Superhero cartoons: infinitely better today?

[Amigone201]

People talk about feeling nostalgic for the entertainment of their youth. Whatever they had back when is often (or for some people, always) better than today's.

I got to thinking about this because I've been watching X-Men: Evolution on Hulu, and I think it's a damn good show. Yes, I know, I'm 27 and I'm watching superhero cartoons. So sue me, there's very little superhero live action TV

But yeah, Evolution, which ran from 2000 to 2003, is almost like watching adult TV. The characters don't always get along, and frequently are at odds with each other. The bad guys aren't generic cartoon villains who do villainous things just for the fun of it; they all have explained motivations and often disagree with each other. The good guys don't always win, and in some cases, it's not even 100% clear who the "good guys" are. And in the fourth season, people start dying. A lot.

Just under twenty years ago, the X-Men animated series debuted on Fox. Yeah, it was okay. I could see what they were trying to do, I just felt there was too much plot jumbled up at once. The characterization was okay and the plots were worthwhile. Just, maybe there was a little too much exposition. Characters were prone to bombastic speeches and laughably expressive gesturing (especially Magneto and Storm). Oh, and the animation was jerky and stiff.

Oh, but then you go back farther. Into the 70s. The less said about that, the better. If you really want to know what I'm talking about, prepare your brain bleach and watch this. And then watch this.

The goggles! They do nothing! (That's not an aberration folks. The entire first half of that episode consists of Magneto walking up to random people and arguing with them about how powerful he is!)

[snapdragonfly]

I'm not a cartoon/superhero fan or geek. (my husband is a diehard fan and he's 51!) The only animation that can hold my interest is Pixar or anything on a quality level the same as Disney, post Little Mermaid.

But just because I don't seek out cartoons doesn't mean I don't get exposed to them.

And mainstream cartoon quality - I'm talking strictly visual artistic level here - was for the most part, sheer dreck. I'm trying to think of anything from the 70's that wasn't crap.

hmmmm. Nope.
(maybe there was some that I can't remember - but I regifted, unopened, when my daughter was a toddler, a VHS of the Hanna Barbera production of Charlotte's Web, because I would have gone insane having to watch the damn thing - it was just so stale and uninnovative, same old cheaply done visuals - even some of the same damn voices! (thought I was gonna hear "And I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those nosy KIDS!!") And yet CW was one of the BETTER pieces. Disney had utterly forgettable offerings at the time also. But the superhero stuff of the era that I have seen my husband watching on Cartoon Network, well, I can't take it.

Ugh. No wonder everyone went apesh*t at the "rebirth" of Disney, post Mermaid and Pixar. There is nothing as wondrous as awesomely done animation, and few things as mind numbingly dreary as cheaply and poorly done animation. ~Wonderful stuff can be done on a low budget, but it requires creativity and some risk taking. Which I am not seeing in the mainstream superhero stuff from the later midcentury. It was cookie cutter and done for profit, not for art.


One might say I'm coming from rather an elitist, one dimensional point of view on this. That's fine with me. I'm speaking strictly of visuals - not plotline or character development, as I pay no attention to those. Also, opinion and subjective and all.

eta: that was a long winded way of saying, oh, SO much better today than they used to be!

[Silas Sparkhammer]

Better than they used to be, that's for sure!

But... NOT GOOD ENOUGH! And the limitations of the medium probably will keep them ever from overcoming this. Basically, even though the characters are "people" (and not, say, coyotes and roadrunners) the physics of getting hit and getting hurt are ignored. Wolverine has razor sharp claws -- which he uses to cut walls, chains, pipes...but never people. Cyclops has a force-beam, which he uses to penetrate walls, cars, tanks...and to bruise people ever so slightly.

This was indirectly addressed in one of the animated Superman cartoons, when he explained how frustrating it was always having to keep his full strength in check.

Now, okay, maybe it would be a better world if our military were armed with sponge-guns, tanks shot out nets, artillery fired only smoke, and bombers only dropped leaflets. But that isn't the "real world," and the fantasy that super-powered-individuals would always show such miraculous restraint (even the villains?) is too stylized. It turns a sci-fi "what if" into a Noh drama or Commedia dell'Arte farce.

But, that said, it's a drama or farce I happen to like a whole lot!

Silas

P.S. does anyone know of any good Commedia dell'Arte video? I've read the stuff, but never actually seen it performed!

[Not_Done_Living]

Does anyone remember the classic "Rocket Robin Hood" "Spiderman" (which actually used footage of each other just replacing the Spiderman or Robinhood characters). When i was little i thought they jsut changed the voice and/or villan.

Or "Tales from the Wizard of Oz" where the munchkins were little critters and the characters were one solid color..

[DoubleNaughtSaleen]

I like Batman: The Animated Series and the recent Justice League series. I don't think anybody shows them anymore, maybe on Boomerang. But a lot better than the old Superfriends and whatnot.

[Notebook]

Originally Posted by DoubleNaughtSaleen

I like Batman: The Animated Series and the recent Justice League series. I don't think anybody shows them anymore, maybe on Boomerang. But a lot better than the old Superfriends and whatnot.

Justice League Unlimited, which is basically Justice League with more people, plays on Boomerang at 11PM... at least the last time I checked, since I can't confirm whether it still comes on now.

The 1990 Batman and Superman cartoons actually play on Disney XD of all channels, though not as much as they used to.

Has anyone ever watched the Teen Titans cartoon? It may have been a bit anime-ish for some and often confused people whether or not is was actually in the DCAU, but I thought that was pretty good. There's also Static Shock, which while I enjoyed, really suffered from the overuse of cameo or crossover episodes in the later seasons. And then there was the school shooting episode, which while I understand what they were trying to do, suffered from After School Special syndrome.

On the topic of X-Men, there's actually a new X-Men Animated series called Wolverine and the X-Men--take a wild guess who the main character is. Admittedly, I like Wolverine and I actually like this new series as I could never get into Evolution for some reason.

[Silas Sparkhammer]

Originally Posted by TwoGuyswithaHat

As a collaory to this, can a cartoon accuarately represent certain characters? Can a cartoon really show the "real" Batman, or the Spectre?

Tricky question, as it depends on a lot of things. What is the "real" Batman or Green Arrow? In one sense, a tv show can never really show the "real" Batman, because so much of what he does is never seen at all! It would make for some very poor tv.

SCENE: Darkness. SFX: thumps and clatters.
LIGHT: as police shine flashlights around warehouse, revealing several burglars all tied up.
In one corner of the scene, a jagged shadow glides up the wall...

Another problem is that you can never fully satisfy all the fans, as we have so very differing personal interpretations of the characters. "Your" Batman will probably differ from "My" Batman.

But, all that said, the live-action X-Men movies were darn close to portraying the "real" X-Men. Hugh Jackman played a darn good Wolverine.

On an entirely unrelated note, why does the Spectre get no respect? *shakes my fist at DC*

Agreed... I remember the 1960's and 70's Spectre -- the eerie and haunting sequence where he kept Earth I and Earth II from colliding. The writing at DC in that era was generally very poor, but now and then, the mythmaking was truly grand.

Originally Posted by Notebook

. . . . Has anyone ever watched the Teen Titans cartoon? It may have been a bit anime-ish for some and often confused people whether or not is was actually in the DCAU, but I thought that was pretty good. . . .

I like that show. It's a bit anime-ish, and a bit cartoony, and the characters are too young...but who cares? It's fun. The writing is fresh, the animation is sharp, and the characters are portrayed with respect. Their treatment of Terra and "The Judas Contract" was elegant; in some ways, it was better than the original "real" story by Wolfman and Perez.

On the topic of X-Men, there's actually a new X-Men Animated series called Wolverine and the X-Men--take a wild guess who the main character is. Admittedly, I like Wolverine and I actually like this new series as I could never get into Evolution for some reason.

I managed to catch the Mojoverse episode. This was fun, for me, as Spiral is far and away my very favorite comics character. I was sorry to see them portray *all* her arms as bionic; that reduces her to just a shadow of Doc Ock! Her arms are *real*, blast it, with one and a half *replaced*, not merely augmented or added on. Hmph!

Unfortunately, they treated Mojo and Spiral as dumb, goofball, two-dimensional, ineffective villains. This, I think, is losing sight of the fact that, while Mojo is dumb, goofball, two-dimensional, and ineffective, he also should be scary. I guess they approached that when Mojo mind-controlled Wolverine and made him chase Nightcrawler and Scarlet Witch around. Hm... Okay, all in all, an "okay" superhero show. But it still falls short of greatness.

Speaking of outright failures, two of the very worst were:

Loonatics. A futuristic Bugs Bunny. The character design was a combination of futurism and art deco, sharp-edged and flashy. Alas, the writing wasn't even one-dimensional, consisting of cliché after cliché. The writing was some of the most trite and banal ever committed to video.

Quack Pack: Huey, Dewey, and Louie, Donald Duck's brilliant and affable nephews, the undauntable Junior Woodchucks, brave, resourceful, wise, witty, patient, and heroic -- turned by the writers into sloppy, lazy, rude, irreverent, foul-mouthed teenaged hoodlums. I suppose it might even have been realistic: lots of good kids grow up to be surly teens. (I did, and I'll bet I'm far from alone here!) But, oh, what a hellish betrayal of the promise that had been made in their character development.

(When Huey, Dewey, and Louie first appeared, ironically, they were rude, nasty, lazy, cruel, and bratty. They played cruel pranks on Donald, ditched school, etc. But Carl Barks changed them, and gave them dignity and virtue. Their portrayal in "Duck Tales" showed them at their finest. What utter dolt at Disney could ever have thought to revert them to delinquency, as was shown in Quack Pack? Find him and give him to Magica DeSpell!)

Silas

[A Turtle Named Mack]

Originally Posted by Silas Sparkhammer

This was indirectly addressed in one of the animated Superman cartoons, when he explained how frustrating it was always having to keep his full strength in check.

Which reminds me of a bit in National Lampoon (IIRC) in which Superman complains about his early sex life, because he could not restrain his ejaculations and blew the heads off several girlfriends.

[Boomcoach]

Originally Posted by A Turtle Named Mack

Which reminds me of a bit in National Lampoon (IIRC) in which Superman complains about his early sex life, because he could not restrain his ejaculations and blew the heads off several girlfriends.

I don't know if NL did anything like that, but Larry Niven wrote a tongue in cheek poece called "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" in 1971 discussing the problems the Man of Steel would encounter.

[MisterGrey]

I don't think kids are done any justice by being presented with the saintly good-guy/demonic bad-guy scenario so present in the past. You pick up on certain subtleties like that, even as a child, and they do have a certain influence on your perceptions. The moral ambiguity present in modern superhero stuff/kids' entertainment is a much better primer for the complexities of the world and adult life that the kids watching it will face on down the road. It's a very easy, simple, yet effective way to introduce children to real human nature; no one's doing them any justice by presenting them with square-jawed heroes who always do the right thing and feel no hesitancy about their roles.

I was about 10-11 when "Gargoyles" premiered and it totally blew me away. There was just something that seemed so right about it that made the stuff I'd been watching before seem worthless in comparison. Now I know that it had to do with the three-dimensional characterization and intelligent plotlines. I think that may have been in that first wave of semi-adult kids' entertainment.

[Amigone201]

Originally Posted by Silas Sparkhammer

But... NOT GOOD ENOUGH! And the limitations of the medium probably will keep them ever from overcoming this. Basically, even though the characters are "people" (and not, say, coyotes and roadrunners) the physics of getting hit and getting hurt are ignored. Wolverine has razor sharp claws -- which he uses to cut walls, chains, pipes...but never people. Cyclops has a force-beam, which he uses to penetrate walls, cars, tanks...and to bruise people ever so slightly.

I know, I know. I keep screaming at the TV, "JUST STAB HIM FOR GOD'S SAKE!!" I suppose you could stretch and say "OK, Wolverine's one of the good guys. He doesn't stab people. Professor X teaches them to non-violently de-escalate the situation whenever possible." But really, we all know what's going on. The network doesn't want to have to hire an army of apologists to answer letters from parents! That also explains why all the non-lethal violence doesn't result in so much as a bruise or a bloody nose on anyone. Although at one point, Rogue did get laid up in the hospital for a while. And of course, as I mentioned above, several people do get killed in the last season. Mostly off screen and all without violence.

This was indirectly addressed in one of the animated Superman cartoons, when he explained how frustrating it was always having to keep his full strength in check.

Oh yes, the "World of Cardboard" Speech from the last episode of Justice League Unlimited. Great show, great speech.

Looks like Supes got himself a little scuffed up there, too. He even bled from the ears a little in one episode of the Superman cartoon. I believe it had something to do with something making a painful, piercing noise.

[TwoGuyswithaHat]

As a collaory to this, can a cartoon accuarately represent certain characters? Can a cartoon really show the "real" Batman, or the Spectre?

On an entirely unrelated note, why does the Spectre get no respect? *shakes my fist at DC*

[Notebook]

Originally Posted by TwoGuyswithaHat

As a collaory to this, can a cartoon accuarately represent certain characters? Can a cartoon really show the "real" Batman, or the Spectre?

On an entirely unrelated note, why does the Spectre get no respect? *shakes my fist at DC*

True, due to demographics, the cartoons won't get as gritty as the comics, but that doesn't mean they didn't try.

[U.T Raptor Red]

Originally Posted by Amigone201

Oh yes, the "World of Cardboard" Speech from the last episode of Justice League Unlimited. Great show, great speech.

Would have been more impressive if he didn't get his ass kicked within a minute of it, though.

Originally Posted by TwoGuyswithaHat

As a collaory to this, can a cartoon accuarately represent certain characters? Can a cartoon really show the "real" Batman, or the Spectre?

Far as I'm concerned, the DCAU incarnations of most characters are the definitive ones.

[mouse goddess]

I remember being shocked when I finally saw the Incredibles.
The bad guys actually die! And the bad guys are trying to kill children!
Blew my mind (in a good way)

[Mr. Billion]

Originally Posted by Amigone201

If you really want to know what I'm talking about, prepare your brain bleach and watch this. And then watch this.

Oh man, that was awesome.