Forum - View topicAnswerman - What If I No Longer Like My Old Favorite Shows?
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Stuart Smith
 Posts: 1298 |
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I would say Ducktales in 1987 kicked off the American animation renaissance, when people realized cartoons didn't have to be just 30 minute toy commercials. Of course, we still got our Street Sharks, Botsmasters and similar, but we saw a lot of great output like Warner Brothers and Disney like the DCAU and Disney Afternoon. The key was finding creators who actually cared about the medium. I feel the renaissance ended somewhere around the time Justice League ended, when networks realized flash and CG could be used to make cartoons cheaply, and they seemed content with leaving the action/drama stuff to anime on Toonami and Adult Swim. For the record, I can say those 90s and 00s anime dubs were always awful. Of course, I was into anime for awhile by then so I was familiar with the original versions, but yes, even back then those terrible jokes and hammy acting in stuff like Pokemon, Digimon, and Yu-Gi-Oh were just as cringey as they are now if. But then I suppose those weren't my childhood as I'm probably older than most people here so I never thought those dubs were good. -Stuart Smith |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Though I am most certainly nostalgic for some things, I feel I also have a sort of anti-nostalgia for some other things. That is, there are some things I liked when I was little that, as time went by, my memories started growing increasingly bitter about it. That is, the more distant it becomes, the less happy I feel like my childhood was. This is not specific to anime though, and it was really more about experiences than entertainment. I also don't really hold anything to any higher esteem just because I experienced it first. Pokémon is a good example of this: There are so many people around my age who think that Generation I is the only generation that should be liked. They would ask me what my favorite generation is, and when I answer with something other than the Kanto generation, they would be shocked and surprised, sometimes even a bit offended. ("Whaaaat...?" "No way." "You're kidding." "I don't believe you." "You're not serious." "How could you?")
Though not an anime, the one thing whose personal perception changed the most from when I was little to when I was an adult is The Adventures of the American Rabbit. Anybody remember that animated film? It was about this rabbit who transformed into his superhero persona by running really fast. Eventually, he ran so fast that his run cycle turned into a skating cycle, and he left a wake of stars and stripes behind him. That transformation sequence really stood out in my head, and for decades, I could remember that scene without remembering where it was from. I eventually saw it again later and realized the plot made no sense, the character development was all over the place, and the protagonist's friends had no purpose in the plot after they could no longer do their band concert tour.
Digimon Tamers is definitely something I would like to eventually give a second chance. Especially in the latter half, it was not stuff meant for children to understand or really enjoy. But when I was younger, I felt it was the most dry, boring season of Digimon I ever saw.
Rugrats was a show I appreciated more as a teenager than as a little kid. I didn't go on any of those group excursions or play sessions that Tommy and the others did, but later on, as I would supervise little kids, I started to understand their logic more, and I enjoyed Rugrats more. For similar reasons (that the characters and situations are unrelatable), I have been curious about if I'd enjoy Seinfeld today compared to when it was on the air. I have a hard time getting into live-action sitcoms though, and I always have.
With Outlaw Star being on modern Toonami, I would occasionally just watch some episodes of it, and boy, are the character designs dated. You also had this hot-bloodedness in Gene that was played straight then that feels a bit painful now. (I would also say stuff like how the main characters have hair that look pretty similar to each other and how they only ever have one chant to perform magic that can do whatever is needed for the plot to advance, but those were...quirks that I noticed even back then. I just kind of accepted them as your anime weirdness.)
There was a classmate of mine in high school who, up until we parted ways during our graduation in 2004, was really fond of the 90's X-Men cartoon. His ringtone was the first few seconds of the opening theme, even (and remember that this was when ringtones were limited to piezo noises). I personally found X-Men: Evolution to be a superior show. Boy, was it ever a mistake to even mention that show's name in his presence.
Heh, I remember getting so much flak for enjoying Jimmy Neutron when it was new. But then I realized that flak was coming from people somewhat older than me who were themselves nostalgic about shows like Captain Planet or Transformers G1, which, when I had the chance to see them, didn't feel that great. As for what you're undergoing, if you're like me, you were likely a mega-fan of some specific genre or franchise and didn't really gain an interest in expanding your horizons until later. You probably found something that clicked with you, and clicked with you so well that you didn't really have an interest in anything else until it wore off enough to get you to seek out other things. When I was little, I would only really play Sonic the Hedgehog games. Sonic 3 & Knuckles alone satisfied my appetite for video games for a few years as I'd play it over and over and over. Then, my interests widened because I was curious as to what there was outside of Sonic, partially because I realized taking sides in the Console Wars is pretty silly, as I was a consumer and wasn't bound to one side generation after generation. |
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KH91
Posts: 6176 |
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If you end up not liking them then you end up not liking them. Doesn't change the fact that you enjoyed them at one time.
Right now, I just started Season 2 of Samurai Jack. I watched it during its initial run and loved it. Since there was a final season recently, I decided to rewatch it. Now? While the theme song is still great, the show itself is just okay. Sometimes I lose focus while watching and start doing other things. By time I finish the episode, 3 hours have passed. I have to force myself to focus when watching so I won't lose any time. I knew what I was getting into when I decided to rewatch it so it's no big deal. I just thought I'd love it like I did it back then. |
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Actar
 Posts: 1074 Location: Singapore |
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Personally, I think that no matter how much older I become, I will always love the shows I fell in love with. There are two reasons for this:
1. I think the reason is that, for the shows I really like, I'm able to connect with them on a very deep emotional level and these are things that remain rather consistent within me. So, unless I go through a great paradigm shift, I don't think I'll fall out of love with them anytime soon. 2. Even if I do, I pride myself on being able to change my point of view to be able to enjoy many different kinds of shows from a myriad of genres. So, even if I do grow out of favor of certain shows, I think that I'll be able to appreciate it in the same context that made me originally fell in love with it. ...or, to be more blatantly narcissistic, maybe I only fall in love with good shows that stand the test of time? (^.^;) Who knows? |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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A lot of people in the thread are discovering that their, quote, "childhood favorites" may have simply been the "Stockholm Syndrome" of simply having a happy-hour after school when they clicked on PBS or cable. After six hours of 5th-grade, ANYTHING looked good, if it was regular. If you felt enough of a sense of relief that Adventure Time, Spongebob or Steven Universe was there for you when you got home, does that make it a more quality show? If you showed Adventure Time to your kids however many years from now, would they be instantly hooked, or would they just sort of stare at it, or stare at you when you tried to explain "But SU was so complex, in its social depiction of societal gender norms!"  ("It looks weird and stupid, and the animators were on drugs!")
Me, I go back farther--I was already heading for college by the time He-Man was "revolutionizing" afternoon TV in the 80's, and while I thought it was merely annoying for its time, by today's standards it looks simply amateurish, static and hideous. OTOH, my generation had to put up with Hanna-Barbera cartoons in the afternoon, and while they were just tolerated after school, it was only later that I discovered an insane anarchic-genius comic timing to Yogi Bear and the Flintstones. At the time, they were just all a local station could scrape up to show. Again, if you can't explain as an adult why you were hooked on something as a kid, you were probably just in it to belt down a few cartoon drinks for the free happy-hour. If you can explain it, then you're never too old for good taste. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6188 |
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As someone who grew up in the 90's even I won't put Animaniacs on a pedestal especially when the show despite it's intentions was pretty dumb and obnoxious for the most part while having elements that amounted to filler at best and nonsense at worst (basically anything that wasn't Pinky & The Brain).
Sure hope that includes most of the series til after Last But Not Beast as everything after was awful or just plain stupid....which unfortunately includes Ego Trip.
Wouldn't that include dubs that preceded that period like Voltron and Speed Racer. |
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vanfanel
 Posts: 1252 |
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I rewatched Blade Runner a few months back for the first time in decades, and especially during the first hour felt like I was watching the greatest live-action adaptation of an 80's anime imaginable. Amazing what an impact that movie's visual design had on the medium. My nostalgic early anime consists of two waves: watching dubbed/edited shows on TV as a child, and watching uncut subbed (when I could get it) anime starting in my college years. The nostalgia hits of the former are "Star Blazers" and "Robotech," which gave me the kind of sci-fi I was craving: serial storytelling with beginnings, middles, and ends, at a time when almost all American shows except soap operas were episodic (and the soaps of course never had planned endings; their mission was to simply keep going for as long as people would watch). In the early 90's, Blockbuster Video carried a set of "Robotech: The Macross Saga" tapes that contained the whole series edited down to fit on 6 VHS tapes. I rented them out of nostalgia, and ended up watching the whole series at least twice. One of my first gateway anime had become a gateway anime for the second wave. My most nostalgic titles from the second wave are mostly movies and OVAs, as I didn't pirate and legitimate companies back then mostly thought TV series couldn't recoup their costs. A few favorites are "Windaria," "Kimagure Orange Road: I Want to Return to That Day," "Arcadia of My Youth," "Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer," and "Patlabor 1" and 2," to name a few. The last time I watched "Arcadia of My Youth" I felt like I might finally be outgrowing that one, but the others have more than stood the test of time for me. The original "Macross" will probably always hold the most special place for me. Haven't been able to embrace any of the sequels though...my one-word review of Delta was, "Nope." |
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jrockfreak
Posts: 125 |
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I hardly ever hear anyone mention Deltora Quest but i love that series and I didn't even discover it until i was like 16 |
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Mr. sickVisionz
 Posts: 2175 |
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Your tastes can change as you get older and have more life experiences. I loved Voltron as a kid but super hate it now. Most of the other stuff I watched is still pretty decent though.
I'm in a lucky spot though. More than 50% of my fun is discovering the story, so I usually don't revisit entire series or shows... just scenes if I even do that. |
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Stuart Smith
Posts: 1298 |
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I assumed those were commonly acknowledged as bad. The only people I've ever met who praised them were people who were not anime fans and view them as no different than other cartoons they watched around the same time. 90s TV dubs still have a lot of diehard defenders in the anime community specifically. -Stuart Smith |
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ninjamitsuki
 Posts: 615 Location: Anywhere (Thanks, technology) |
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Another show I appreciate more now that I'm older is Courage the Cowardly Dog. The show is so artfully made. That episode "The Mask", damn.
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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I don't remember where I read it, but official word on Samurai Jack is that Genndy Tartakovsky would specifically design each season to outdo the previous in quality. There were many reasons the series went into indefinite hiatus after Season 4, but one of them was that he felt he couldn't top Season 4 (at least without making it into a movie).
I was so happy when one episode of Space Dandy turned out to be one long homage to Courage the Cowardly Dog (the ukulele episode). |
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CandisWhite
Posts: 282 |
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I'm guessing that the awards given at the time to the show were not supported by you, and the accolades and "best" lists since were not warranted. Taste is subjective, so that's no knock against you, but you're at a small table on that one.
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Huh, would The Pebble and the Penguin then be a Z-list Don Bluth film? That's a movie I liked when I was younger, but considering it got a big fat 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, I ought to watch it now to look for the flaws I didn't notice when I was younger. Honestly though, I watched a lot of Don Bluth and Don Bluth imitations when I was little. They'd wind up on TV all the time on various channels. My parents never watched any cartoons, not even when they grew up, so to them, they were all the same. (Except for the hyperviolent anime of the 80's, which my father, being a fan of science fiction and horror, absolutely loved.) Eventually, they just kind of blurred together in my head. My father would tape a lot of them, but unlike you, he never did that with American Rabbit, which is a major reason why I couldn't remember where I saw that transformation sequence (which, I would agree, is one of the best transformation sequences I've ever seen). In the Sonic video games, Shadow the Hedgehog does something similar when he gains speed (he begins running like normal but switches to a skating animation as he activates his hover skates, and starting in Sonic Generations, he even has a red wake when he reaches top speed), and that was when I REALLY started thinking about it more often. Rewatching it, I also noticed a pretty specific plot hole: When Vultor burns the steamboat in New Orleans, he could have escaped by flying away as a vulture rather than jumping into the boat to escape, which was what allowed everyone else to escape unharmed. It would've revealed his true nature a bit early into the movie, but it would've strategically been his best option, as the jackals would have burned along with the steamboat. But I guess you said that this is the sort of movie where you're supposed to turn your brain off if you're not a little kid. In a way, that could be one way to not get nostalgia-burned if you suspect something may be a bit lower in quality than you might have thought as a kid. I was planning on tracking down Katy and the Aliens to watch eventually, as I had just learned the title of that movie earlier this month, another animated film I remember quite fondly due to the aliens' weird commentary on soccer (interpreting it as fighting over a treasure), but I think I'm going to have to turn my brain off with that too, or at least approach it in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 kind of way, as I don't think it was really that good. |
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#854626
Posts: 171 |
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you could get the opposite effect. theres anime i watched when i was like 13 (im 26 now) that i only watched like half of. then i remembered them as i grew up and realized some of the things in it were to deep for 13 year old me to understand. i went back and finished them and now ill probably think there awesome till the day i die.
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