How come so many people are hard on today's cartoons?

H

Hillbillee

New member
I'm not referring to anyone here at rabroad. Obviously the majority if not all of the people here enjoy today's cartoons. I remember making a GeoCitites website about it and called them "80's and 90's nostalgics". They make outlandish claims about how kid-friendly today's cartoons are and how they're of a lesser quality yet at the same time they admit that they don't even watch them. So how can they even judge them? I don't understand the glorifying of old cartoons. Some of them were pretty bad too.
 
I guess cuz after living in the 80's and 90's, which had some awesome cartoons. They want more of that and less of things like they have today.
Though I like some shows that were airing, like Jimmy Neutron.
 
Nostalgia, mostly. I'd personally say we never had any really good cartoons until the 2000s, and I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I mean, I thought Power Rangers was good as a kid, and after watching the reruns Disney is pumping out recently, you realize just how easily entertained kids are.
 
I think that people say that '80'/'90's cartoons were better than the ones that are on now because of two reasons:
  1. Nostalgia filter. People like looking back at the stuff that they liked, not stuff that they thought was trash. Hence why no one brings up "Wish Kid" as a good show from that era.
  2. Growing up and changes in taste. Sure I thought Magic Shcool Bus was an awesome show when I was seven, but that show has no entertainment for a 20-year-old.
 
.>

Waitaminute... you're talking about animated TV Shows, aren't you? Please say yes, because that'll be much, much easier to swallow...
 
Nostalgia is a big part of it, you only remember all the good shows and not the bad ones not to mention the shows they remember fondly may not actually be as good as they remember.

Its also ignorance, people will just say cartoons nowadays suck even though they don't watch cartoons nowadays Or they look at something and since its not exactly as the one they grew up with it sucks without watching it.
 
:^:This, folks, is the very definition of what I've come to term as "Retro Snobbery"; the act of immediately poo-pooing any cartoon that isn't what they personally grew up with and dismissing anything new as being "trash" without even even experiencing said current cartoons. If you've actually seen the newer cartoons and you still prefer the stuff from back in the day, then that's fine, but what makes it retro snobbery is hating on the new stuff just because it's new. As if the shows from "their" era are inherently superior to the cartoons from any other era.
 
These are both very good points, and also why I don't put much stock in retro-snobbery.

1. Most of the people who romanticize, if not outright deify, the cartoons from the so-called "good ol' days" (i.e., the era they grew up in) tend to forget or just choose to ignore the less-than-stellar cartoons from those same eras. But the truth is that suck has always been with us, and it will always be with us. Retro-snobs tend to gloss over the fact that for every Tom & Jerry, there's a Herman & Katnip. For every Daffy Duck, there's a Buzzy the Crow. For every Scooby-Doo, there's a Goober and the Ghost Chasers. For every Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy, there's a Mike, Lu & Og. For every Tiny Toon Adventures, there's a Histeria! It's been said before, but nostalgia blinds us to the fact that suck is eternal.

2. The other valid point raised in Dr. Pepper's post is that as we get older, our tastes in shows tend to change, particularly when it comes to kids' cartoons. Most of the people who make pat assessments like "All of today's cartoons suck!" are simply too old to enjoy them. Going back to point #1, I, like most us, watched plenty of crappy cartoons as a kid, and since I was a kid at the time, I loved every moment of them. Take a good chunk of the shows that you loved as a kid, then try to watch them now, and see how many of them hold up. I thought The Three Robonic Stooges, The Shirt Tales and The Super Globetrotters were 'the stuff' as a child, but I can't say these shows carry the same weight for me at 41.

To sum up: I can't take the act of uniformly trashing every cartoon made after a certain year or era seriously, and the above reasons are why.
 
It's that they're not kids anymore. When we were kids we'd watch any old rubbish and call it awesome because we didn't know any better and couldn't se the flaws in them. Today they're grown up and when they see the new stuff they think it's bad because they're not kids and don't know how to look past the flaws like they used to.

10 years from now we'll see the same thing happen to the 2000s cartoons against the modern lot, and again 10 years after that with the 2010s cartoons. It's a cycle that will keep on going and going with the current generation growing up and thinking their childhood is better than the rest.
 
Nah, I think its that cartoons were naturally better. The bad toons get forgotten and the good ones are remembered.

We had FoxKids, KidsWB, and Cartoon Network all pumping out hits back in the 90's, and this continued into the early 2000's.

However looking back on shows from the last 5 years, its all been downhill. The sad thing is I barely watch any new shows anymore, all I watch are DVDs of my old favorites.
 
I consider myself to be very objective and open minded about animation. But, the only reason people prefer cartoons from other decades is because of blind nostalgia? Cool.

It wasn't because, the occasional Wish Kid aside, the baseline for writing and art was higher, there was more variety, more risktaking, and the decade left more of an objective artistic legacy. I mean, The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, and Spongebob (all shows created in the 90's) are still running, yet it's almost as if all of the animated TV shows of this decade never existed.

What about animated features? Few would argue that last year wasn't one of the greatest years for animated films... ever (with Up, Coraline, Ponyo, Princess and the Frog, Monsters vs. Aliens, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, etc.) and that's not even getting into Kung Fu Panda, most of Pixar's output, Wallace and Gromit, Spirited Away, and others.
 
I agree. The early 2000's were pretty good. Shows like Fairly OddParents, Grim Adventrues of Billy & Mandy, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and others were good. There were some bad shows that I didn't watch much but it seemed like there was more variety and a lot better shows to choose from all around, not just one block or one network.

Maybe it's just my taste in cartoons but it seems like a lot of newer shows try to either be over the top goofy and stupid or try to be odd and weird. Also, it seems like the newer shows don't have that great of animation and characters. I don't really care much for shows newer shows like Chowder, Flapjack, and the Total Drama shows.
 
It's the fact that some people rely so much on cartoons they watched when they were younger, they sense today's cartoons don't contain such quality they strive for. I wish more people would appreciate the fact that cartoons are cartoons and they are there for entertainment.
 
If we're talking about casual fans, then nostalgia will most likely play a good role in their opinion. I mean, prior to Michael Bays Transformers, the original series was living on through Hot Topic merchandise despite the fact that the original series was hardly a bastion of quality. There's also TMNT 80s that has been surpassed by the 2k3 series, but that one's been largely ignored.

I do agree a lot more memorable series came from the 90s though. There was more outlets all around, and animators were being given more freedom than before. It's a shame with at least 6 animation channels today, we're not even getting half of that output.
 
Thank you. I was waiting for this kind of reply. Every gen has its bad toons, but when I think of which decade gave me personally the best quality I give it to the 90s. The Batman VS BTAS is just one example of old vs new where the old was simply done better. Haven't seen the brave and the bold, but what I have seen doesn't make me think it holds a candle to timm's masterpiece.
 
How come so many people are suffering from nostalgia backlash, lately? Especially around here? That's what I'd like to know.

No, nostalgia hasn't blinded me to "the fact that suck is eternal". May I make a comparison with music? I'll say there's been a serious decline in the music industry since the 90's. Ahh, yeah, 90's music. Good stuff. Except most of the music from that decade sucked. I thought a lot of the music from the early 00's sucked as well, but now I think it doesn't sound so bad compared to what's out there nowadays. (Is it nostalgia if I didn't like it to begin with?)

In a way, I'm making an unfair assessment. Talented people have been making good music decade after decade. What's changed is who gets mass exposure in radio and other media. I've learned that I can trace different bands' influences backward and forward to find other music I like. (This can, incidentally, lead you to liking weirder bands than you might have expected were out there.) The 90's just happened to have a significant alignment between the record labels and talent that matched my musical tastes.

Animation is sadly not like music. The amount of labor involved, especially without the aid of computers, is more than a few people can muster in their garage on weekends. The talent and the ideas are surely out there, but what studios are willing to fund is subject to their own, very non-artistically driven whims. If studio heads look at the numbers and see that toy-driven cartoons are the it-thing next season, that's where the money goes; fire your old talent and produce shows for cheap, the kids will eat it up! This is but one way the industry can swing in unpleasant directions. Why then should I believe that the collective animation of one year will be just as good as that of any other year?

As for objectivity, there's enough animation from the 90's that I'm still trying to forget. I spent countless hours complaining about it on the internet. No need to remind me about those shows, honest. I also spent enough time criticizing my favorite 90's shows; it's fun to be invested in entertainment to that extent.

--Romey
 
I agree with those points. 2009 was defintely the best year for animated films in a while. I think we all agree that there are good and bad toons in every decade. My gripe with the 2000's is that, with a few execptions such as Avatar, Justice League, and Courage the Cowardly Dog, everything just seemed the same to me. Nothing really stood out or tried to be different. It's like everything was just a cheap clone of something else. I think the problem is with everything being executive driven nowadays. In the 90's there was a lot more creator-driven material which resulted in a huge variety of different cartoons. Nowadays instead of letting the creators create, parasitic executives go around dicating how everything should be done from the art to the writing and vice-versa. Instead of focusing on telling a good story with intresting characters. They'll waste lord knows how much of the network's money on worthless surveys, polls, and focus groups looking to chase temporary fads or some imaginary formula to why a previous show was successful. Finally,after dumbing down and stripping a said cartoon of all it's good qualites, what would've been an intresting and creative cartoon turns into a serialized, generic, and souless product.
 
The glut of cheap Flash animation has seriously degraded the creative and artistic standards for this decade's cartoons. And it's not like I'm a blind Flash hater, seeing that Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends is one of my favorite cartoons of all-time and THAT was undoubtedly the best use of Flash in an animated series. Unfortunately, it was very much the lone exception.

Not to mention the homogenization of concepts/premises. Every kids comedy cartoon must star a loud, dumb, gross, selfish prick of a protagonist who treats everyone else around him like crap. Every action cartoon must be blatantly toyetic (or based on an existing toy franchise) and feature a cocky, egotistical teenage Gary Stu. Every adult cartoon must either be a family sitcom or a pseudo-dadaist stoner comedy (depending on whether you're pitching to Fox or AS). And don't even think about having a female protagonist, because we all know that's exclusively for little girls and their cooties and stuff (hello there, Modyfiers!).

It's not like any of the above premises are automatically bad, but the 90s undoubtedly offered a far wider variety of ideas which broke the mold and defied preconceptions of what TV animation could and should be. If anything, this new decade has the opportunity to break the 2000s mold in the same way the 90s did to the 80s.
 
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