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CelticPredator
Oct 11, 2013
🍀👽🆚🪖🏋

Our president is basically the main character of the show. An egotistical, narcissistic moron hellbent on taking over the world. But can't get anything done right because he's just so dumb and bad at everything.

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Detective No. 27
Jun 7, 2006

CelticPredator posted:

Our president is basically the main character of the show. An egotistical, narcissistic moron hellbent on taking over the world. But can't get anything done right because he's just so dumb and bad at everything.

That metaphor doesn't hold up, because at his worst, even Zim had a human heart. Probably a few of them.

RC and Moon Pie
May 5, 2011

Did Married With Children have any opinions that are really awful in retrospect?

While in college, Bud was arguably raped by a woman that was played for laughs, but I'm struggling to remember much of anything else that was really terrible.

Al insulted overweight women (and everyone else) but the writers always made the women to be awful individuals. Seemingly every one of his targets was written to deserve it. Considering the attitudes of the era and the show being edgy for the time, I'm assuming there has to be something.

mind the walrus
Sep 22, 2006

I do recall a hell of a lot of scantily-clad women shoved into the show for no real reason, accompanied by the sounds of rabid shelter dogs, but if I'm being totally honest the only difference between that and today's CBS sitcoms is that there's less barking and the tits are sometimes attached to more than one main character.

Calaveron
Aug 7, 2006
:negative:

RC and Moon Pie posted:

Did Married With Children have any opinions that are really awful in retrospect?

While in college, Bud was arguably raped by a woman that was played for laughs, but I'm struggling to remember much of anything else that was really terrible.

Al insulted overweight women (and everyone else) but the writers always made the women to be awful individuals. Seemingly every one of his targets was written to deserve it. Considering the attitudes of the era and the show being edgy for the time, I'm assuming there has to be something.

NO MA'AM was like prototypical MRA but we were in on the joke that Al and his friends were all a bunch of losers for being in it

mind the walrus posted:

The story goes that Nick was trying to make a new teen block for Saturdays, like SNICK only not-terrible, but I've never seen any sources to back it up. I think you're talking about the Vasquez comic "Squee" or something? I don't know. The only other property I know the guy for was Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and the title alone should tell you why it would never have made it to TV.

In Latin America there was this Saturday morning block called SLAM with XTREME ATTITUDE that played Invader Zim and Yugioh and other poo poo that might've been aimed at more uh, mature audiences relative to your generic mid '00s Nickelodeon viewer

CelticPredator
Oct 11, 2013
🍀👽🆚🪖🏋

Detective No. 27 posted:

That metaphor doesn't hold up, because at his worst, even Zim had a human heart. Probably a few of them.

In 4 different colors no less.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
Married With Children kinda cheated by portraying pretty much everyone as terrible people in every way they possibly could.

And in retrospect, 90s Nick prepared us well for adult life in portraying it as a Kafkaesque surreal nightmare where everyone with a modicum of power is out to gently caress you over for the pettiest perceived gain and expect you to smile while they do it.

Though I do fondly recall the Catdog episode with the action figures that's basically a big and accurate Beanie Babies spoof, which is a pretty good lesson on why the collector's market for anything is a racket.

Ghost Leviathan has a new favorite as of 07:36 on Aug 5, 2017

Arivia
Mar 17, 2011
Okay, here's another one from Sex and the City that requires some setup. Everyone's familiar with Sex and the City in general right? Four white women basically sleeping, boozing, and living an independent life amidst the lights of New York. It was super popular and tuned into a lot of culture at the time, so a lot of celebrity appearances and parts were involved. Someone mentioned Donald Trump earlier, and that was par for the course - celebrities showing up as themselves, or sometimes in guest parts, but being a major part of the show. I watched it in like the late 2000s so after it had ended but before the second, wretched, movie.

So in Season 3, the main cast head to Hollywood for a vacation to get all that glitz and glamour instead. At a bar, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) gets picked up by Vince Vaughn and they have a fling. Okay, cool. Nothing the show hasn't done before. It was a surprisingly drama-free plotline, but that's okay. Vince wines and dines Carrie as only a hollywood star can - all the best restaurants, elaborate gifts, a huge pad. They fall asleep in each others arms after having sex - and get woken up by Carrie Fisher, who's shouting at Vince, her assistant, for bringing a random girl home to her house. See, it turns out the actual plotline is that Vince is supposed to be Carrie Fisher's assistant but is misusing her celebrity and money to sleep around, including with Carrie. But between the time the episode was shot and the time I watched it, Vince Vaughn blew up from everyday kind of schlub who didn't stick out at all and made sense as an assistant to Vince Vaughn the everyday kind of schlub who's also a Hollywood A-lister himself. There were signs that Vince's character was playing beyond his means, but I totally missed the signs and the drama because it was loving Vince Vaughn, of course he can get a table at Spago or whatever.

So yeah. In the course of like 5 years this episode went from meh to completely incomprehensible just because one of its cast members became famous.

WampaLord
Jan 14, 2010

Reading that at first, I mixed up the two Carries and thought she walked in on herself and was like "Man, I do not remember the SatC episode with cloning..."

RareAcumen
Dec 28, 2012




CelticPredator posted:

Our president is basically the main character of the show. An egotistical, narcissistic moron hellbent on taking over the world. But can't get anything done right because he's just so dumb and bad at everything.

This sounds more like it'd fit Plankton than Zim, but I never really watched Invader Zim when it came on so I can't say that for certain.

Inescapable Duck posted:

Married With Children kinda cheated by portraying pretty much everyone as terrible people in every way they possibly could.

And in retrospect, 90s Nick prepared us well for adult life in portraying it as a Kafkaesque surreal nightmare where everyone with a modicum of power is out to gently caress you over for the pettiest perceived gain and expect you to smile while they do it.

Man, not only did they predict MRAs, they even predicted It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia!

Marmaduke!
May 19, 2009

Why would it do that!?
My wife watches and rewatches all of the new Doctor Who stuff regularly (why no, she doesn't have a job, how did you know?), I'll have to ask her how the episode where the doctor is on Big Brother​, and another character is on The Weakest Link, seems these days.

To me it seems so weird that it makes me think I might've imagined it.

mind the walrus
Sep 22, 2006

RareAcumen posted:

This sounds more like it'd fit Plankton than Zim, but I never really watched Invader Zim when it came on so I can't say that for certain.
Zim is Plankton with half the age and twice the meth. I say that for certain.

quote:

Man, not only did they predict MRAs, they even predicted It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia!
IASIP is basically a "split the difference" between Married with Children's chuckles about working class sensibilities in the post-Reagan world (W.Bush for IASIP) and Seinfeld's "the main cast are the worst human beings now watch them gently caress up everything they touch."

Marmaduke! posted:

My wife watches and rewatches all of the new Doctor Who stuff regularly (why no, she doesn't have a job, how did you know?), I'll have to ask her how the episode where the doctor is on Big Brother​, and another character is on The Weakest Link, seems these days.

To me it seems so weird that it makes me think I might've imagined it.

I don't know how it would play if you've never heard of/seen either The Weakest Link or Big Brother, but the fact that these elements are so dated and cartoonishly exaggerated in the episode works in its favor, adding to the surreal "wtf is this place?" nature of everything. Plus you've got Simon Pegg in-between Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz in a throwaway role.

mind the walrus
Sep 22, 2006

That reminds me of a great early episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation for this thread: The Outrageous Okona.

It's already a bad episode with some really dated poo poo in the A-Plot, but the B-Plot really shoots it forwards. So, the A-Plot is about some "dashing rogue" named Okona whom we're told is very charming and incorrigible but really seems like Lone Star from Spaceballs wearing the Puffy Pirate shirt from Seinfeld. He's played by the guy who was in the Rocketeer and he seduces Teri Hatcher from under Riker's beard. You should be halfway to late 80s Bingo by now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDDETyWoVMY

Anyway, you know how in Star Trek they love to have the B-cast act as stand-ins for various types of autistic tendencies? Well in early TNG the show loved to put Data in the "hyper-literal and super technical" type of autistic, leading to the B-Plot:

Data doesn't "get" comedy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GL25SaeOBg

Now this is bad enough on multiple levels. The jokes all suck. Data is repulsive whenever he's not being well, Data. Whoopi Goldberg is :smug: as all poo poo about how far above this material she is. Then we get to the climax of carbon-dating. The one bit that puts this episode exactly in 1988. Data goes to the Holodeck to conference with one of the greatest comedians in history.

Joe.

Motherfucking.

Piscopo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJsYY93FSCI

Want to hear the kicker? The bit that really sells this all the way to the bank? Joe Piscopo rewrote his lines for the episode because he thought they were too lame. There's loads I didn't mention about the episode-- Wesley's boy-crush on Okona, Brent Spiner mocking the poo poo out of Piscopo during their scenes together, Whoopi Goldberg's astonishingly bad joke about 'noids, the Okona plot involving a kidnapped princess... it's one of the real stinkers guys. Worth a hate-watch.

evobatman
Jul 30, 2006

it means nothing, but says everything!
Pillbug

RC and Moon Pie posted:

Did Married With Children have any opinions that are really awful in retrospect?

While in college, Bud was arguably raped by a woman that was played for laughs, but I'm struggling to remember much of anything else that was really terrible.

Al insulted overweight women (and everyone else) but the writers always made the women to be awful individuals. Seemingly every one of his targets was written to deserve it. Considering the attitudes of the era and the show being edgy for the time, I'm assuming there has to be something.

Married with Children is now a sci-fi show about how it's possible to support a wife, two kids, a dog, a car and a mortgage with one shoesalesmans income.

Deltasquid
Apr 10, 2013

awww...
you guys made me ink!


THUNDERDOME
Not necessarily a tv show example, but in the late 90's to mid-2000's there seemed to be this belief that ecoterrorism would become an actual thing. This means Civilization: Call to Power is pretty dated (one of the world wonders you could build was a ecoterrorist nuke hippy van: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxBVc2cSFeI) but so is final fantasy VII in some respects (at least the very early parts of the game).

Most impressively is how Tom Clancy's Endwar (released in 2008) nailed a few things (The UK left the EU, the EU shifted towards a federal state with its own army in the wake of growing discontent with NATO and the USA's lack of commitment, resurgent Russian nationalism caused troubles in Eastern Europe, etc.) but then also went into some weird plotline about ecoterrorists blowing up an American space station with EU hardware to prompt a new world war?

I feel like any plotline with ecoterrorists can be traced to a particular mood we had at the time.

Solice Kirsk
Jun 1, 2004

.
Ecoterrorists could have been a real thing if anyone actually cared about the environment. But no one does, so they don't really exist in any numbers that matter. I blame the cancellation of Captain Planet after only 6 seasons.

mind the walrus
Sep 22, 2006

Because I'm like that, I have to post the Baywatch/Gilligan's Island crossover that actually happened. It is a thing that exists. Gilligan and Mary Ann met the cast of Baywatch, and made out with two of them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRQo1KOeFOI

And if you're not a masochist with over an hour to kill, the recap in Baywatching is great. The "protagonist" character of Baywatch in the first two pre-Pamela Anderson seasons was a guy named Eddie, and Baywatching takes a special delight in mocking him for being an ultra-weenie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW_VgXgUixw

Solice Kirsk posted:

Ecoterrorists could have been a real thing if anyone actually cared about the environment. But no one does, so they don't really exist in any numbers that matter. I blame the cancellation of Captain Planet after only 6 seasons.

If Tim Curry couldn't save the Earth, no one could.

Deltasquid
Apr 10, 2013

awww...
you guys made me ink!


THUNDERDOME

Solice Kirsk posted:

Ecoterrorists could have been a real thing if anyone actually cared about the environment. But no one does, so they don't really exist in any numbers that matter. I blame the cancellation of Captain Planet after only 6 seasons.

Yep, that's a good summary. These games are dated because they were developed in that narrow timeframe where a) enough people understood global warming/the environment is a Big Deal and b) people assumed we'd give enough shits about the environment to kill people over it. Once it became clear that the strongest reaction global warming can evoke is a few lukewarm protests, the archetype that never was lost its appeal.

doverhog
May 31, 2013

Defender of democracy and human rights 🇺🇦

Deltasquid posted:

Yep, that's a good summary. These games are dated because they were developed in that narrow timeframe where a) enough people understood global warming/the environment is a Big Deal and b) people assumed we'd give enough shits about the environment to kill people over it. Once it became clear that the strongest reaction global warming can evoke is a few lukewarm protests, the archetype that never was lost its appeal.

Just give it a few years, there's gonna be a lot people both dying and getting killed over countries near the equator becoming uninhabitable. :hb:

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.

doverhog posted:

Just give it a few years, there's gonna be a lot people both dying and getting killed over countries near the equator becoming uninhabitable. :hb:

It's already happening, see Syria.

Pick
Jul 19, 2009
Nap Ghost

BioEnchanted posted:

I think Zim has some humour that still works, mainly the absurd situations, like the members of the Irken Empire who's planet was turned into a giant weapon factory, so they intentionally make garbage weapons that serve no purpose like the giant robot that turns invisible - except the pilot can still be seen floating in midair, and it has a really short power cable that needs to be plugged in at all times.

I have learned to ignore fan bases. One of my favorite episodes of anything is the one about door to door sales because we've all been in either that situation or one where that's one hell of a metaphor.

You work yourself to death for capitalism. At the end there is no prize.

Pick has a new favorite as of 15:29 on Aug 5, 2017

oldpainless
Oct 30, 2009

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I'll never understand anyone liking rugrats

Guy Mann
Mar 28, 2016

by Lowtax
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNtcWpY4YLY

Deltasquid posted:

Not necessarily a tv show example, but in the late 90's to mid-2000's there seemed to be this belief that ecoterrorism would become an actual thing

The period between the fall of the soviet union and 9/11 was a weird one for entertainment because we had no idea what nebulous evil to dedicate ourselves to fighting so just clung onto whatever was convenient, whether it was identity politics or conspiracy theories.

trickybiscuits
Jan 13, 2008

yospos

cubicle gangster posted:

did you just guess this in the hopes that that's what it was or what because they were both from modest backgrounds and were super big theater/performing nerds who were trying to make intentionally contrarian comedy from the age of something like 14. I don't disagree that they may have slowly realized that 'not giving a gently caress & being contrarian' does have adverse effects when people start taking it seriously but the idea of it being a libertarian conspiracy because they are Rich White Males® is bollocks.
A lot of South Park and plenty of Family Guy is really clearly (to me at least) made by middle-class white men with zero interest in the experience of someone who is not also a middle-class white man.

Recently I got the entire run of Reno 911! on dvd. Humor about incompetent cops abusing their authority has aged . . . weirdly.

Mister Kingdom
Dec 14, 2005

And the tears that fall
On the city wall
Will fade away
With the rays of morning light

evobatman posted:

Married with Children is now a sci-fi show about how it's possible to support a wife, two kids, a dog, a car and a mortgage with one shoesalesmans income.

Not to mention the multiple life-ending injuries suffered by nearly all of the cast.

Zamboni Rodeo
Jul 19, 2007

NEVER play "Lady of Spain" AGAIN!




oldpainless posted:

I'll never understand anyone liking rugrats

more like old...

You know what? No. I totally agree and I'd emptyquote this all day if I could.

Calaveron
Aug 7, 2006
:negative:

Mister Kingdom posted:

Not to mention the multiple life-ending injuries suffered by nearly all of the cast.

Memories of the episode where Al and Jefferson try to install satellite tv still makes me giggle to this day

The Moon Monster
Dec 30, 2005

oldpainless posted:

I'll never understand anyone liking rugrats

It's a fun show when your age is in the single digits.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
Rugrats is a lot funnier whenever they focus on the parents.

And the comic strips are better than they have any possible right to be.

RareAcumen
Dec 28, 2012




oldpainless posted:

I'll never understand anyone liking rugrats

Same, but Rocket Power.

Mister Kingdom
Dec 14, 2005

And the tears that fall
On the city wall
Will fade away
With the rays of morning light

Calaveron posted:

Memories of the episode where Al and Jefferson try to install satellite tv still makes me giggle to this day

And Jefferson was a much better partner-in-crime for Al than Steve.

Punished Chuck
Dec 27, 2010

Deltasquid posted:

Most impressively is how Tom Clancy's Endwar (released in 2008) nailed a few things (The UK left the EU, the EU shifted towards a federal state with its own army in the wake of growing discontent with NATO and the USA's lack of commitment, resurgent Russian nationalism caused troubles in Eastern Europe, etc.) but then also went into some weird plotline about ecoterrorists blowing up an American space station with EU hardware to prompt a new world war?

I feel like any plotline with ecoterrorists can be traced to a particular mood we had at the time.

They were just kind of general terrorists (a loose coalition of anybody pissed off at the global power structure iirc) and then they turned out to be Russians pretending to be a grassroots militia movement to forward their own agenda like the "volunteer fighters" in Ukraine so EndWar's still pretty prescient for a game where French troops can fight Russians to seize the White House.

Wheat Loaf
Feb 13, 2012

by FactsAreUseless
I liked Rugrats a lot when I was little. It's got a bit of an off-putting art style in retrospect. Same with Rocket Power.

I don't think a lot of the Hanna Barbera cartoons from the 60s and 70s have aged well, especially in comparison to what Disney and Warner Bros were doing at the same time.

BioEnchanted
Aug 9, 2011

He plays for the dreamers that forgot how to dream, and the lovers that forgot how to love.
The main thing with Rugrats was that it had some potential for interesting characterisation, and some parts of it capitalised on it. Examples being the contrast between how some of the characters lived - Take Tommy Pickles, Chuckie Finster and Angelica, in order of age, and look at how their bedrooms are portrayed :

Tommy is helpless, being less than a year old, or just over in the post-Dill episodes, his bedroom is a mess because he simply doesn't have the motor skills to pick up after himself (as far as his parents are aware), or the physical strength with some of his toys.

Chuckie, being 2 years old for most of the show, is a Toddler. He can move on his own power, has developed a few motor skills and has an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. Possibly because his Dad's too busy to pick up after him every step of the way, Chuckie is relatively independent - his room is always tidy as he not only picks up after himself, he has developed systems based on shape and colour, like how he puts his blocks away by arranging them into a large organised, symmetrical cube-kind of structure, with the unusual pieces placed logically (Semicircles go inside arches, that kind of thing). The rest of this room follows the pattern as well, he nests his Teddybears all in one corner of the room, each of them protecting one thats one size smaller like a very soft Matryoshka doll.

This means that Angelica, as the eldest of the children before Suzie shows up, has no excuse - her room is a tip partially because of her terrible parenting and personality - she never had to tidy up and doesn't bother to because she is a spoiled idiot child, and my least favourite character honestly.

There is a similar contrast in the episode where they make their own home movies, also the best episode of the entire show due to this characterisation - the characters show their developmental stages through their art - Tommy is barely able to render abstract scribbles that only have rudimentary meaning (The squiggles representing him and his parents are inside a rough circle that represents his house, that kind of simplistic relationship) while Chuckie forgoes his fathers paperwork and instead neatly places a chalkboard on the easel to add his own stuff - clever decision as he is simply able to erase former images and redraw the new situations without making a mess, and his images have greater meaning - his images resemble people in some way, he has appropriate colours, and he understands the basic shapes that objects take although not yet grasping scale.

Rugrats could have been much better than it was, and these aspects are why it was so disappointing to have characters who should be at the stage in their lives in which they constantly change, to remain as static as any teenage character would have been.

BioEnchanted has a new favorite as of 18:49 on Aug 5, 2017

Guy Mann
Mar 28, 2016

by Lowtax
Rugrats was the animators who made the first few seasons of The Simpsons taking what they learned and trying to use it for their own show. Up until that point all kids cartoons on television were either reruns of theatrical animated shorts, lovely Hanna-Barbera shows that were as old as your parents, and toy commercials like Transformers. It's objectively not a great show and it hasn't aged well but there really wasn't anything like it at the time and it was a happy medium between the grossout zaniness of Ren & Stimpy and the incredibly boring sitcom antics of Doug.

Wheat Loaf
Feb 13, 2012

by FactsAreUseless
Doug is a show I enjoyed when I was younger (both the Nick and Disney versions) then about 12-ish years ago when I started going on Internet message boards, I discovered that people loving hated Doug, and I could never understand why. Even years later, I don't understand why people hate Doug, because there's just so little there to hate.

I've read that apparently Doug had one of the most detailed pitch / series bibles ever put together for a TV show, animated or otherwise, which is interesting (the most detailed I've seen myself is Ron Moore's BSG series bible) even though I've no idea if it's actually true.

I liked the Disney ones. Is there anything about Recess that's particularly dated? I think it's managed to age fairly well.

BioEnchanted
Aug 9, 2011

He plays for the dreamers that forgot how to dream, and the lovers that forgot how to love.
I liked the characterisation of Peter Prickly and Muriel Finster - Prickly was just like TJ when he was a kid, but eventually life caught up with him and he had to start taking himself more seriously, until he took it too far and became an rear end in a top hat, until he noticed what he'd became and dialled it back a bit.

Muriel just got old and never really noticed until everything just gave out. Then bitterness set in, possibly as she saw her best friend get married and have a family and generally have a more fun life, while she ended up alone with nothing but her own regrets. Then her time babysitting Spinelli and as a result rekindling her old friendship with her mother let her see that it wasn't too late to still enjoy herself, although she still keeps up appearances at the school by remaining as grouchy as ever to retain the control that she has over the playground.

I also liked the "twist" that Menlo and TJ used to be super close as kids, but then just grew into very different people - but TJ still goes over to Menlo's for his birthday as he still likes him on some level :3:

Mister Kingdom
Dec 14, 2005

And the tears that fall
On the city wall
Will fade away
With the rays of morning light

Wheat Loaf posted:

Doug is a show I enjoyed when I was younger (both the Nick and Disney versions) then about 12-ish years ago when I started going on Internet message boards, I discovered that people loving hated Doug, and I could never understand why. Even years later, I don't understand why people hate Doug, because there's just so little there to hate.

I liked Doug. Hell, I even bought the box set a couple of years ago. I thought it handled kid issues fairly well. I didn't know people hated the show.

Then again, I have discovered on the internet that there is always somebody who hates something as much as you like it. More so in some cases.

Wheat Loaf
Feb 13, 2012

by FactsAreUseless
I feel like Doug was the Disney version of Hey Arnold (even before it was on Disney, when they were both on Nickelodeon), which always felt more down-to-earth to me, even when I was younger. I mean, Hey Arnold had "Helga On the Couch", and I don't think Doug ever had anything like that.

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Croccers
Jun 15, 2012
Has Round The Twist aged well?
Uhh....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46HbXeL83iQ&t=1564s
There was also an episode when one of the male characters pissed on tree and got pregnant.
Australian shows got weird.

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