Wasted Potential

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Daikaotikao

New member
By the title of the thread, you should be able to tell that this thread is going to mention The Haunted World of El Superbeasto and Eight Crazy Nights. If you've never seen these movies, then let me evaluate.

Both movies have stellar animation, but are either unfunny or hardly entertaining. It frustrates me considering how such potential ends up getting wasted on films that only make the animation industry more difficult to strive. Usually the case happens to involve beautiful animation being wasted on such a poorly constructed storyline.

So let's discuss films or shows with wasted potential. (Can also include shows/films with horrid animation but incredible writing.)
 
?Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within?. It just goes to show that being technically proficient doesn?t matter if you can?t tell a decent story. I think just about everybody was disappointed with how that turned out.
 
Drawn together fits this category in my opinion. The idea of doing a show were characters from different animated universes live together was a nice and creative idea, but the result was a mess due to bad writing and overuse of toilethumour and other vulgarities.
 
I don't know if this one counts:

Ben 10 and Alien Force

Sure, it's the most popular cartoon right now yet what i have seen from the first series and AF it's just a total waste of potential. Instead of being well written, plot twist, character development for both heroes and villains they made the show have plots that don't make sense, some of them even pointless bad writing like Ben and Gwen fight, the motivation of Animo turning into a villain, Ben battling normal villains or villains that are just a joke.

AF is far worst with even bigger pointless plots, predictable stories, plot holes and not so interesting villains.

I think Man of Action would've work better with a more serious toned on the show and at the same time the kids can enjoy it because believe me when these kids get older they are going to watch the show again and say wtf? that's what i have been watching when i was kid? Kinda like what happened to the TMNT 80's version.

Still CN doesn't care if the show is really good or bad but that it gets ratings, They just see Ben 10 as a Gold mine. Reminds me of what Alan Moore said on the Simpsons.

Alan Moore: "You see what those bloody corporations do? They take your ideas and they suck them! Suck them like leeches until they've gotten every last drop of marrow from your bones!"
 
This. Draw Together could have been a keeper, but instead the writers misused the concept and turned it into the animated version of those Selzer and Freidberg Movie Movies.

By that same token, Ren and Stimpy: APC. How could new R&S cartoons with John K. firmly at the helm possibly go awry? By completely abandoning everything that made the old episodes great.
 
I'm gonna have to group Huntik Season 1 in this category.

The series started out really nice, it had a clean, original story to tell.

By Episode 5, it became a series that had a difficult time articulating the story and spent more time on transformation sequences.

The story was still coherent, but I think the writing and animation budget failed.

Season 2's graphic package looks a lot cleaner. I hope the writing and dialogue pickup along with it.
 
I want to second Huntik. It was not a bad show but it has some of the worst pacing I have ever seen in a show. It's almost impossible to keep track of whats going on at times.
 
The Disney movie Atlantis and how. I remember my mom and I were chomping at the bit to see that one, only to be letdown. It has been many years since I have seen it, but from what I remember, I feel that it would have been better if there was less action so it would feel more like a Disney movie.
 
Atomic Betty - I really liked the art for this show and it had a female protagonist, but the writing just never went anywhere. I felt like it could have been more likable with a sharper script.

The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest - I have a love/hate relationship with this show. I liked the premise and felt that him being a little older and having more women appear on the show was cool, but the show itself was kind of schizo and gimmicky. Not to mention, I personally prefer the early 60's cold war setting for Jonny Quest.

Cool World - Wasn't this supposed be horror film before it was hacked to pieces by the studio? I actually liked the original premise.
 
Small world... I'm watching the movie right now. Back when it came out, it was thought of as a possible contender to live action film. An entire 8 years later and the film to my more mature eyes has depth movies these days wish they had and to me anyway pretty darn good writing. And i couldn't sit through 10 minutes of it back then. We'll see as far as the whole CGI vs live action debate though. CGI dates a film more than a live action shot I'd say. The movie now really looks of its time, its only the story that saves it from being nothing more than an overlong videogame cut scene.

Other than that, I'd say titan A. E. I was so hyped for that movie then it turned out mediocre.

Cartoons:

The Batman. :crying: I know there are kids here who will defend it to their dying day like I will defend the muppet babies, but the muppet babies was actually good.

Rambo. garbage.

Bucky O'hare and the Toad wars. This show is a trip, man.

Robocop cartoons. Both of them, the old 80s one and the 90s one. The live action shows were good though.

Um... there's so many...

Spiderman-animated.

X-men Evolution. I was posting here while this series aired and it was THE talk of the boards since it was considered a fresh take on the x-men that would rival the (to me) unbeatable X-men tas. It was crap. i hate evolution and it only got good when they decided to stop with the girly high school drama and make it about grown men and women weilding their amazing powers. I'm guessing the new x-toon is just as bad, but admittedly I've not watched more than an episode. I don't really think I can stomach more of the same story anyway.

Goof Troop. I know I know... it's a decent show... but it had nothing on ducktales or talespin. I was like WTF why'd the quality dip so much when this came out....

Bonkers. I know it's an attempt at re-creating who framed roger rabbit or something but was lame.

Also the Quack pack. Garbage. Ducktales for tweens or something... and it sucked.

I didn't like the house of mouse either. A lot of the once great disney shows suddenly got replaced with stupidness later on for some reason.

Road Rovers. I don't care how many here liked it. I hated it.

The Tick. I have to watch this again, but I can remember feeling the show was just not as good as it could have been.

MIGHTY DUCKS. JESUS why did they even call it the mighty ducks.

Are we allowed to put anime here?

POKEMON. This could have gone down as an animated classic. Instead it'll forever be remembered as the most embarrassing phenomenons to ever occur during an entire generation of kids. I'm sad to say I spent time thinking about ways ash could have become a master. He'll never be a master. He's like the rabbit in the trix commercials. He'll never ever get to taste that sweet cereal.

Dragonball GT. Pointless and extraneous. I don't even care anymore about what happened after goku beat frieza while revisiting the series. It's just a pissing contest without end.


----
PS.
Real Adventures of Johnny Quest REALLY peaked around its second season. The first season was all freaky loo wacka doo.
 
Umm, you do realize this is for toons you thought could have been good but you feel wasted their potential, not every cartoon you dislike regardless of why.

Anyway, Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends was a great premise, but I think it missed much of its potential by being "how big a jerk can Bloo be this week?" Mind you, the two Thanksgiving Specials were nothing short of awesome and really showed what could be done with the premise, but I could've done with few "Bloo is a jerk" eps.

Chowder suffered from a similar problem. Chowder himself started believably childish, but as the series went on, he just got dumber and dumber until all the jokes revolved around how dumb he was. Made worse by just how wonderful and bizarre the world was. I don't want a serious drama or anything, but something a little more low-key on occasion would've helped.
 
Road to El Dorado: I loved the movie when I was a kid (was deeply obsessed with Mesoamerican culture at the time, history geek that I am). Now I only like its aesthetic aspects; the plot was yet another rehash of Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King, and the characters weren't developed enough. It needed a climatic confrontation between the Spaniards and the natives, but that surely would have given it a rating above PG (we all know history wasn't pretty). Dreamworks tried using Elton John to draw people, but the movie still flopped. If only they had put more effort in the writing...
 
I think the entire per annum output of Kyoto Animation certainly qualifies at this point.

I'm still waiting for The Third Raid.
 

Really? I only laughed once through the whole thing honestly. I mean, it wasn't a HORRIBLE movie, but it relied on a lot of unnecessarily crude humor that came off as obnoxious rather than funny.

And I agree about the notion of Fosters having potential but ended up just being a disappointment. I mean, I adored the movie. The first few episodes were alright, but after a while it just got kind of... bleh.
 
THANK YOU.

At first I thought I was the only one who had that problem with the show.

What really pissed me off about it was all the characters actually had more than one trait about them...and then come Season 2, they all get stripped of those traits sans their most well-known one, and they exaggerated beyond belief. I wasn't expecting epic character development, but it's like, "wtf"

Schnitzel was really the only half-way decent character imho :radda:

Also, I liked Chowder's first design better - made him more cat-like. Meow.
 
I actually really enjoyed Atlantis, I thought it was a nice change of pace. :sweat:Also Mike Mignola did the character designs - that just wins.

Anyway, I'm gonna say most of Adult Swim in general. There's a huuuuuge opportunity to turn out some really smart shows but they just keep cranking out crude, and crudely animated cartoons that are more often than not an insult to the medium and their target audience.
 
Surf's Up: Saw it on CN a while ago. I thought it was gonna be different from all the other CG movies out there (with the mockumentary style and all), But near the end, it felt predictable and derivative. (complete with the whole "Winning isn't everything, friends are more important" moral that was stolen from "Cars"). It did have decent character design and good voice acting though.
 
I agree with this.

I used to be a big fan of AS, and I still enjoy the early stuff, but it's become so mindless and overly violent and weird for the sake of it. It's way past the point of surreal and random into the territory of pointlessness. It seems like Venture Bros. is the final remnant of the old era when writing meant something.

It's such a shame to see AS has blown it's potential and delved into such dumb content.
 
I think for the last half decade, my default response has been Gundam SEED Destiny.

I liked Gundam SEED. It wasn't my favourite but enjoyable enough and the ending lacked so much closure that I was hopeful for a sequel. So I was glad when one was announced and that further the new protagonist would be a partial victim of the previous one's actions.
Well, the enjoyment didn't last long. The effective pacing of the original's final run was scrapped for plodding that put the original to shame. The interesting updatings of classic mecha designs were scrapped in favour of literally stealing barely tweaked designs from the 1979 original Gundam. But most importantly, the show couldn't decide who was the protagonist. The initially rough protagonist featured in all the promotional material is robbed of any development, instead backtracking so that the previous protagonist is made to look like a saint. In general, it's a huge mess that just wastes the potential set up by the original which left a ton of dangling plot threads that the sequel doesn't even try to resolve.
 
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