Cartoons Then, and Cartoons Now
Categories: TVOkay, I’m not one of those weirdos who thinks that everything from when I was a kid was brilliant and everything today is shit, but holy shit I just watched an episode of Yu-Gi-Oh and I think I forgot how to poo.
A Brief Comparision, 1991 Saturday Morning Cartoons versus 2007 4kids.tv Saturday Morning
1991: Superheroes we’ve all heard of blow shit up and fight each other in outer space.
2007: A bunch of people with crazy haircuts spend upwards of 15 minutes discussing how to operate new accessories for a card game. They then spend the remaining 7 minutes of the episode sitting at a table playing said card game.
1991: Fox Kids has to have the occasional educational message. So, for instance, Spiderman will swing onto the screen and tell kids to "Eat Apples!" or "Eat cereal that contains apples but does not taste like apples!" It was always Spiderman because his mouth is covered so you don’t have to reanimate anything.
2007: A Ninja Turtle (who is extreme and from the 27th century) tells kids how to make winky faces on their mobile phones. I’m not kidding. This was a real educational commercial. "You can just type a semicolon, a hyphen, and a parenthesis!" Then "Tune in later for more Text Messaging Made E-Z!"
Sigh, the future is a bleak wasteland where children spend all day text messaging each other on their mobile phones about card games, all the while refusing to eat apples.
Yeah plus some cartoon are really rude and innappropriate.
Comment by Anna — January 20, 2007 @ 2:32 pm
Anime has gotten way out of hand in the past few years. It used to be just Dragonball, which was bad enough, but at least confined to people who liked standing around saying ‘Arghhh!’ Now entire walls at B&N are covered in crappy Manga.
I’m wondering if this is good or bad. Good because they do have multi-episode plot sagas that involve some level of involvement and comprehension. Bad because the plots are so, so stupid, and every character has some variation on a DSM-IV syndrome.
Comment by Kevin! — January 21, 2007 @ 8:31 pm
I think the surging popularity of anime/manga generally is very cool. However, there is bad in anything, and the fact that there are literally cartoons about playing cards bespeaks a certain laziness in the adaptation process. So when you play the card version in real life, you are pretending to… play a card game? That is like if Monopoly were about being a board game player. Where is the metaphor?
Comment by kenny — January 22, 2007 @ 12:58 am
Having spent so much of my life watching TV from American culture, it all starts to seem the same to me. But repetitive formulaic TV from another culture (e.g. anime) is interesting, under the “if I haven’t seen it, it’s new to me!” doctrine. I’m saving “running around trees in India” for after college.
I recall a complaint somewhere (Something awful, maybe) about a computer game where you play paintball or lasertag or something, which raises the same issue.
Comment by Beetle — January 22, 2007 @ 11:36 pm