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INTEREST: Animaniacs, Freakazoid Producer Credits Pokémon For WB Cartoon Decline

I think western animation has gotten better in the last few years. Hell, I don't think 90's cartoons could compare to Gravity Falls and Steven Universe in terms of story. Animaniacs and its ilk were really freaking funny, but that was about it.

As someone who enjoyed Animaniacs, Freakazoid and Pinky and the Brain well into my teens, I'd say Hysteria's aggressive unfunniness also played a big part in the downfall of WB Animation.

To be honest, i'm thankful that pokemon was the reason for less wb cartoons. It paved the way for new and original shows, instead of a different version of batman or looney toons. We got some great stuff on kidsWB, like Jackie Chan Adventures, Xiaolin Showdown, and X-men Evolution, as well as Pokémon itself, and THOSE shows are what made it my favorite channel.

While I don't think that he's wrong about what lead to the decline of American cartoons like Animaniacs, I think that's only part of the story. I also think there was a big shift in what we in the US consider appropriate for children now, as opposed to what was appropriate back in the 1980s and 1990s. With exception to the Avatar series, I can't think of any series aired in CN or Disney in the past decade that has been even remotely as dark as, say, Batman the Animated Series was, or as politically charged as Animaniacs.

In the attempt to sanitize what we show to children, we've lost the humor and serious themes that US animation brought to children and young adults two decades prior. I think we're doing a disservice to all but the youngest of children in the name of protecting them from the world around them.

ninjamitsuki wrote:

I think western animation has gotten better in the last few years. Hell, I don't think 90's cartoons could compare to Gravity Falls and Steven Universe in terms of story. Animaniacs and its ilk were really freaking funny, but that was about it.

The nineties also brought us Disney's Gargoyles, which was the first American cartoon I know of that really had an ongoing plot, an amazing voice cast with a ton of Star Trek veterans, tons of diversity (lead woman character was half native American, half African American), and inspiration from great works like Shakespeare, so the 90's wasn't all bad.

To be honest, i'm thankful that pokemon was the reason for less wb cartoons. It paved the way for new and original shows, instead of a different version of batman or looney toons. We got some great stuff on kidsWB, like Jackie Chan Adventures, Xiaolin Showdown, and X-men Evolution, as well as Pokémon itself, and THOSE shows are what made it my favorite channel.

You are partially correct. Histeria! was ridiculously expensive to produce. The budget for retakes alone was larger than many of the shows on the air at the time. These cost overruns forced executives to re-examine their priorities. Budgets at Warner Animation were slashed across the board, and new leadership was brought in to see that control was maintained. Pokemon was just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Histeria! contributed to the unraveling as well. It was a perfect storm of events, but thankfully the execs didn't throw the baby out with the bath water; WBA was allowed to produce more series, but by then Spielberg had moved on and the time of shows created under his aegis were soon at an end.

Look, to be clear, I love 90's cartoons (it's the 70's and early to mid 80's that I consider the dark period, where animation was either really cheap via studios like Hanna-Barbera or were just toy commercials like Transformers G1 or GI Joe) but it annoys me when people say the medium went on to be stale or sanitized when it clearly has done anything but. The medium has clearly evolved in new and exciting ways and it saddens me when people act so dismissive about what it has accomplished over recent years.

Again, Spielberg's Amblin' productions thought it "understood" the love of vintage cartoons, because they had trotted out all the classic character cameos in Roger Rabbit, even though Zemeckis' movie treated all vintage cartoons like shrieking, hyperactive, tongue-stretching, anvil-dropping Tex Avery MGM toons. And since it was 1988-1992, and most grownups didn't have the genuine real old classics on video to watch, most mainstream people believed it. Especially Spielberg.
As a result, Warner built a whole afternoon industry around "new-generation" tributes to the Looneys, but pitched at a hyperactive, rib-nudging level, with self-amusing grownup-writer gags that would be more at home in a Dreamworks Shrek comedy than in Chuck Jones. Buster Bunny and Wakko represented the soulless image of Bugs Bunny Warner gives us today, of an obnoxious sociopath amusing himself with tossing out dynamite sticks, rather than Jones's "this means war" bully-avenger or Bob McKimson's overconfident Bronxlyn wisenheimer.

And, as noted, although there were some kids who watched it because it was on, after school (hey, why do you think they watch Adventure Time and Spongebob?), to grab a 10-yo., you need to think like a 10-yo.
And Pokemon battles, like Power Rangers and Sailor Moon, grabbed them in a way that smug West Coast jokes about Arnold Schwarzenegger and pop movie lines never could. Even in 4Kids form, Anime brought something new to the early 90's toon-verse, it was called Earnestness--Japanese kids still loved their toys.

(Something that, as Zin5ki pointed out, Cosgrove-Hall had a decade earlier, until they gave us that smug, hyperactive 10's Danger Mouse reboot.)

In the attempt to sanitize what we show to children, we've lost the humor and serious themes that US animation brought to children and young adults two decades prior. I think we're doing a disservice to all but the youngest of children in the name of protecting them from the world around them.