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Originally Posted by Marty McFly
I honestly can't stand to watch it anymore. When I was younger, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world, a cartoon for adults. Now I have to watch how far TV animation has fallen and witness its degradation...on both ends of the spectrum, kids' and "adult" genres.
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I you mean the state of current animation, things are roughly fine, but with KND, Avatar, and GAOBAM ended, the cancelations of 12 Oz Mouse and Wonder Showzen...and ATHF having never topped the movie...I see your point.
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There's nothing but terrible chaos in cartoons right now. Because less companies own more stations, there are less choices as these companies want to own as many networks as they possibly can, but don't want to be their own competition. Why do you think they got rid of the profitable Kid's WB line ups? Cartoon network is struggling to find itself as it is, why should Time Warner compete with its own ratings? Face it, cable is supposed to give us more choices, but we end up with less and less. Syndicated cartoons used to be the biggest thing there was. Transformers, TMNT, and the Disney Afternoon line up were not attached to any network. Any station could air them. But then, when kid's programming became unprofitable (due to various FCC rulings, all blind sighting the general public to the real goal of letting massive corporations buy up as many networks as possible), they blanketed afternoon syndication with endless lowest common denominator crap like Judge fill in the blank. Cheap to produce garbage like that.
And the little places that air cartoons that we have left run throwaway programming that isn't clever, or has an audience. Look at Cartoon network the last couple of years when they canned B&M and KND. My Gym Partner's a Monkey? That sounds like one of those scribbly looking T-shirts that you see at Target or Kohls. The fact of the matter is, no one is trying anymore, and the quality shows. No wonder why WB wanted to abandon TV animation, and head for the far more profitable DC DTVs. Loonatics Unleashed? Coconut Fred? lame, derivative , unwatchable, and unmarketable. And Loonatices was pretty much made TO sell toys. No toy line came out of it, and it was double fail.
You can even see they ceased to care, since most of the line up this year was shows that weren't even produced by Warners, and most of them were from Canada, one form Ireland, and one from Hong Kong. Spidey's pretty much all they got now.
The irony of all this is that the Adult cartoons are the most profitable, and they pretty much just fall for the same routine frat boy humor. Assy MaGee? Oh... the character's a butt. That's funny for five minutes... especially since butt characters are nothing new (Ultimate Muscle... cough cough).
But getting back to the subject, I want to see the characters do something amazing. There were some good moments and a few good plots this season. I think that the episode where Homer's mother dies for real, and even uses her death to stop Mr. Burns's evil desires was epic. But then we had a horrible Halloween episode, more "Homer has a new job" bits (though the season opener, where he had no new job was a slightly clever spin on it), and more Eco-Preachy Lisa episodes.
Even a potentially great episode became an unfinnished mess. I'm talking about the new Comic book store episode. There was so much potential in seeing the Comic Book Guy get revenge on the cool new comic shop (somehow), but someone said, "Hey! Instead of finishing the episode and giving closure, let's make fun of Curves gyms!" Feh... Hard hitting satire, no doubt.
What we need is someone to come in, toss these writers aside and bring it back to its former glory and wind it down with an epic ending.