TOTAL NOSTALGIA DEATH!!!!!!
I deleted my original response because after some sleep I came back and realized my first response was massively unfair.
Like, thing is I agree with you in one respect: I hate modern media that tries to just ape the past without really understanding it, or else just does the TV Tropes thing of commenting on common trends without actually understanding why those trends happen.
Where I start having an issue is the whole "don't live in the past" thing. Liking old media does not mean you are living in the past, and acknowledging a thing has gotten worse does not mean you're blinded by nostalgia (indeed, my opening post didn't even mention nostalgia).
I honestly don't care much for the demonization of nostalgia in general. Again yeah, people who just recreate the past rather than innovate on it suck, but that's not a nostalgia problem, that's a "lots of people are terminally uncreative" problem--the same as what leads midwits to make sites like TV Tropes.
But nostalgia itself is just positive memories of good times. And I argue that's altogether a good thing. Remembering good times can lift you up when you're down. It also makes you less likely to buy into Mao-like gaslighting where they try to convince people to accept a shitty new status quo by gaslighting them into thinking the old sucks. At the risk of getting a politisperging sticker, its no surprise that certain groups here in the USA often try to pretend the 80s and 90s sucked.
Demonizing nostalgia comes off to me a lot like "people should not be allowed to remember good things. Being happy is a disease. Stop being happy." Why should I want to "cure" something that is 99% benefits, maybe 1% drawbacks? It's sure as fuck not hurting
me at all.
Survivorship bias. You have a handful of good cartoons like Thundercats and tons of mediocre ones that only existed to sell merchandise.
That's just nostalgia on your part, 80's cartoons were almost all just low quality toy commercials. The weird interesting stuff only came around in the early 90's and basically stopped after season 3 of Spongebob (around 2002/3). There seems to have been a complete drought of high quality western animation outside of Disney and Warner Bros. from about the 60's to the 90's.
(not quoting
@>-Ack! 's "overdosed on nostalgia award" post because he doesn't sound like he's being critical).
Responses like this reek of an almost pavlovian reaction, and people just parroting arguments they heard some other nerds make hundreds of times before.
To repeat something I did say before... where in the opening post did I even mention nostalgia? Especially since I mentioned discovering shows I had never seen before? For a case in point, I saw Inhumanoids for the first time just a few hours ago, watched with a friend who had also never seen it... and we both loved it and noticed a lot of things it was doing that were unique.
Or is the assumption that just liking anything before current year is automatically nostalgia? In that case is liking Lord of the Rings (published in the 1950s) nostalgia as well?
I also always get the feeling these kind of responses are coming from people who are judging shows they've never actually watched.
As I said before, I never understood why being based on a toy is a bad thing. It in no way implies a lack of effort or creativity. Heck a lot of these cartoons are
very imaginative.
Not to mention its something people are inconsistent as fuck about. Apparently being toy-based is only bad in two cases: One, its from the eighties and two, its American. Shilling toys is fine if its from the 2000s or later (as proven by how I've legit heard people claim that the 2002 He-Man or My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic are both "artistic" compared to eighties cartoons, when both are way more toy-shilly than any eighties cartoon ever was). And then people praise shows like Batman the Animated Series (which
is a good show, but.... seriously are we going to pretend Batman has
never been a slave to franchising?)
And of course, toy shilling seems to be fine when Japan does it--not to call out
@ShadowAngel785 here but it is weird to see "toy slop" criticized then a bunch of mecha shows held up as "high quality." In my experience, Japanese toy-based shows are 100x more blatant about it.
That's an odd contradiction I've always noticed: the more blatant the media is about toy shilling, the less people will criticize it for that. Meanwhile its cartoons that actually tried their best
not to live up to that moniker that get that heat the most!
My favorite example of this is arguments I've had throughout the years where people will claim the 1983 He-Man is blatantly toyetic (when there's been plenty of interviews with Filmation staff who state they actually butted heads with Mattel because they were storytellers first, advertisers second)... then those same people would turn and say the 2002 revival is more "artistically pure."
Pictured: Apparently this is what an artistically pure cartoon that never once shilled for a toy line looks like.
Another "artistically pure" show, apparently, is My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
Pictured: Again, according to online nerds, this is total artistic purity that never bowed to toy manufacturers.
Early 90's will always be better, cartoons got more adult. 80's cartoons still had some of what I call that 70's/60's "stink" to them. Looking at all Care Bear like shows that came out at that time. Even The Raccoons had the "stink' and I liked that show as a kid.
"90s got more adult" is a narrative that only holds up if your experience with the eighties is very limited... which it sounds like it is if your only frame of reference is Care Bears and The Raccoons.
Don't get me wrong, I don't hate the 1990s--as I said in the opening, I think of it as an expansion pack to the 80s.
But to act like no cartoons were acting "more adult" in the 80s... well... first question I must ask is "how do you define 'adult'?" It's kind of impossible to discuss this farther if I don't know what your standard of "adult" is.
What's something you think 80s cartoons didn't do?
