Napoleon Dynamite Animated Series

[Opaque]

I have Boomerang and the Nick Jr channel, I've watched old cartoons from my child hood A LOT over the last few months.

Yesterday I caught Little Bear and watched two episodes, it was so fucking different from all the shit being made today. Remember Laff-A-Lympics? I was watching that about two weeks ago, so fucking good.

[Frogacuda]

90s were a good time for cartoons in a way the 80s weren't. Ren and Stimpy kind of signalled the beginning of an animation rennaissance. Before that it was all action figure horseshit, and before that it was horrendous Hanna Barbera cookie cutter scooby doo ripoffs.

[Fe 26]

'80s cartoons were fucking horrible. Your warm childhood memories are lying to you.

90s were a good time for cartoons in a way the 80s weren't. Ren and Stimpy kind of signaled the beginning of an animation rennaissance. Before that it was all action figure horseshit, and before that it was horrendous Hanna Barbera cookie cutter scooby doo ripoffs.

I have just one question, how good of a date is John Kricfalusi?

[Frogacuda]

I don't mean to imply that all that came after is owed to Ren and Stimpy, but it was around that time that the doors opened up for a lot of cartoons where the animation itself (and the animators) actually mattered.

[Melf]

90s were a good time for cartoons in a way the 80s weren't. Ren and Stimpy kind of signalled the beginning of an animation rennaissance. Before that it was all action figure horseshit, and before that it was horrendous Hanna Barbera cookie cutter scooby doo ripoffs.

There's still a ton of action figure horseshit on TV now, but it's not as good. I'd take the '80s cartoons over the current stuff any time.

[Brisco Bold]

Liked the movie. Trailer for the cartoon? Not so much.

[Dolemite]

The movie was shit. It stands to reason that anything based on it will be shit as well.

[Fe 26]

There's still a ton of action figure horseshit on TV now, but it's not as good. I'd take the '80s cartoons over the current stuff any time.

Frogs just regurgitating stuff that John Kricfalusi has said in interviews. Which shouldn't be taken as an absolute authority. He has a pretty strong personality. At least when he is creatively involved. He'd probably call anything that involved not getting your way "horrible and creatively bankrupt

The thing about the 80s was that by that point, cartoons had become a business. An 80s business at that. They had to make money. They had to make whatever group paying, happy. They had to be PC and not offend parents.

Some people want to act like 80s cartoons were 100% soulless commercials. Which is just logically impossible. You're not going to have that many creative people working on something, and nothing get through. They'd all quit their jobs.


All the bitching about the 80s boils down to artistic kids that wanted to make bugs bunny cartoons for a living, getting a job and it not being what they wanted. All Ren and Stimpy did was tell the business end that it could be profitable to let creative teams have their way. That they sometimes know what they are talking about.

[Frogacuda]

Frogs just regurgitating stuff that John Kricfalusi has said in interviews. Which shouldn't be taken as an absolute authority. He has a pretty strong personality. At least when he is creatively involved. He'd probably call anything that involved not getting your way "horrible and creatively bankrupt

It's true that John K says a lot of hyperbolic stuff about those cartoons, saying that they were made by "people who hate cartoons" and such, but it's just objectively true that there was a MAJOR paradigm shift in how cartoons were made that came around then where animators became more involved in the creative process again in a way they hadn't generally been for some time. I think there's a big difference between cartoons that were written as screenplays and cartoons that were storyboarded by animators.

Some people want to act like 80s cartoons were 100% soulless commercials.

No, I never said that. But those cartoons were produced on very low budgets, written by generally untalented writers who didn't talk to (or usually speak the same language as) the slave camp of animators, and it just wasn't a process that lent itself to good shows.

Even before the whole toy-show craze, there were all those Madlibs Hanna Barbera shows that were all the same fucking thing. There were LITERALLY like 15 shows about teens traveling around with some kind of talking animal/ghost/robot/genie/whatever solving mysteries. And they were all bad because the people in charge of producing them were generally uninterested in their quality.

Ok, Mysterious Cities of Gold was completely awesome, but no one really watched that.

All Ren and Stimpy did was tell the business end that it could be profitable to let creative teams have their way. That they sometimes know what they are talking about.

It's not so much THAT there were creative people making decisions as much as who those people were. The Simpsons was just as much about letting creative people have their way, but those creative people WEREN'T the animators, and so that show is very different. There's something fundamentally different about those two ways of doing things. And it wasn't just Spumco, I think Klasky Csupo also had a big impact throughout the decade.

To think about stuff like Ren and Stimpy, Duckman, Rocko's Modern Life, even Beavis and Butthead... and then look at GI Joe and Ninja Turtles and the Silverhawks and all that shit that was on in the '80s, it's really like they're from two different planets.