Cartoons: What changed?

I think he's saying that in "Night of the Lizard" from the ninties cartoon Peter did not end up looking like a selfish jerk like he did in Spectacular. Instead it made eddie Brock look like the bad guy when all he was doing was his job.
 
Yeah, but both those episodes were likely played out differently. What I've noticed is that many people on the internet always say the EVERY cartoon in the 90s was amazing, no matter what. And I find that hard to believe. Each era had to have it's ups and downs. And personally, I don't find Animaniacs funny. Entertaining of course, but I don't really care for it's type of humor. There has to be at least ONE bad cartoon from that decade, but no one seems to mention it. :shrug:
 
There were lots of crappy series in the ninties, Spider-Man Unlimited, the Super Mario Brothers 'toon, Captain Planet; the list goes on and on. But nostalgia has a way of filtering out the bad and exaggerating the good.

Here, go through this list and see how many stinkers you can find.
 
A lot of people who inhabit message boards nowadays grew up in the 90's; it's "their" decade, and as such they tend to remember everything from that era as gems, even the shows which were pure drivel. People who grew up in the 50's, 60's and 70's do the same thing with decades of their youth, for the same reasons of nostalgic fondness.

It's like someone better than me said once (and was also my sig for a time): "Nostalgia tends to blind us to the fact that suck is eternal."
 
No denying that the 90s had it's crap, but a lot of us here who complimented the 90s were children of the 80s, therefore the nostalgia theory is a bit faulty.

Thing is the 90s had a great deal of diversity. I mean Fox Kids for instance in it's glory days didn't rely on the same kind of programming too much. You had a Looney Tunes centered show, a couple of modern day Looney Tunes type shows, shows with original characters, both comedy and drama cartoons based of Super Hero comics and while not animated several live action shows with Japanese footage. During the last run from Fox Kids, reruns aside all we had for diversity was Power Rangers and a rerun from Marvel. The rest were mostly competition monster based animes.

And you might say that Adult Swim shows a riskiness dwarfing the 90s, but even the majority of Adult Swim have a play it safe attitude. Just take a regular cartoon plot, add a load of adult content for good measure. Sure there are AS shows that strive for more (Venture Bros being an exception), but such shows are in the minority.
 
So true. I've noticed that a lot of people's favorite cartoons, as well as their opinions, are due to some nostalgic feelings. While I don't see a problem at all with looking fondly back in the past and all for entertainment, I usually try to separate nostalgia and actual quality in my opinions. For a quick example, I may be one of the few people on this form who does not think that the first two seasons of Pokemon were the best. Not horrible by any means, but not what I considered the best of the series either. Of course, there are some people who do not feel that way because of nostalgia, but that was the best example I could think of at the moment.

As for the example about the Spectacular Spider-Man series, Peter obviously couldn't tell them about his double life. It's like one of those superhero codes where they can't tell their family and friends about their secret life. That can depend on the situation, but it had to be for this case. They might have been a bit nicer to him if he told them about needing the money to help pay bills, but it might not have made a difference. Besides that, there would have to be major differences in this series and the 90s Spider-Man not only in the character designs, but of how the stories are told. It would be pretty pointless to have the stories function and end in the same exact way. That's usually what they do with a new series based on an established character/franchise.
 
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