When did young shallow teenagers become good protagonist in cartoons?

L

Lustful Kisses

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Maybe two hours ago I watched Stoked on CN for 5 minutes...I wasn't impressed... surfer dudes and girls griping about their hair...When did cool kids become good guys? When I was kid, the popular kids in television were bad guys. Anyone else wonder what the heck?
 
Popularity has always been idolized in these kinds of kid-centered shows, even if the popular people themselves are jerks sometimes. I suppose you could always attribute it to being Canadian so different cultures would have different ideas of good protagonist qualities, but it's not really all that new since cartoons started starring teenagers.
 
It is a very general movement, not only in animation. Youth, popularity, fame, and pleasure are what is good now when it used to mostly be characteristic of the bad guys.

I don't know the reason behind it all, why popularity is good, why being yourself is bad and only gets you into trouble. It is a shame, how culture seems to change for bad lately.

Of course like us there will come a time when we learn to think for ourselves and decide what is right and what is not and how we think we should live our lives. We can only hope that the next generation of children will be able to do the same.
 
The comments kind of veered away from the topic title, but anyway...

In 1969 Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? arrived on the scene with a leading cast of shallow teenagers and an almost talking dog. There may be earlier examples, such as in Archie comics, though the television cartoon version of that came about later. There definitely were many such shows through the 1970s, most following the Scooby-Doo formula with minor adjustments, but for the most part the shallow teens were going about solving mysteries that were too lightweight to be handled on primetime cop shows. The recent bunch seems to focus on just living an average pathetic Canadian life.
 
Don't forget what the 80's gave us in 'Beverly Hills Teens' and 'Maxie's World', both of which gave us shallow teens just... doing stuff without the mystery angle.
 
... um... that makes no sense in written form you know. XD

Anyway, on topic... this is new? Shallow teenagers doing shallow teenage things has been a staple of kids shows for a long time. It's supposed to be mindless fun, but it ends up being kind of disturbing in that this sort of stuff is oftentimes MORE popular than shows with unique characters and solid writing. O.o
 
I guess Bleach falls into that category, as far as the popular teens part. Also the older Choosen Children in Digimon Adventures 02 were teenagers and popular among their peers.
 
I never got the impression that the lead characters in Bleach, at least the Earthly humans, were at all popular with their peers. They had a tight group of friends, but they're all weirdos in one way or another.
 
I second the questioning of defining the Stoked cast as 'cool'. Even 6Teen only has maybe Caitlin as 'cool' and that was before she lost her credit card. Even there we have no idea how their status at school really is.

The cast of Stoked are just normal teenagers doing crappy jobs in a place they can't afford to vacation to. They like surfing and like stuff other teenagers like. They're not particularly heroic, but they're not particularly bad guy material either...they just are.
 
Stoked isn't an action adventure "Save the World" type of deal. There are no "good guys" and "bad guys", just the main cast whom we (the viewers) are supposed to empathize with and follow throughout the series. Everything isn't black and white.

As for their being "shallow", well, they are teenagers, and teens acting in a manner and doing things that we non-teens would consider to be "shallow" is hardly a new thing; this goes all the way back to the days of Archie. Even some quote "unpopular" teenagers are obssesed with their appearances and like to surf and skateboard and so forth, so I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at here.
 
Everyone, not good as in saving the world or bad like destroying the world. Bad Guys as antogonist...Jerks.

Good Guys as in characters like Arnold, Doug, Pepper Ann, Peter Parker when not Spidey

Bad Guys as in Dash Baxter, Flash Thompson.

It seems cartoons nowadays seem to have Dashes and Flashes as main characters. They may not bully, but the shallowness is still there.
 
The entire teenage experience is pretty shallow, when you really think about. Trying to look good. Wearing the "cool" clothes with the brand names on them. Trying to act and talk a certain way in order to be accepted by your peers, etc.

Thank Odin that's over for me...

Another common stereotype is how rich characters are usually portrayed as being the heavies/antagonists. However, there are exceptions to this rule. This is why one of my favorite character in the now defunct Cartoon Network series Class of 3000 was Eddie Lawrence, because he was a nice kid and a team player despite his being obscenely wealthy.

The point: Not all popular kids are bad, and not all outcasts are good. Sometimes a cartoon character is just a cartoon character.
 
I was never like that, and knew others who weren't. Perhaps they're in the minority, but they exist. It would be nice to see more of them in cartoons rather than the standard shallow/'I want to be popular' type, since I've grown fairly tired of those types of teenage protagonists.
 
It depends largely on who you're supposed to laugh at.

In some shows, you're supposed to sympathize with/relate to the protagonists and laugh at the antagonists. In other shows, you're supposed to laugh at the main cast; Stoked seems to be one of the latter.
 
Perhaps, but I'd rather watch a show about Ginger Foutley than Courtney Gripling. (Maybe a bad example since Ginger tries to be cool like Courtney, but it's more or less what I'm talking about)
 
I'm pretty sure, at the very least, the majority of the people on this forum were NOTHING like those portrayed in this particular show. I suppose we're not representative of the mainstream though.
 
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