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Old 01-22-2023, 05:08 PM   #45
Zog The Magnificent
Stone Warrior
 
Join Date: Nov 2015
Posts: 566
Quote:
Originally Posted by neatoman View Post
I do not exclusively hold FW to this standard, it might seem like it because it's a TMNT forum but I can assure you that it is universal. The problem with comparing these types of shows to the silent era of film making is that color and sound wasn't possible. As in, the technology for making film in color and sound literally did not exist. Even if we point out that some movies lack color and sound after the technology was invented due to budget or artistic reasons, we can still hold them accountable for bad editing or poor lighting, because those are just straight up flaws that don't need to exist and shouldn't exist.

"We need to cut out quality control and pump out 65 episodes as quickly as possible to get that syndication deal" is not an excuse. It's not like it was it literally impossible to slow down production and oversee the quality to prevent these types of problem. Those types of shows shouldn't be excused like there were technical limitations, if you only have the budget and time to make 13 episodes per year, don't try to make over 45.

It is not an unfair standard, saying that it is just comes across as an empty attempt to deflect criticism.
It's not a perfect analogy, I grant you, but the point remains. Whatever they theoretically COULD have done is irrelevant. It's why the cartoons from that era that truly did have effort put into them were all the more special. Because regardless of what was technically possible, the simple fact is that Cartoons just were churned out in mass quantities for the primary purpose of selling toys. You could still end up with something that was entertaining, but it doesn't change the fact that almost no major cartoon all the way up until later in the 90s had any amount of faith in them from the higher ups, who saw them purely in terms of toy sales. They had ham sandwich budgets, deadlines that were too strict, and were outsourced to so many different animations studios, written by so many different people, that quality control just wasn't possible in the same way.

It's pointless to say what COULD have been done because it WASN'T done, not only in practice but in terms of where the industry was at the time. To use another analogy, it's why I have problems with the way people look at the past in general. It's unfair to compare it to the standards of today, because they simply weren't the standards in the past. You have to judge things within their own context. The '87 cartoon's context is the late 80s and 90s, where animation on television wasn't taken seriously by almost everyone, and cartoons as a rule were rushed, shoddily put together productions for the purpose of selling toys. It's not like today, where even the worst cartoons are still technically well put together in general. We judge a bad cartoon differently today. The best cartoon in the 80s would never stand up against even some of the mediocre cartoons today. We judge cartoons more critically today because they CAN be better much more easily. The same can't be said of most of the cartoons from the 80s and 90s, and that includes TMNT.
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