Just a little market research:
What drove you crazy when you watched Saturday morning cartoons as a kid? Was there anything cartoons did that you found especially patronizing, or disappointing, or off-putting back then? Is there anything you'd wish they'd do, that they never did? Were there any cliches that you noticed even back then?
@Azure Yeah, me too.
I once had a Shadowrun GM who called that the "Thundercats ending" and would give us a karma bonus if we ended a session that way. The worse the ending joke, the more points...
@zebratron2084 I remember it mostly from He-Man! And the MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE!
@zebratron2084 The entire suite of "comedic" miscommunication/missed-communication tropes set my teeth on edge. Like, I get not having a chance to say something in a rush? But when an incorrect assumption can ruin things and someone just has to say *something* to avoid it, then *maybe* being a rude asshole just to clear the air is the better option. (this is especially offensive to me in cases where one *sentence* five minutes in can completely solve the plot.)
@zebratron2084 As for what I wish cartoons *had* done when I was a kid?
Show how the characters have grown since I first met them, and show them *actually learning from their mistakes.*
You can only watch the Scooby Gang split up so many times before you start yelling "No! You fools! You incomprehensible buffoons! Every time you split up something goes wrong!" at the TV, after all. ;)
@zebratron2084 I have not! It started airing after I stopped watching TV, and I've never been interested enough to go looking for it.
@LexYeen Oh god, HIJINX, yeah. Plots that could be solved in ten seconds by just gently patting one of the characters on the head and taking the proverbial "Idiot Ball" away from them...
@LexYeen @zebratron2084 Cartoons *still* have not solved this.
@zebratron2084 What distinguishes Saturday morning cartoons from other cartoons BTW?
@Balinares Oh! Right! For you, probably nothing. :) I have no idea if the Saturday morning corporate broadcast-network cartoon block was a _thing_ or not in your area of the planet. :)
For your purposes, consider all cartoons targeted at an <18 audience appropriate for this question. "Saturday morning cartoons" is just so evocative of a certain time and place in the USA, saying it all as one phrase is a bit of a reflex.
@zebratron2084 Yeah, I think I see. A French person would probably say "Club Dorothée", which was a (in retrospect not very good) Wednesday TV show for kids not having school then, and mostly about showing cartoons. But you could use the name to refer more broadly to that specific type of cartoon, and people would get you.
@Balinares Oh, we sort of had those too, but those were kind of more of a Sunday morning thing? Instead of NBC, CBS, and ABC blasting SUPER DUDES in our faces, local stations would often devote the morning to some absurdly long block of cartoons, hosted by a local celebrity, ideally a mild creepy one. :) Those tended less towards 11/22 minute narratives like the Saturday morning cartoons, and more towards shorts and oldies. (This is basically what Krusty the Klown and Itchy and Scratchy parody.)
@zebratron2084 Laser rifles never ejected casings or needed ammo refills or recharging. I could see an argument for retconning/reusing the M16 hardware, build high-densisty chemical batteries into the magazines or clips and turn the entire bolt assembly into a single resonator gas laser assembly (CO2, trace elements argon for good side, neon for bad side for the glow effects), but just hang a lampshade on it or something!
@zebratron2084 ... I was probably supposed to be learning important lessons about friendship and teamwork and asking my parents to buy toys, instead of trying to reverse-engineer fantasy weapon systems. Wasn't I. >.>
not weaponizing friendship with your toys?
@zebratron2084 @001zlnv "I think we all learned a valuable lesson here today." "A Care Bear Stare of five or more bears can can melt steel if focused to a point of half an inch or less, and reflections may be strong enough to flash ignite paper and polyester. Use proper Personal Protective Gear and never gaze directly into the unshielded Stare."
@Momentrabbit @zebratron2084 @001zlnv (Stumbles across this thread at this point and is suddenly extremely interested.)
@zebratron2084 @001zlnv @Austin_Dern
Why did Jill or Max never get to wear Monster's cuffs in My Pet Monster?
Does everyone have tapes, and Ruxpin alone is cursed to know of the buttons?
When Tex Hex threatened to turn Judge McBride into a Dingo, a)did you abruptly wonder why you hadn't any female dingomorphs in the series and b)start rooting for furry tf?
@Momentrabbit @zebratron2084 @001zlnv (Heads to DuckDuckGo to learn about this My Pet Monster thing and discovers there are things worth paying attention to that he was a tiny bit too old to encounter at the time.)
@Momentrabbit @001zlnv @Austin_Dern
> Does everyone have tapes, and Ruxpin alone is cursed to know of the buttons?
*does not sleep for a week*
*is haunted by visions of a Those Characters From Cleveland reboot of Videodrome*
@001zlnv @Austin_Dern @zebratron2084 There are tapes, of course. And then... there are _tapes_.
"Come dream with me tonight-" "Don't you understand, Ruxpin? SHE NEVER SLEEPS."
the Fisher-Price PXL2000 video camera could record a short, grainy, black and white video to a standard audio cassette.
not a long message... but long enough.
the well
the caterpillar
the cliff
the dreamship
the horse
the record button
the ring
7 nights then teddy's
@001zlnv @Austin_Dern @zebratron2084
Moment you are a Dark Genius and you have enriched us with this post, as blood and bone meal enriches soil.
@001zlnv @Austin_Dern @zebratron2084 @acetone_kitten *blushes deeply* You honour me. n.n
@zebratron2084 the lack of consequences for cute sidekicks. if orko nearly ends the world with magical incompetence, no one ever brings it up again.
@zebratron2084 totally understandable, though I always think megatron and soundwave when I hear welker
@zebratron2084 technically, the way that I wasn't permitted Saturday morning cartoons. My parents thought they were awful and they weren't wrong *but*.
@zebratron2084 This is a very 70s thing but: cartoons that confuse "turned invisible" with "turned intangible, like a ghost". Also crazy inconsistent rules about when the magic device could work; there's this Space Ghost I'm still angry about.
Also any plot where characters swap roles for a day, make a dog's breakfast of it, and conclude they could never do the other's job. Because apparently they mastered their jobs perfectly the first day and never had to learn anything?
@Austin_Dern You know what always drove me crazy: characters who swapped voices when they swapped bodies. HOW ON EARTH DID YOU BRING YOUR LARYNX WITH YOU?
@zebratron2084 I actually processed that as dramatic license! What drove me crazy was hearing how the body-swap mechanism wouldn't work if it wasn't reversed in 24 hours or whatever. How could *that* make sense?
@zebratron2084 @Austin_Dern secretly, that was never their natural speaking voice, they are just an extremely talented vocal mimic!
@001zlnv @zebratron2084 Really I'll take the brain swaps since it lets the animators show the cute animal sidekick doing something that gets respect for once *and* the sidekick voice actor gets to do the cool part for once too.
@zebratron2084 I wanted a show to try fixing some failed invention's flaws. Didn't matter if it was Wiley Coyote or COBRA. Just, if the original idea was decent and something made it fail, try fixing the problem. Giving up right away infuriated me. I wanted iterated deployments!
<- Kind of understanding why everyone treated me like that in middle school.
(One time Wiley Coyote did keep trying to fix his invention, but it was one of those awful 60s cartoons so who could care?)
and the non evil applications of "evil devices" (Dr. mindbender has liquid doppelgangers!? why is he only using them to troll a sailor)
@001zlnv @zebratron2084 Really I just so wanted them to do more with that matter-transmitter ray from the original G.I.Joe miniseries and I don't mean to share my 800-page list of things that could be done with the power to manipulate matter but well as long as you're all asking anyway ...
@001zlnv @Austin_Dern Agreed, and I think we can all include this as part of the greater "Reed Richards Syndrome?" :)
@zebratron2084 @001zlnv Oh definitely. I mean, yes, sometimes an idea is really attractive yet can't be made to work. But if it takes some ridiculous long-shot last-minute save by the heroes to foil ... I mean, why not try a baffle plate over the thermal exhaust or whatever?
@zebratron2084 The inclusion of "in today's episode..." morality lessons at the end of every show, even though I laugh at them now.
... also, the continued appearance of Scrappy.
@JulieSqveakaroo @zebratron2084 GOD YES. BOTH OF THESE uuuugggghhhhh "ha! ha! ha!" where the visual clues that the characters are laughing is 1. they have a smile on their face 2. their chest is heaving rhythmically.
@zebratron2084 Also, it mucked with my head whenever a recognizeable voice from one show would suddenly be voicing a character in a different show with no alteration in the voice and a completely different personality. I could not parse the flip-flopping of a familiar vocal pattern from bad guy to good guy.
@JulieSqveakaroo @zebratron2084
especially if it is someone super recognizable like Chris Latta
@zebratron2084 one thing that is particular to me is that dragons were always presented either as evil or goofy or both.
I mostly hated the "episodic" nature of the shows--how no matter what happened in any episode, everything would get completely reset to "normal" (usually with a little "laughing-with-the-Scrappy" moment in the last 20 seconds, Ho! Ho! Ho!) by the end of the episode. even then I understood why, but I still hated it.
@zebratron2084 I also disliked that female characters were rarely present, and when they were they were almost always "THE Girl," complete with being pink and wearing a bow because OTHERWISE HOW WILL WE KNOW IT'S A GIRL.
I *also* disliked (heh) how little thought was usually put into the background. like, in their *entire world*, only *one guy* in the *entire species* of lion-guys was named "Lion-O"? and only one panther-guy was "Panthera?" COME ON.
is that the catboy equivalent of naming a man "guy"?
@001zlnv @zebratron2084 yeah, basically. which come to think of it there's already "He-Man" so...
@001zlnv @zebratron2084 at least "Hiro Protagonist" had a clever explanation. XD
@green Remind me to give you my "precocious gender warrior" spiel about Jenny from Bucky O'Hare when I see ya. :)
@zebratron2084 I will *endeavor* to remember that. :D
@green Yeah, um... I'm pretty sure we can be trusted to fix the dragon thing for Parallax. :D
In fact, thank you for reminding me both teams need more dragons. n.n
@zebratron2084 eeeee *dances* :D
@green @zebratron2084 MOAR DRAGGIES *upends a box full of smol dragons on everyone's heads*
@zebratron2084 oh yeah
like, I didn't think much it about the time, but I always felt a bit cheated when anything Hanna-Barbera came up >_> to be perfectly honest
Tom and Jerry were maybe the best of a bad lot but I really got to hate that mouse after a while
@kara @zebratron2084 yes! the pointless, nonstop violent "gags," especially with Tom & Jerry, were at best tedious and at worst very off-putting to me. same with Road Runner, mostly. Bugs was more of an ambiguous trickster archetype, so it wasn't like he was always the "good guy"--sometimes he got dunked too, though rarely.
@green @zebratron2084 oh, yeah, I disliked the Road Runner as well. and, to a lesser extent, Tweety Bird
and of course I developed other opinions about what was good and bad about Looney Tunes. Pepe Le Pew sucked because it was the same joke over and over (and then of course I picked up on how creepy the "joke" was)
@zebratron2084 silly answer: the worst thing about Saturday morning cartoons, was SUNDAY morning cartoons :}
@zebratron2084 The lack of threat in fighty cartoons. Very few were the toons were anyone was actually taken out of commission for more than a partial episode.
In contrast, both Voltron and X-men mortally wounding/taking out one of the introduced main characters very early in the series got me far more invested in the cartoon.
@zebratron2084 Characters who act dumb or illogical simply so a problem is created that the rest of the plot can be devoted to fixing. Also, characters screwing up their mission in obvious ways as a cheap way to add dramatic tension.
@zebratron2084 This is not just a cartoon issue: it also ruined the entirety of #TLJ
@zebratron2084 poorly composed music. When they cancelled one show and did a cringy spinoff in its place. Two boys and a girl ratio. Catch phrases for dialog.
@zebratron2084 The one thing I noticed
And hated
Was the way so many cartoons wold end with thirty seconds of forced laughter.