One era’s trash is another era’s treasure. The deeper we delve into the age of computers and automated, technology-assisted production, the more true this becomes.
I’m thinking of this because of the existence of nostalgia cable networks metv toonsIt plays nothing but older animation – primarily content produced between the 1940s and 1990s for movie theaters, broadcast networks, and cable; A mix of shorter subjects that ran in front of feature films and single stories or half-hour shows with lots of brief segments.
For our family, it has become the default thing to have the channel on the main television in the house. At first, putting on those programs was primarily a soothing, familiar option when I was a kid or when I watched my younger brother as a kid. Saturday morning network shows of the 1970s such as “Super Friends,” “Bugs Bunny and Friends,” “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends,” or “Scooby-Doo” or shows that were usually local The level ran five days a week. After-school stations, such as “Speed Racer” and “Inspector Gadget.” No one I know has written critically on this topic. The only time I saw it mentioned in newspapers or magazines was in an editorial complaining about the garbage on TV that is polluting children’s minds and lowering their standards.
But the more we did these shows, the more I found myself really Look on them, actively rather than passively, and appreciating them as examples of handmade popular art.
Let’s be clear: this piece does not argue that disrespectful kinds of entertainment are actually works of genius. On most of these things, except for Warner Bros. and Rocky and Bullwinkle and the old Popeye and Tom and Jerry cartoons they show, and maybe “Speed Racer,” which had a dynamic and poker-faced commitment to its own absurdity. The idea was cheap and forgettable for a reason. This was the product. That any personality managed to fit in was a small miracle, given the financial and logistical limitations imposed on him by the owners.
Every “Scooby-Doo” storyline was basically the same, and most “Super Friends” storylines were variations of something very familiar. The stakes were low. Characters rarely die, even in more “serious” adventures. Not much thought was put into telling the story. You can trace an overall decline in the craft in American animation from the 1940s to the 1980s: images became less stunning and expressive, movements became less smooth, and background elements became blatantly reused or simply repeated. (Like when Scooby and Shaggy walk into a haunted mansion and run into a ghost and pass the same door and furniture ten times).
This was not the fault of the animators: they were working with a limited budget and tight timetable given by their employers, who were mostly more interested in selling advertising and making money than in creating anything memorable. Hanna-Barbera studio executives, responsible for the cheap, mediocre, slapped-together Saturday morning cartoons of my youth, as well as the supposedly “adult” cartoons that ran in prime time for most, though not all, Those responsible for such films as “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons”, as well as most of the artists who worked on them, are long gone. I’m sure he would have been surprised to know that his work was still being played again half a century later.
Despite all this, I can honestly say that there is not a single one of these animated works that I don’t respect on a basic level, simply because they are clearly the product of human artists working with their minds and hands. Are. I never used to think about this type of stuff, but now I think about it all the time.
Generative AI didn’t exist until quite recently, so it wasn’t possible to type a prompt into a computer and have it spit out some hideous inanimate nonsense that was “scraped” from artists all over the world and throughout time (i.e. plagiarized without compensation. Went). Even when it was bullshit, someone actually had to do it Make it. Some of them put their hearts into it. The rest turned their backs on it. Making 12 images per second of screen time is hard work.
As a result, during a recent re-watch, I found myself appreciating elements that wouldn’t have caught my attention as a child, such as the fact that all the backgrounds in Scooby-Doo were drawn in a cartoonish, exaggerated manner. Who was familiar to anyone who visited there. You’re still getting the experience of being inside the mind of legendary director Chuck Jones in the Haunted Mansion at Disney World, or even when you watch those cheesy Road Runner cartoons from the 1970s, where most modern photorealistic Disney features are made on nine-figure budgets. But can manage, putting more personality into even the most rudimentary character portraits and desert landscapes.
There was a style to all these cartoons, and it wasn’t the soulless, boring texture that all General AI scenes have in common. Like handwriting (another almost lost art form) if you’ve watched many of these shows, you can tell different signatures apart. You’ve reached the point where you can tell, from the other side of the room, at a glance, Hanna-Barbera from the filming of Terrytoons, or MGM from Walt Disney shorts. Each member of the Scooby-Doo gang had their own distinctive body language and way of running. The renderings in the first season of the adventure series “Jonny Quest” are gorgeous, with thick, dynamic lines and harsh shadows reminiscent of film noir. Shaggy’s surprised or horrified reactions are still really entertaining today. Even less memorable animated characters like Captain Caveman or Snagglepuss had some kind of life force. They didn’t seem to have been picked out by an algorithm.
I love to picture animators in Los Angeles or New York (or later, somewhere in Korea or Japan or Belgium, as a lot of work started to be outsourced in the 80s) and actually drawing on their drafting boards, using pencil. Or to sketch with pen or paintbrush what will eventually be finalized and circulated. Near every desk there were wastebaskets filled with crumpled papers. You can feel the human touch even in the worst or most rushed content. It is a reminder of what we are in the process of losing as technology attempts to eliminate not only labor, but also thought.