tl;dw but I'm gonna guess it comes down to "they sure did shit out a lot of cheap, terrible cartoons for a decade". I mean seriously Joe and Bill won an Oscar or two for their lovingly-animated Tom & Jerry shorts at MGM but once the theatrical shorts market dried up they started making stuff with the fewest drawings humanly possible, that rested largely on voice work. "Illustrated radio" is a term that animation nerds throw around for the vast majority of their output.
Then Turner bought them I think, then WB bought Turner, and IIRC just kinda merged them into Cartoon Network because having two studios in the same city is kind of a waste or resources. Also the whole rise of sending work overseas to Asia where your dollar buys an order of more magnitude more pencil mileage; animation was at the forefront of hollowing out the American industry by substituting cheaper labor across the globe.
Or at least that's what I recall from growing up in the seventies and being in the animation industry in the nineties/00s.
People who were kids with no taste and a lot of time to fill during the time they dominated Saturday Morning have fond memories of their characters but that stuff really does not age well. It maybe ages slightly better than most Filmation work. Slightly.
> People who were kids with no taste and a lot of time to fill
Very true. I grew up in Germany, but we got most of the cartoons that were popular in the US (plus some Japanese stuff) as well, dubbed.
One particular situation from the late 80s or early 90s that I remember was when the channel that showed the Smurfs, which I liked, was somehow repeating the same episode over and over again. Maybe there was an error at the station (I wouldn't be too surprised if nobody paid that close attention to the children's programming), or maybe I just happened to catch all the reruns in strange coincidence. It's hard to remember the specifics.
But what I do remember well is that I watched that episode, one that I actually did not like to begin with, over and over again, disliking it more and more each time. When the episode started playing and I realized that it was that episode again within the first few seconds, I got so disheartened and disappointed. And then I continued watching it.
Nowadays, that's a pretty funny, if not somewhat bizarre, memory. As an adult, there is no way I would force myself through any show's episode that I don't like anyway repeatedly, why did I "have to" as a child? Similarly, I remember a few entire cartoons that I was not particularly fond off, or sometimes actively disliked, and I still watched those, too, "because that's what was on TV right now".
Apparently, realizing that I had agency over how I spend my own entertainment time was something I had to learn better growing up.
I have fond memories of those characters from my childhood and my adult hood when [adult swim] came along and gave us fresh and absurdist/adult-oriented versions of some of our favorite characters.
Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, The Brak Show, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, Sealab 2021, many others.
At around 7 minutes he goes into Hanna Barbera's "Limited animation" including a surprising reference from Dextor's laboratory to the cheap animation style and that animator Chuck Jones called it "Illustrated radio".
The video puts the 80s era of licensed properties/toy cartoons (GI Joes, Transformers, etc.) as the first thing to really challenge HB due to the , and that during that time HB struggled to adapt and compete and that the Smurfs seemed like their only success during the era.
He says they had a revival after being bought by Turner in the 90s and making decent cartoons for cartoon network but were ultimately absorbed by WB animation after the companies merged.
Would anybody be able to provide a summary? I find the narrator's intonation unbearably forced and unnatural, such that I don't feel like listening to it non-stop for 21 minutes. Scorn me, berate me, and downvote me if you will; but to my mind, poor narration in long-form video essays is no different to printing academic journals entirely in Zapfino.
The video doesn't actually live to its title, as there's an important link missing, but here's what I got:
They did very well for a long time, but then the 80s arrived. Suddenly there were better shows (Transformers, GI Joe) during the entire week rather than just weekends, and they lost a lot of market. They later went to Cartoon Network and created some new classics (Powerpuff Girls and co), but for some reason (not explained) that wasn't enough.
> I find the narrator's intonation unbearably forced and unnatural
I'm glad I wasn't the only one. There's a lot of misplaced upward inflection which I assume is the narrator's normal speaking voice that they're desperately trying to fight against to sound more "professional". In fact the phrases that don't do this sound like they've been pitch-corrected downwards (maybe they have, maybe it's some weird auditory illusion).
> to my mind, poor narration in long-form video essays is no different to printing academic journals entirely in Zapfino
The what, as far as I understand the video was 80s toy tie-in cartoons such as Heman, GI Joe and transformers that ushered in a new style of animation and a new way of financing them, ultimately leading to HB dropping in value and getting purchased.
What the video doesn’t touch on is:
Who are these studios animating them? According to the video, the entire tv animation market was more or less HB. How could these studio rise out of seemingly nowhere and produce high(er) quality animation?
Why wasn’t HB part of these tie-ins? According to the video, they owned the market. Aren’t they the obvious choice to ask to produce, when you want a cartoon about your new toy?
Why didn’t HB pivot towards more action animation in the 80s, when going up against TMNT and Dino riders?
Are you talking about the merchandise tie ins? They weren't higher quality, certainly not on the 80s. Most of them seem to be Japanese and have that Anime thing of getting away with animating as little as humanly possible.
A someone who was heavily consuming cartoons over the relevant period, I find it remarkable that there was no mention of either WB/Looney Toons or the growth of Japanese animation. Makes me suspicious of his conclusions.
I'm generally suspicious of anybody making long-form video essays on YouTube about such subjects. Unless they were in the industry, I tend to believe I'm merely having a Wikipedia article and perhaps a few interviews, taken from blogs or perhaps online magazines, regurgitated to me.
That's what Did You Know Gaming seems to be, for instance.
tl;dw: they got lazy at the end of the 70s and started copying their own hits over and over, putting out the same type of shows. Toy companies got involved and created their own toons, with a superior quality, and they were done after that. Cable also hit, and they couldn't keep up with the demand, so also lost additional market share.
Sturgeon's Law isn't a new thing. The key has always been to find the best stuff. I think that's easier than ever.
I have to agree that virtually nothing Hanna Barbara has done has stood the test of time. Despite being so politically incorrect a lot of it has been buried, I can think of a few Looney Tunes that are still pretty good (Bugs Bunny conducting the orchestra is quite popular, I'm also a fan of a particular Bugs Bunny cartoon in which he stays overnight in Dracula's castle), and Disney's stuff is still generally watchable and enjoyable, but I'm sitting here racking my brains and despite having seen some of those shows as a kid, I literally can not relate to you a single episode of any of them.
I watched this video yesterday evening and this morning this post is at the top of my feed. It is not the first time a specific topic ends up on both pages.
Is YouTube information being sent to Hackernews or is it just coincidence that my YouTube suggestions are in sync with Hackernews posts?
When something interesting is trending on [insert popular platform] that this audience finds interesting, of course people are going to submit it here. This site is 100% submissions based.
It's really just a clickbait title. If you look at his channel, he has an entire series called "What's RUINING/RUINED," all of which is basically him reading Wikipedia while playing cartoon footage.
"but don't say why Hanna-Barbera couldn't/didn't compete."
The answer is more a business answer than a creative one. When a business is highly, highly successful pursuing a certain strategy, that strategy becomes part of their internal cultural identity. The entire business is macroscopically and microscopically arranged around exploiting this particular opportunity. When the strategy stops working, such a culture will virtually inevitably double down on the strategy, which in a way makes things even worse, because that usually works for a little while. By the time it becomes undeniable the strategy is no longer functional, they've usually fallen too far behind to compete. And since usually the only way to see "the strategy is unsuccessful" is precisely that there is competition pursuing other strategies eating your lunch, the competition is always already there by the time the message finally gets through.
From the outside it's so easy to see. Early in the process it's easy to say "Jeez, guys, you've got literally 10 times the resources of anyone else in this industry, why not 'just' pivot your strategy?" But it's not a matter of just pivoting; it's a matter of rewriting the entire company's culture and way of doing business. That's why even when a company tries to co-opt the new strategy, they almost always undercut themselves somehow, either by being unable to really commit, or if they are in the rare case where they succeed, they undercut themselves by trying to use this success to pivot back to the original strategies they know and love. It can literally be easier to found a brand new company and start from scratch than to reform an existing company. There's a lot of examples of a couple of creatives disgruntled about the cultural limitations of their employers going and forming a business that follows a strategy that does very well, exploiting a niche their original employer never could have. (I'm more familiar with the video game industry, where Activision is an example of that, but this sort of things happens a lot over there. Or at least it did, before video games required so many people.)
Companies that develop cultures that can navigate this mess are rare. It doesn't seem that way, because of survivorship bias. For instance, you might say "But jerf, Disney seems to manage it OK", and, yeah, they do, and that's a non-trivial part of the reason why they are a decade-spanning behemoth of multiple industries, rather than a 1940s also-ran. And there's a lot of other companies you can name that can too. But those are precisely the rare survivors.
Ted Turner trying to make the cartoons more family-oriented is what ruined HB.
In the 90s, they just had put out SWAT Kats. That could've been hugely marketable, but Ted thought it too violent, along with many other HB properties in development at the time. He changed that, and HB began a painful decline.
[+] [-] egypturnash|7 years ago|reply
Then Turner bought them I think, then WB bought Turner, and IIRC just kinda merged them into Cartoon Network because having two studios in the same city is kind of a waste or resources. Also the whole rise of sending work overseas to Asia where your dollar buys an order of more magnitude more pencil mileage; animation was at the forefront of hollowing out the American industry by substituting cheaper labor across the globe.
Or at least that's what I recall from growing up in the seventies and being in the animation industry in the nineties/00s.
People who were kids with no taste and a lot of time to fill during the time they dominated Saturday Morning have fond memories of their characters but that stuff really does not age well. It maybe ages slightly better than most Filmation work. Slightly.
[+] [-] anyfoo|7 years ago|reply
Very true. I grew up in Germany, but we got most of the cartoons that were popular in the US (plus some Japanese stuff) as well, dubbed.
One particular situation from the late 80s or early 90s that I remember was when the channel that showed the Smurfs, which I liked, was somehow repeating the same episode over and over again. Maybe there was an error at the station (I wouldn't be too surprised if nobody paid that close attention to the children's programming), or maybe I just happened to catch all the reruns in strange coincidence. It's hard to remember the specifics.
But what I do remember well is that I watched that episode, one that I actually did not like to begin with, over and over again, disliking it more and more each time. When the episode started playing and I realized that it was that episode again within the first few seconds, I got so disheartened and disappointed. And then I continued watching it.
Nowadays, that's a pretty funny, if not somewhat bizarre, memory. As an adult, there is no way I would force myself through any show's episode that I don't like anyway repeatedly, why did I "have to" as a child? Similarly, I remember a few entire cartoons that I was not particularly fond off, or sometimes actively disliked, and I still watched those, too, "because that's what was on TV right now".
Apparently, realizing that I had agency over how I spend my own entertainment time was something I had to learn better growing up.
[+] [-] msla|7 years ago|reply
And they even cheaped out on the "radio" part, in that their jokes and plots were stale, unimaginative, and just as recycled as their backgrounds.
Rocky & Bullwinkle did "Illustrated Radio" well because it had a good writing staff.
The cardinal sin of making media is condescension. Don't talk down to your audience, and don't make media you yourself wouldn't consume.
(There might even be a broader lesson there.)
[+] [-] dvtrn|7 years ago|reply
Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, The Brak Show, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, Sealab 2021, many others.
[+] [-] rat87|7 years ago|reply
The video puts the 80s era of licensed properties/toy cartoons (GI Joes, Transformers, etc.) as the first thing to really challenge HB due to the , and that during that time HB struggled to adapt and compete and that the Smurfs seemed like their only success during the era.
He says they had a revival after being bought by Turner in the 90s and making decent cartoons for cartoon network but were ultimately absorbed by WB animation after the companies merged.
[+] [-] Tsubasachan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zapzupnz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] probably_wrong|7 years ago|reply
They did very well for a long time, but then the 80s arrived. Suddenly there were better shows (Transformers, GI Joe) during the entire week rather than just weekends, and they lost a lot of market. They later went to Cartoon Network and created some new classics (Powerpuff Girls and co), but for some reason (not explained) that wasn't enough.
[+] [-] anthonybsd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SmellyGeekBoy|7 years ago|reply
I'm glad I wasn't the only one. There's a lot of misplaced upward inflection which I assume is the narrator's normal speaking voice that they're desperately trying to fight against to sound more "professional". In fact the phrases that don't do this sound like they've been pitch-corrected downwards (maybe they have, maybe it's some weird auditory illusion).
> to my mind, poor narration in long-form video essays is no different to printing academic journals entirely in Zapfino
I couldn't have put it better myself.
[+] [-] Al-Khwarizmi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnnyg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egypturnash|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghayes|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veryworried|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfdietz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tclancy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wodenokoto|7 years ago|reply
What the video doesn’t touch on is:
Who are these studios animating them? According to the video, the entire tv animation market was more or less HB. How could these studio rise out of seemingly nowhere and produce high(er) quality animation?
Why wasn’t HB part of these tie-ins? According to the video, they owned the market. Aren’t they the obvious choice to ask to produce, when you want a cartoon about your new toy?
Why didn’t HB pivot towards more action animation in the 80s, when going up against TMNT and Dino riders?
[+] [-] benj111|7 years ago|reply
Are you talking about the merchandise tie ins? They weren't higher quality, certainly not on the 80s. Most of them seem to be Japanese and have that Anime thing of getting away with animating as little as humanly possible.
[+] [-] JackFr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zapzupnz|7 years ago|reply
That's what Did You Know Gaming seems to be, for instance.
[+] [-] ccnafr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vkaku|7 years ago|reply
Hanna-Barbera were my favorite animators, hands down. I could watch their toons any day and I would not get bored.
[+] [-] ourmandave|7 years ago|reply
As a kid I never noticed how commercial it all really was.
After reading some of the history you can see they've all been doing the exact same tried and true things since forever.
Merchandising, spin-offs, episodes written around new album releases, copy-cats of successful shows (e.g. Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie), etc.
So you end up with minimal janky animation, Disney child actors, and 1/2 hour toy commercials.
[+] [-] jerf|7 years ago|reply
I have to agree that virtually nothing Hanna Barbara has done has stood the test of time. Despite being so politically incorrect a lot of it has been buried, I can think of a few Looney Tunes that are still pretty good (Bugs Bunny conducting the orchestra is quite popular, I'm also a fan of a particular Bugs Bunny cartoon in which he stays overnight in Dracula's castle), and Disney's stuff is still generally watchable and enjoyable, but I'm sitting here racking my brains and despite having seen some of those shows as a kid, I literally can not relate to you a single episode of any of them.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ListeningPie|7 years ago|reply
Is YouTube information being sent to Hackernews or is it just coincidence that my YouTube suggestions are in sync with Hackernews posts?
[+] [-] majewsky|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SmellyGeekBoy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rawmodz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonzus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|7 years ago|reply
Not really answered.
They mention other cartoons came in based on merchandise, but don't say why Hanna-Barbera couldn't/didn't compete.
[+] [-] sirmarksalot|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|7 years ago|reply
The answer is more a business answer than a creative one. When a business is highly, highly successful pursuing a certain strategy, that strategy becomes part of their internal cultural identity. The entire business is macroscopically and microscopically arranged around exploiting this particular opportunity. When the strategy stops working, such a culture will virtually inevitably double down on the strategy, which in a way makes things even worse, because that usually works for a little while. By the time it becomes undeniable the strategy is no longer functional, they've usually fallen too far behind to compete. And since usually the only way to see "the strategy is unsuccessful" is precisely that there is competition pursuing other strategies eating your lunch, the competition is always already there by the time the message finally gets through.
From the outside it's so easy to see. Early in the process it's easy to say "Jeez, guys, you've got literally 10 times the resources of anyone else in this industry, why not 'just' pivot your strategy?" But it's not a matter of just pivoting; it's a matter of rewriting the entire company's culture and way of doing business. That's why even when a company tries to co-opt the new strategy, they almost always undercut themselves somehow, either by being unable to really commit, or if they are in the rare case where they succeed, they undercut themselves by trying to use this success to pivot back to the original strategies they know and love. It can literally be easier to found a brand new company and start from scratch than to reform an existing company. There's a lot of examples of a couple of creatives disgruntled about the cultural limitations of their employers going and forming a business that follows a strategy that does very well, exploiting a niche their original employer never could have. (I'm more familiar with the video game industry, where Activision is an example of that, but this sort of things happens a lot over there. Or at least it did, before video games required so many people.)
Companies that develop cultures that can navigate this mess are rare. It doesn't seem that way, because of survivorship bias. For instance, you might say "But jerf, Disney seems to manage it OK", and, yeah, they do, and that's a non-trivial part of the reason why they are a decade-spanning behemoth of multiple industries, rather than a 1940s also-ran. And there's a lot of other companies you can name that can too. But those are precisely the rare survivors.
[+] [-] pm90|7 years ago|reply
But... the ultimate reason does seem to be simply: there was a lot more competition.
[+] [-] lightedman|7 years ago|reply
In the 90s, they just had put out SWAT Kats. That could've been hugely marketable, but Ted thought it too violent, along with many other HB properties in development at the time. He changed that, and HB began a painful decline.