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Senerio posted:DuckTales is another good choice. Specifically the recent remake. I know a lot of the fanbase seems to disagree but I also have a bit of a soft spot for the Netflix She-Ra series (and you don’t really need a whole lot of knowledge of the He-Man franchise to enjoy it either). Also if you liked ATLA/Korra, The Dragon Prince on Netflix is also pretty good in my opinion.
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May 10, 2021 14:08
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The Bee posted:I think you have a good point with it being easy to see the show as episodic. Nowadays, you watch a serialized show, and its pretty obvious what you're in for, whether you mean most modern cartoons, the explicitly storyline driven Avatar, or even something with a background arc that comes to fruition like Mystery Inc. But its really easy to come into Danny Phantom expecting something episodic only for the serialized elementd to sneak up on you. Maybe its because it was surrounded by shows like Jimmy Neutron and Fairly Odd Parents, so you were primed for more like that and didn't expect the serialization to hit. Danny Phantom was iirc contemporary with Teen Titans that does something similar, basically sneaking serialised storytelling into an otherwise episodic show, and it turns out that the target audience was desperate for that kind of thing.
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May 10, 2021 14:19
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I legitimately think those two shows were trailblazers, and if it wasn't for them we may not have had fully serialized works like Avatar. I kinda started this whole topic because of a big convoluted toxx that's lead to me doing a Jake Long watch/review, and I can kinda see the influence already because man did the first episode of Jake Long give me some similar vibes.
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May 10, 2021 14:44
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Since we're talking about superhero shows Kid Cosmic is worth a watch as well.
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May 10, 2021 14:55
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There's probably a connection here between the hunger for serialized American cartoons and the early 2000s explosion in anime piracy but I don't really know enough to articulate it.
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May 10, 2021 14:57
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YggiDee posted:There's probably a connection here between the hunger for serialized American cartoons and the early 2000s explosion in anime piracy but I don't really know enough to articulate it. I mean, Jake Long literally has anime-style transformation scene, right down to some really bad CGI model spinning, and it sure doesn't strike me as a show that needed to break one of those out to save on budget. So I'm right with you on that one.
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May 10, 2021 15:03
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YggiDee posted:There's probably a connection here between the hunger for serialized American cartoons and the early 2000s explosion in anime piracy but I don't really know enough to articulate it. I think the fact that anime is willing to target an older demographic has a lot to do with it. In the early 2000s, western cartoons (non-comedy) that targeted anybody older than a tween were basically non-existent. (Western cartoons that target an older audience are still pretty rare even now.)
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May 10, 2021 15:50
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IShallRiseAgain posted:I think the fact that anime is willing to target an older demographic has a lot to do with it. In the early 2000s, western cartoons (non-comedy) that targeted anybody older than a tween were basically non-existent. (Western cartoons that target an older audience are still pretty rare even now.) We're seeing a shift though, with more teen animation (Korra, Inifnity Train, Kipo) and the way descendants of the 90's AMV scene/ DC direct to video scene have birthed Castlevania, Harley Quinn, Blood of Zeus, etc.
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May 10, 2021 15:55
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Started out yesterday showing my six-year-old clips from the original Wacky Races on YouTube, and now he's addicted to the 2017 remake. Nice work, Dad. (Actually, despite it having a reputation for being terrible and nobody watching it - which the show itself commments on - from what I saw I didn't think it was that bad. Although it's ridiculously part-mockingly, part-admiringly referential to the original, which is weird because it's a half-century-old show that the target audience will probably never have seen.) My son's other current addiction is Talking Tom & Friends, which god help me had some for-the-parents jokes that drew a genuine laugh. [Tom writing on a whiteboard] Tom: What I'm all about is F-U- [Drops his pen; the other characters gasp in shock] Tom: -N! [The others sigh in relief] Ben: Being a nanny isn't meant to be fun! It's meant to be hard and kind of awful, like being an adult!
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May 10, 2021 16:08
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YggiDee posted:There's probably a connection here between the hunger for serialized American cartoons and the early 2000s explosion in anime piracy but I don't really know enough to articulate it. It’s more that explosion of anime piracy in the 90’s expanded people’s ideas of what cartoons could be and created the desire for serialized cartoons that told more solid stories. However it wasn’t until the mid 00’s when millennials started taking the reigns on creative projects that you started to see those influences make it to TV with shows like Teen Titans, which I’d argue was the first show to put these influences into practice.
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May 10, 2021 17:53
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readingatwork posted:It’s more that explosion of anime piracy in the 90’s expanded people’s ideas of what cartoons could be and created the desire for serialized cartoons that told more solid stories. However it wasn’t until the mid 00’s when millennials started taking the reigns on creative projects that you started to see those influences make it to TV with shows like Teen Titans, which I’d argue was the first show to put these influences into practice. There were serialised cartoons before then - Wyrd Sisters, The Adventures Of Sam. Yeah, poo poo you're never heard of. Gargoyles too. But I've never watched Teen Titans or Ben Ten. Do you wanna talk more about these anime influences, this is kinda cool to hear about these cartoons I've never really had much time for, but I'm interested in this.
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May 10, 2021 18:04
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Someone else saw The Adventures of Sam! I mostly remember that for being one of the few cartoons to feature Australia and the protagonist appearing to die at the end of every episode. (yes, it does the pulp cliffhanger thing)
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May 10, 2021 18:48
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Artelier posted:Thank you for all the recs! I have already done Steven Universe, Over the Garden Wall*, and Gravity Falls, all very good choices that slipped my mind when I posted. Have you watched or rewatched Gargoyles recently cause if not watch that
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May 10, 2021 19:09
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Xiaolin showdown had significant serialized elements too right?
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May 10, 2021 19:38
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ninjewtsu posted:Xiaolin showdown had significant serialized elements too right? As far as I’m aware, yeah. I forget, did that show actually get a proper ending?
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May 10, 2021 19:40
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It did, in the finale while the struggle isn't over, that's because the struggle with never be over, and the ending is marked by Raimundo officially being made the leader of the monks as they go off for off-screen adventures. It's a complete enough story, even if only because every primary villain got their own apocalypse except for Hannibal Bean, so they all got time in the spotlight. I liked how aspects of that show recurred too, like that the Shen Gong Wu were not always benign - sometimes they had their own thing going on and were the main threat, such as whenever the Heart of Jong got put into play, or during the cool idea that was the Heylin Comet. Also Mala Mala Jong's recurrence as the Fearsome Four owned. Mala Mala Jong was a creature created by assembling certain shen gong wu, initially IIRC the Jet Bootsu for the feet, the Two Ton Tunic for the body, the Third Arm sash for the right arm, the Fist of Tebigong for the left, and the Helmet of Jong for the head and infusing them all with the Heart of Jong to bring them to life, forming an invincible warrior with incredible strength, the ability to fly, a far reaching grip and the ability to see out the back of his head due to how the Wu's powers interacted, and every time a character would try to fight him weilding a Wu of their own he'd just take it from them and infuse them into himself, making himself more versatile and powerful. The Fearsome Four were when enough of the Shen Gong Wu were active enough that 4 separate bodies could be created, triggered by the Emperor Scorpion (primary power to control Mala Mala Jong, but if he obtains the scorpion himself he can make the other 4 warriors IIRC.) Those were really strong ideas, and I liked that the Heylin comet was kind of an inversion of MMJ (the result being that while that comet is active in the sky, using a Shen Gong Wu would result in them gaining a mind of their own, forcing the wearer to obtain any other Wu they could and adding it to their body. By the end of the episode Raimundo is basically a pile of artifacts using him as a substitute Heart of Jong) As you may guess, I loved that show despite it's faults.
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May 10, 2021 19:57
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Now talk about Xaolin Chronicles 
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May 10, 2021 19:59
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Electric Phantasm posted:Now talk about Xaolin Chronicles Was the sequel not that good or something?
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May 10, 2021 20:00
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My and my brother watched that whole mess as it was airing as we both loved the original show. It was so much wasted potential, unlike the amazingly imaginative showdowns in the original show, Chronicles just had every showdown boil down to "Climb a setpiece to the top", so despite the attempt at adding intrigue with CG elements it just fell flat, because Xiaolin Soccer (not the movie, one of the lategame showdowns is a soccer match with 4 villains v 4 heroes, and it's AMAZING), the Basketball game, Lighthouse Tag (keep out of the light while trying to knock the other into it) and Truth or Lie (which were all from the OG show) were all just more fun to watch. Also they didn't have the rights to the names for a lot of the Shen Gong Wu, so the Orb of Tornami got called the lame "Orb of Tsunami", and the Shroud of Shadows got replaced with basically a lovely knockoff version that didn't even work properly, like it's batteries were dying or something. The new character was a ludicrous clusterfuck because while he was an Omi clone called Ping Pong it wasn't a racist writing thing, he was given that nickname because of his energy, bouncing around like a ping pong ball. The writing was such a mess the characters even made fun of it, like there is one scene where Chase Young is randomly doing martial arts stances then an egg happens and eventually hatches in a flashback and his new assistant Shadow simply reacts to that with "Seriously? That's how I was born?  "There were moments where we were both laughing but we were laughing AT the show and no longer laughing with it, like when Chase is watching the other characters in a scrying pool and he randomly dunks his hair into it and flips it baywatch style while laughing maniacally. We found that hilarious for the wrong reasons. For those who haven't seen the original, this is the Lighthouse Tag clip - every time a Showdown happened, it would completely transform the area into a magical badass version of itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNWGxPm3rAc BioEnchanted fucked around with this message at 20:13 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 20:09
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I think that TV in general was starting to experiment more with longrunning plots as opposed to staying episodic, and after the 80s established childrens' television as a potentially lucrative thing worth putting money into, it was natural that format would find its way into cartoons eventually, but it sure did help speed things along when anime started getting brought over and hitting it big with their more narrative-focused stories. The internet I think also played a big part, because serialization really benefits a lot from giving newer viewers access to watch the older material to catch up on the story. Shows targeted at adults would be able to rely on home media distribution and being able to hunt down recorded VHS copies, and in Japan they were way more into home media and anime wasn't even relegated to exclusively children, but cartoons in America didn't get reliable home media releases, either coming out long after the fact like how Transformers released VHS copies of the 1984 show in 1995, only releasing a few episodes at a time instead of whole seasons, or even slicing up and reorganizing episodes (which seems weird now, but it seems like an extension of how TV shows treated cartoons. Hannah Barbara would slice together their old shows in new ways just like how Warner Brothers and Disney would slice together their old theatrical shorts). With the internet, it was much easier for people to just circulate old episodes through :files: so the drama wouldn't be as prone to fall flat to audiences who wouldn't know what's going on. It's interesting for me to piece all this together from information about VHS publication dates because I grew up watching VHS. The original X-Men animated series was actually really good about maintaining the episode order and was released while the show was coming out, so it's an exception that was actually pretty easy to follow all the drama. And I watched it alongside Rocky and Bullwinkle, which got released on VHS on around the same time, and was serialized in the old-fashioned way back in the 60s where half of the runtime was recapping the last episode. It also got released on home video in the 80s, but it was on CED, the weird and ill-fated vinyl video format. 
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May 10, 2021 20:11
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA
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May 10, 2021 20:24
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One thing that's also changed is the hunt for syndication is falling by the wayside thanks to the internet and streaming. Before, the emphasis on episodic series was so that when a series was syndicated networks didn't have to worry about audiences being confused if they missed an episode or 10. They could mostly just jump back in with no problem. But that sort of thing is becoming less and less necessary as it's now easy enough to just find the missing episodes and fill in what was missed
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May 10, 2021 21:37
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Larryb posted:Was the sequel not that good or something? It's terrible in pretty much every way possible, the one thing it did remotely right was make more clear something the original series didn't do as well of a job with as it could have, regarding the fact that Omi is not ethnically Chinese and no one has any idea what the hell he is besides probably human
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May 10, 2021 21:48
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From what I understand, at least when it comes to kids' media, networks care at least as much about streaming views and social media engagement as they do TV ratings, if not moreso.
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May 10, 2021 21:48
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Omi and Ping Pong were straight up racist. I mean, come on. That poo poo is bad. Decent show, though. R he original, not the seqeul. Danny Phantom needs a reboot that has an explicit no Butch rule. Also, Danny should be trans masc, if only because so many fans latched on to that and it be cool.
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May 11, 2021 01:04
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFR1fP384MY
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May 11, 2021 01:06
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Open Source Idiom posted:There were serialised cartoons before then - Wyrd Sisters, The Adventures Of Sam. Yeah, poo poo you're never heard of. Gargoyles too. Ok so basically serialized cartoons existed going way back but they were generally the exception to the rule and when they did happen their approach to storytelling was very much of the time. For example, shows were rarely planned with an ending in mind and generally didn’t change up the status quo. Continuity existed to reinforce the formula, not break it. I distinctly remember that one of the things that absolutely blew me away about Sailor Moon was that they actually wrapped up the Queen Beryl storyline, killed the big bad, and then did something completely different involving time travel in season 2 (ok, not COMPLETELY different but you get my point). That’s like TMNT outright killing Shredder/Krang and then never bringing them back. It just wasn’t done. I can’t speak for Ben 10 but I distinctly remember that Teen Titans was the first show to overtly try and do what anime had been doing up to that point. In addition to some... questionable appropriation of anime expressions it also written with complete storylines in mind with villains dying (sort of) and the entire formula shifting in the aftermath. Other shows like Avatar would then do the same thing only way better and this trend would continue until Adventure Time along with it’s cohort of shows showed artists how to more organically integrate the elements they like about anime into their work while keeping their own voice and leaving out the more cringey elements. Now all those elements like “having a plot with consequences” are super common and nobody really considers it “anime” inspired anymore. Basically, TT walked so Amphibia could run.
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May 11, 2021 02:02
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readingatwork posted:I can’t speak for Ben 10 but I distinctly remember that Teen Titans was the first show to overtly try and do what anime had been doing up to that point.  
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May 11, 2021 02:08
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bfBhIM5tb4
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May 11, 2021 02:12
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exosquad
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May 11, 2021 02:14
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Reboot was pretty serialized in the later seasons, complete with the timeskip that turns the kid sidekick into a grizzled gun-wielding cyborg man. But that was a 90s series, probably not germane to the discussion. I just like talking about ReBoot.
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May 11, 2021 02:22
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Covok posted:Omi and Ping Pong were straight up racist. I mean, come on. That poo poo is bad. Decent show, though. R he original, not the seqeul. Well that was the point I was making Omi and Ping Pong aren't ethnically Chinese(which is probably why they had the latter be from France), they're some sort of mystery race, though yeah having someone raised in China have Yellow skin isn't exactly the best optics
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May 11, 2021 03:23
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huh, i thought teen titans came out in the same year as TLA, but apparently it was out two years earlier but yeah, as far as serialized shows go, i think it should have been clear that viewers wouldn't get turned off by something that they had to follow closely since that's pretty much how almost every anime that existed turned out to be and they've been doing that sort of stuff for decades.
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May 11, 2021 03:48
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readingatwork posted:That’s like TMNT outright killing Shredder/Krang and then never bringing them back. It just wasn’t done. I think that in the later seasons of the original 80s TMNT, they did just not bring back Shredder and Kang after a point, although they didn't really get defeated in any climactic scene. One of the Sonic animated series in the 90s had a big climactic scene defeating Robotnik, and the series intended to move on to a different villain after him, but for better or worse it didn't get renewed. And half points for Transformers sort of killing its entire cast and moving on, except Megatron wasn't exactly dead and Optimus Prime didn't stay dead, and the characters who did stay dead were kind of superfluous in the massive cast anyways. Come to think of it, I remember TMNT 2003 might've had some kind of long-term narrative that it was pursuing, but it's been a long time and I don't really remember it. I know that the final few seasons kinda got screwed around between weird network decisions and being made into a sort of sequel series. readingatwork posted:I can’t speak for Ben 10 but I distinctly remember that Teen Titans was the first show to overtly try and do what anime had been doing up to that point. Honestly I think Xiaolin Showdown might've been more directly copying the most popular animes of its time. It pulled a lot of chinese aesthetics and cultural influence, but the whole gotta-collect-em-all storyline crossed with supernaturally amped-up contests seems like it was really copying Pokemon (which was the most popular kid's show when it was new) and Yu-gi-oh. Teen Titans had some heavy Japanese influences, but I feel like more of their influences came from shows that didn't actually get brought over to America at the time, or weren't really meant for kids in the same way. Or even from manga. Although it's really complicated tracking influences coming from Japan because it's hard tracking dates on when things make it over from Japan and the fact that Japanese sources picked up influence much faster from America than Americans did from Japan. Heck, by the time America started being openly influenced by contemporary anime, you also had European anime-inspired works popping in like Code Lyoko, Winx Club, Totally Spies, and W.I.T.C.H.. YggiDee posted:Reboot was pretty serialized in the later seasons, complete with the timeskip that turns the kid sidekick into a grizzled gun-wielding cyborg man. But that was a 90s series, probably not germane to the discussion. I just like talking about ReBoot. That was another example I looked at when poking around how lack of home media distribution led to series not gaining traction, and ReBoot got only half of season one released on VHS while it was airing, which definitely didn't help when it got turbofucked by being bounced between networks. I'm pretty sure season 4 never even aired in America. At least not on Cartoon Network or any of the channels I was watching. Kinda made the creators' attempt at continuing as a webcomic in the hopes of getting picked up again even more futile, because it was basically impossible for anyone to have seen the whole series without  .
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May 11, 2021 04:43
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speaking of W.I.T.C.H., what's the verdict on it? i caught a couple episodes back in the day and it seemed decent.
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May 11, 2021 05:00
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It was OK but it suffers from Gregg Wiesman's habbit of planing for six seasons when he keeps getting the two.
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May 11, 2021 08:28
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I imagine Ixus Naugus was meant to replace Robotnik, but it's for the best cause Robotnik is great in basically every iteration of Sonic no matter how good or bad the games are. The comics tried killing off Robotnik and just found ways to bring him back in the end
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May 11, 2021 09:17
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drrockso20 posted:It's terrible in pretty much every way possible, the one thing it did remotely right was make more clear something the original series didn't do as well of a job with as it could have, regarding the fact that Omi is not ethnically Chinese and no one has any idea what the hell he is besides probably human Omi is basically just a competent Krillin. Though yeah, the design is still pretty iffy from any angle. Not surprising that animated shows go all in on streaming, because their target demographics (kids and nerds) are the first adopters for those, and absolutely don't watch broadcast TV anymore.
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May 11, 2021 10:04
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The 80s imported serialised cartoons like Mysterious Cities of Gold and Ulysses 31.
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May 11, 2021 15:33
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Covok posted:Also, Danny should be trans masc, if only because so many fans latched on to that and it be cool. Wait what.
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May 11, 2021 18:01
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