television when action cartoons died
You're kidding, right?
You wanna know the number 1 action show airing at the same time Korra was sinking like a stone? Naruto Shippuden. Not even regular 'Massive hit in the states' Naruto, we were in SHIPPUDEN by then, and the ratings on television were being dwarfed by fantastic DvD sales. Right, DVD, because streaming hadn't completely killed it by 2012. Why bother with making one of your own when Anime was finding more and more success and you were losing it?
Of course this had nothing to do with GLTAS, that show died because Green Lantern utterly flopped and no retailer would touch any merch with the name Green Lantern on it. Nothing could have saved it since GL poisoned the brand.
Have you seen tron uprising
>on a visual level
Spoken by someone who doesn't watch much anime. The average western action cartoon has better and certainly more consistent visual quality than the market quality TV action anime. Most anime made for TV is dogshit in terms of animation. The real advantage of anime is actually having original concepts and characters (even if the stories themselves are highly derivative) instead of continuing to ride the same half-century old zombie IPs that western companies refuse to give up.
>The average western action cartoon has better
God no.
>and certainly more consistent visual quality
Sure.
You'd have to be delusional to say the former, most western action shows are horrifically stiff when it comes to the actual action on display.
And this is before taking into account that we're talking about action anime from before western action cartoons died, so you're not competing with stuff like Overlord season 3, you're competing with stuff like Fullmetal Alchemist and Gunslinger Girl and Soul Eater and even Naruto before it became about people summoning their stands.
Couldn't sell enough toys and the top heads thought they were to mature for kids hence Teen Titans go
Death of the toy market
No one wants to buy action figures anymore.
Anime and video games
Tween boys shifted away to stuff like Naruto, One Piece, Bleach, and FMA, and also video games.
Younger kids shifted towards comedic cartoons and Pokemon, and Pokemon was a HUGE video game even in the mid-2000s (and even still to this day).
Teenagers shifted away to video games with the more pervy ones shifting away to anime, I still remember watching stuff like School Days on my shitty laptop in 2008 when I was 13.
There are new tween boys every year.
Naruto is still fricking popular.
I can only speak anecdotally, but in my experience the new anime hotness with tween boys seems to be stuff like Demon Slayer, MHA, and occasionally older stuff that they see on Netflix like Soul Eater and Naruto.
Demon Slayer is apparently blowing up thanks to Twitter and Tiktok showing off the Episode 19 fight and the second season delivering by managing to be just as insanely well animated.
The notion that animation is for kids and western overprotectiveness of them; it means that it will always fall short against anime because they can't be too violent and since you can only appeal to kids all the merchandise has to be like actual articulated toys and shit whereas anime can just sell static figurines and make millions.
The obvious answer is anime just doing the whole "action" thing better.
But the less obvious answer is that action cartoons started suffering in terms of animation quality as more and more of the actual animation was outsourced to less competent Korean, Vietnamese, and Filipino studios, and animation is generally pretty important for an action cartoon's success.
Yea, cheap shit always tends to look bad, even when it comes to anime outsourcing can often resort to shit that just looks awful, like that terrible Ex-Arm anime, or like 70% of the Spider anime.
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I would be more sympathetic to the lack of toy sales answer if most the shows aren't so badly written. beware the Batman was shit. Castlevania was shit. People love those shitty cartoons.
reliance on toy sales.
In addition to many of these answers, also some executive biases. Action cartoons, especially around that area, didn't follow the boundaries of what people think about cartoons. They had action, comedy, drama, etc. all at once, and that scares old fogeys in power. So, they lack the incentive to salvage these projects and just let them die at the slightest hint of trouble.
Also, this only mostly affected WB, but the in-fighting between the WB and CN branches made it so WB was stuck making projects that CN would half-heartedly play before declaring them failures. It ended up killing most DC TV animation besides Teen Titans Go, along other third-party cartoons, most of them being action.
I do think they're making a comeback due to streaming. There's less worry about demographics and toy sales, so they can take more risks in projects. Castlevania becoming an unexpected success alone made it easier to greenlight more adult-oriented action cartoons. Even if Netflix goes belly up, it seems HBO Max and Amazon Prime are going to pick up the slack.
>and that scares old fogeys in power.
I will never understand why executives are always so fricking butthurt at action shows, outside of the obvious "we need to spend more animating them and that's bad because money!"
Seems like they always get the short end of the stick.
Even stuff that manages to be extremely popular like fricking Ben 10 (which is still CN's biggest property in terms of revenue) ends up getting shit on in favor of a cheaper style and more focus on comedy.
They cost a lot more money to make than "comedy" cartoons, yet had about the same revenue. To maximize profit, execs killed them.
Toys
American action cartoons lost their international appeal.
Compare how big Ben 10 was in LatAm to any of their modern stuff, including Ben 10's ugly reboot.
Videogames.