Take off your rose-colored nostalgia glasses.
As a child of the 80s, I grew up watching the cartoons that defined our generation at the time. I'm sure a good percentage of our listeners here at the ol' Dubya Jee share a similar history. And as geeks, we paid a lot more attention to our cartoons than the average kid. Like video games came to be, toons were an escape for us. We had our He-Man, Transformers, Ninja Turtles, etc. We had a giant proliferation of toys to go with our favorite shows. By most accounts, the 80s were the golden years for cartoons. Well guess what, those "most accounts" are dead wrong. That's right, I said it. I am getting sick and tired of all these 80s kids declaring that "all cartoons today are crap" and that everything we grew up on was vastly superior to what is on now.
That line of thought is patently wrong and I'll tell you why.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on the 80s toons. I loved them as much or more than most of you when I was growing up. I watched them all the time. My room was a shrine to reptiles trained in martial arts and named for renaissance. But many of these shows do not stand up to the test of time.
As much I loved my cartoons, I can look back at them now and know that many of them were poorly written, horribly voice acted, and/or cheaply produced. The most perfect example of this theory in practice is a little show called Thundercats.
I loved Thundercats as a kid. It had a big scary evil villain, lots of action, cool gadgetry tech thingies, and big alien cat people. What more could a 6 year old kid ask for? Not much. But now, as a 27 year old kid, I ask for more. I ask for decent writing. I ask for voice acting that isn't painfully bad. I ask for quality animation. Go find an old episode of Thundercats on YouTube, a torrent, on DVD, or something, I dare you. While you're at it, do the same for Voltron. Prepare yourself for a flurry of crap.
And don't give me that "you can't compare it to current toons because you were a kid then and also they have better technology for animation and whine whine whine bitch and moan" stuff. I can compare shows I watched as a kid to shows I watch now because I can watch the old shows now and compare them to what's on now, now. And as for the animation technology? That dog don't hunt, sonny. I believe that some old shows did indeed have good animation for their time. Some shows didn't. It's the exact same right now. DuckTales had good animation for the time. Thundercats did not. Justice League Unlimited has great animation for the current time. Boondocks does not.
And on top of that, I can provide you with examples from decades and decades ago that had better animation than many of the shows of the 80s. Old black and white Popeye cartoons from Max Fleischer had better animation than Thundercats. So "older technology" is no excuse for poor animation.
Leaving the animation aside, the art, the writing, and the voice acting can all be fairly compared across time periods with no bias for technology. Thundercats is my whipping boy for this article, so I'm going back to it again. Sweet merciful crap, what horrible voice acting. Devoid of any real emotion and worse pausing than Shatner on slo-mo.
There's no doubt that the 70s and 80s were a great time for cartoons, but as we grow up, so do our expectations. And some of us that watched those toons in those early days grew up to start making their own cartoons. Those people are making great cartoons now. Yes, we have crap filler shows like Yu-Gi-Oh and The Wild Thornberries (I absolutely LOATHE anything by Klasky Csupo), but we also have masterpieces like Invader Zim and Samurai Jack.
What say you?!