I can't tell whether the 90s were a little renaissance in animation, or whether it's just my imagination.
As gcatalfamo and yareally pointed out, Disney had Duck Tales, Darkwing Duck, Chip n Dale and so on.
Meanwhile at Warner Brothers they had Tiny Toons, Animaniacs and of course the excellent Batman: The Animated Series. I rewatched it recently and, unlike a lot of my nostalgic favourites, it has held up beautifully.
MTV backed Beavis and Butthead and Aeon Flux. Fox backed King of the Hill and was riding the wave of some of the best of the Simpsons.
And let's not forget Klasky Csupo -- most famous for Rugrats and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, they were also responsible for my favourite "cartoon for grownups", Duckman. I love that show -- if it'd been around for the DVD era we'd probably still be watching it.
Edit: and Nickolodeon (forehead smack) with The Ren & Stimpy Show and Rocko's Modern Life.
Gargoyles was amazing. The movie (which shows the story of their "creation") and some of the early episodes can get surprisingly dark (but deep).
Another show along those lines is "Batman Beyond" (a dark "reboot" of Batman in which an aging Bruce Wayne enlists a young protege to be the next Batman in the near future).
In both shows (particularly Batman Beyond), if you ignore some obvious elements that point to them being shows for kids/teenagers, they almost seem like they were originally intended for adults, and then later rewritten to be targeted towards younger audiences.
If you enjoyed Gargoyles and you're still inclined to watch animated shows, please check out two of Greg Weisman's other creations: The Spectacular Spider-Man (not to be confused with the currently airing Ultimate Spider-Man [1]) and Young Justice (currently in its final season).
This actually supports my theory that the 90s were the greatest decade in popular culture history. It jibes so well with the (arguable) Golden Age of Rap/Hip-Hop music as well as the Seattle Grunge and Hard Rock renaissance.
Rap in the 90s had Biggie, Tupac, Wu-Tang, NWA, Nas, Outkast, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z and a Tribe Called Quest.
Rock in the 90s had Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Radiohead, the Smashing Pumpkins, Oasis, Weezer, Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, and Rage Against the Machine.
It also had some of the greatest movies of all time in the 90s as well: Goodfellas, Terminator 2, Trainspotting, Fight Club, the Matrix, Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, the Big Lebowski, Boogie Nights, Schindler's List, Rushmore, and Pulp Fiction.
Now, I may be looking through with rose-tinted glasses (and having my adolescence back then, how could I not?), but let's just make it official, and not only with just cartoons. It's almost empirical that the 90s were the greatest decade of American Popular Culture.
After the 1960s came the stagflation of the 1970s.
The late 1930s saw World War 2.
I suspect that my generation will look on the 90s as a benign time, and we would be right.
The Cold War was over, the War on Terror was yet to come, the Internet was taking off and economic growth in most countries was uninterrupted for almost the whole decade.
I agree with all of those great things except grunge. While fun then and even now, to my ear it lent little to later music - a dead end. It's easy to find Radiohead, rap, and Rage's influence through eras, but which post-grunge groups of note were influenced by Nirvana?
Grunge led to Foo Fighters, Live, Collective Soul, Silverchair, Bush, even Alanis Morissette. That led to Creed, Matchbox Twenty, Puddle of Mudd, Staind, Audioslave, Incubus, Nickelback. The next wave included Shinedown, Seether, and The Vines, as well as mainstream pop incorporation such as with Avril Lavigne. After that I lost track because millennials don't seem to know how to rock out.
After that I lost track because millennials don't seem to know how to rock out.
They just don't understand, man.
But seriously, millennials are all about 'the party'. They were really young during the roaring late 90's and weren't burdened by the issues of the 00's. If pop music is the a good measure of a generation's status, you wouldn't know of bad times from all the Katy Perry, Kesha, Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Justin Bieber, Pitbull, and Maroon 5. Every one of those except Katy Perry currently has a top 20 hit.
You can say that for just about any time in human history. there was a lot of shoddy entertainment in the 90s too, and there were lots of great stuff from the 80s and 00s.
With that being said, I feel like animation is following music's lead, in that there's still some fantastic animated shows being produced, but they're not necessarily the most popular ones: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dan Vs., Adventure Time, Gravity Falls, (straying into adult) Archer, American Dad!, half of what Adult Swim shows, etc.
(On an semi-related note, I do feel that nostalgia is the main factor in what time period of animation people feel is best: I mostly associate good animation with late-90s/early-00s Cartoon Network shows, but I know quite a few people who do the same with 80s cartoons.)
Bruce Timm, who was involved in Batman: TAS, and later The Adventures of Superman, and then Justice League Animated, is now doing Green Lantern, all of which are excellent.
I don't think we should get too wistful, because a lot of the greats are still around making material on par with some of their earlier, classic work.
I remember watching interviews Vince Gilligan, who went from writing for X-Files (and Lone Gunmen) to Breaking Bad, and back in the days of X-Files, the budgets were just obscene, which allowed them to do whatever they want. The now-ancient Superman cartoons also had a by our standards insane budget, and a lot of that probably explains why today feels slightly different, nostalgia aside. I mean, just consider back when Tom & Jerry and Donald Duck cartoons employed entire orchestras to score the sketches.
I remember accidently seeing My Little Pony on TV in the 90's while zapping for good cartoons. It was something with flying pink pony's with long hair that looked all girly to me.
Why do I hear so much about My Little Pony on the internet these days?
It was rebooted (is that the right word) a few years ago. Lauren Faust had to quit the project, unfortunately, and the show isn't very interesting now, but you definitely should check out the first season. It is unironically one of the best cartoons out there.
I babysit a lot of my friend's kids (lacking kids of my own, I'm available for this) so I get to watch A LOT of children's TV. Perhaps its just an "in my day..." sort of bias but I do feel like the 90s were of higher quality than content of today.
Most hit shows of the '00s till today are invariantly tied up in trying to peddle toys of some kind. Certainly older shows were used for merchandizing but it seems like today the toy comes first and the show is developed around it. Plot development is optional and stories need not build off one another or refer back to past episodes. Out of those the early seasons of Pokemon and Digimon weren't bad and there are certainly a few neat shows on Disney & Nickelodeon (The Fairly Odd Parents and Sponge Bob come to mind).
Aside from that it seems like a lot of shows lack the complex story telling of shows like Batman: TAS, Superman: TAS, Spiderman, Beastwars, Reboot, XMen, and the others mentioned in the article. While not really a kids show (seriously - watch this as an adult and its 10 times funnier), Freakazoid outdoes most content peddled to adult audiences.
Another thing I've observed that seems to be detrimental to animated shows is the rise of cheap soap opera style live animation in place of cartoons. Probably the biggest example is Miley Cyrus' early career (Hannah Montana, etc). These shows let companies monetize in more ways since you can create concert movies and albums and the fanbase will follow the actor/actress to multiple shows. Benda Song[1] has spent nearly a decade jumping between various TV shows on the Disney channel (and playing a pretty good 'crazy girlfriend' in the Social Network IMO). I'm sure there are many other examples (all the faces seem to look the same between Disney's shows) but she stands out to me since she's seemingly the only cast member my age in shows filled with 12-16 year olds.
edit: On doing a little more reading, I didn't realize that this was actually banned up until 1984 when the Reagan FCC rescinded regulations on children's television. Those regulations had previously banned "program-length commercials," a category under which shows like this would have fallen.
The 80s were particularly notorious for toy-based animation.
Transformers is the most famous example. Characters would be killed off and replaced to boost toy sales.
Still, there's a difference between a show where you make the toys and then get the nastiest animation done to create a 22-minute advertisement; vs making a halfway decent show and flogging some merch on the side.
In other media, one might compare the original Star Wars trilogy with episodes I-III.
In one sense, I'm glad they had the freedom to kill characters. Hearing that Optimus Prime had been killed was one of the more emotional moments of my childhood, even if they only did it to replace one truck with a bigger truck.
I don't recall characters being killed off in the Transformers cartoon show. A good chunk of the classic characters were killed off in the first ten minutes of the theatrical movie though. After watching several characters get killed in the span of thirty seconds, keep in mind we had never really seen this before, they then top it off with killing one of the most beloved characters in the series.
I was a kid at the time. I was shocked. I cried. About a fictional cartoon robot. I didn't feel that way again until that jerk Whedon killed Wash.
The result was that since the reaction to all this was rather severe, kids were devastated, that they actually changed the storyline in the GI Joe animated movie they were producing at the time. Duke was supposed to be killed in that movie but changed it so that he actually survived instead. Of course, they show that he survived by just adding in a background voice at the end of the movie saying that Duke was going to be okay! If you watch the scene where he is injured, with the idea he wasn't supposed to survive, you can tell by the way the scene was animated that he clearly dies right then and there.
On a side note, most of the time none of the GI Joes would be killed in the comic book, just faceless Cobra soldiers. But I remember one comic where a few of the Cobra soldiers commit mass murder by shooting up several of the Joes that were being held prisoner in a pit. As usual, older characters to be replaced by newer ones to freshen up the toy line I suppose.
I think the Star Wars as toy commercials began with Return of the Jedi because of the Ewoks. To complete the setup they then made a TV cartoon featuring the Ewoks.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (had lots of turtle toys when I was a kid). My brothers and I would mix them in with other random toys, like Lincoln Logs and do cross-overs. Nothing wrong with cartoons and marketed toys in moderation and expands creativity if done right.
There's also Genndy Tartakovsky with Samurai Jack and Dexters Laboratory, although I realize they're in early 2000 - they're both excellent. Sad that his first foray into feature films is Hotel Transylvania.
It seems like he still wants to make awesome, and is at least well aware of the challenges he faces in selling people on buying into what may be a limited (albeit super dedicated audience)
Loved Dexter's Laboratory. I missed most of Samurai Jack, but what I did see was good. Adult Swim is currently showing Sym-Bionic Titan on Saturdays at 2am (so that would technically be Sunday at 2am). It's pretty good too.
Did they make more than one season of Sym-Bionic Titan? I thought the art was gorgeous, but it felt like a decent high school drama, an awesome "large mecha fighting monsters" drama, but that the two halves didn't blend well at all. The strongest episodes were the ones that were either entirely in the high school, or entirely in the suit.
I also enjoyed the political stuff & (oddly) the robot dating the cheerleader.
That's exactly what I said to my wife. At least he'll get to keep making films. At one time, he was heading up the Astro Boy movie. That might have been amazing.
She's incredibly mousey, and her personality is so over the top quirky, a detailed biographical account would come across like she's a fictional character written by a clumsy simpleton who is trying to write a serious novel but can't get his mind away from the scripts he's written for after-school animated cartoons. Like, people would read it and say shit like, "I can't suspend disbelief for that. Maybe don't try so hard? Like, don't make her a germophobe like Monk with the agoraphobic/Fluttershy thing and on top of all that, and then the whole 'Flowers!' thing like she's the baby skunk from Bambi. And then you even add the Anime girl trope with shoving stuff piled to the top into her closet. Who's going to believe all that at once?" (Actually there's even more stuff I'm leaving out.)
Except she's actually un-self-consciously like that and just thinks of herself as "a normal girl." I doubt you'd actually be able to imagine what that's like, except that it's a little bit like living with an Italian Greyhound, but a lot more complicated, and sometimes she talks even less. I'll never meet anyone like that again, and I'm kinda sad and glad at the same time.
She probably thinks the same about me. (My quirks are completely different, though.)
It's not your imagination, but if you were a kid in the 1990s, then you probably didn't watch a lot of new kids' cartoons in the 2000s.
- Futurama (it counts as 2000s if Simpsons counts as 1990s)
- Avatar: The Last Airbender
- Invader Zim
- Samurai Jack
- My Little Pony (well, 2010)
I'd personally pick "Avatar: The Last Airbender" over any of my childhood "Disney Afternoon" favorites. I'm actually kind of jealous of kids growing up with better programming. The other side of the pond (no, the other pond) gave us some great stuff too, such as Shinkai and Kon.
I think Shinkai deserves special mention, because he got a theatrical release with no staff and no funding: just himself in his apartment with a PowerMac G4 (although his fiancée helped with voice acting). We'll only be seeing more people like him as time marches on and the technology becomes affordable for hobbyists.
My guess is that the 2010s will be my favorite decade for animation, at least for the next ten years or so.
Samurai Jack is perhaps one of the most perfect animated shows of all time. Hyperbole be damned there is something about that show that struck a nerve with me. Some episodes had almost no dialogue. It was just awesome.
You could call it renaissance. It was a pinnacle of what we learned about hand drawn animation for the past century. Then, a new method entered the arena (CG) where principles had to be taught all over again, so we lost a bit of time while catching up. A decade or so, you can see CG finally having nice animation now (pixar doesn't count since it spawned 2d principles in 3d, along with PDI).
Last 2D animation that advanced 2D animation was Tarzan from Disney.
As per my memory there was something of an explosion of animated tv shows during the latter half of the eighties and first half of the nineties.
I guess part of this was that they were animated 'cheaply' by japanese studios, pretty much all animated shows were, including Duck Tales. Later they were getting stiff competition from korean studios, and I believe that today the vast majority of US animated shows are being animated in korea, just like most Disney 'direct to video' releases.
It was a good example of when outsourcing works. Japanese animation was still cheap at the time (mid 80s to early 90s). Same thing happened with Korea after that. No idea where that will move next.
It gave the show's developers the opportunity to think about what did and didn't work instead of managing the politics.
As gcatalfamo and yareally pointed out, Disney had Duck Tales, Darkwing Duck, Chip n Dale and so on.
Meanwhile at Warner Brothers they had Tiny Toons, Animaniacs and of course the excellent Batman: The Animated Series. I rewatched it recently and, unlike a lot of my nostalgic favourites, it has held up beautifully.
MTV backed Beavis and Butthead and Aeon Flux. Fox backed King of the Hill and was riding the wave of some of the best of the Simpsons.
And let's not forget Klasky Csupo -- most famous for Rugrats and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, they were also responsible for my favourite "cartoon for grownups", Duckman. I love that show -- if it'd been around for the DVD era we'd probably still be watching it.
Edit: and Nickolodeon (forehead smack) with The Ren & Stimpy Show and Rocko's Modern Life.