Why are newer cartoons so shitty?

What if you find modern adult TV as shitty as you find modern cartoons?
 
Why the newer cartoons are so much shittier can be summarized easily.

Technology. Making cartoons has never been easier and as you can expect more and more people have started making cartoons. Look at things like ToonBoom, Flash, Go Animate! There are literally dozens of options to speed up the process, but just because we have more access to this doesn't make 100% better toons.

Look at Pickles and Peanut. Hastily thrown together using flash animation and stock photo images from photoshop. Hell look at Ctrl-Alt-Del the animated series. Animated in flash and boy does it fucking show.

That is not to say flash is bad its just the one everyone uses and thus has more shits than gold. Look at Star Vs The forces of evil. The animation isn't that great, but it does have some witty stories at times.

Case and point. For every good show such as Gravity Falls, Rick and Morty, or Futurama we get tens and twenties of a dozen shitty shows that aren't all that great, but make stupid people happy by being "topical" or trying too. It also isn't new. Look at the 60s - 70s. They had the Osmands, Happy Days Gang, and Casper solving mysteries in fucking space. Mostly trying to build off the success of scooby-doo.

We also need to realize that cartoons from the 80s,90s, and 2000s that are still on today are starting ot suffer from seasonal rot. They are getting more and more worse. Look at the Fairly Odd Parents they added a fucking dog. The simpsons stayed on by doing god knows what. I know They wanted to add a new character but rejected the idea. Instead all they did was copy southpark by being "topical".


Did Life in Hell ever make it to film or was it always kept on paper as a concept?

He wanted to put them on the Tracy ulman show but changed his mind because he didn't want to give up copyright of his characters. Instead he created a family he didn't give two shits about. Hell at the end of the first season of the simpsons. Marge was suppose to shave her head and reveal bunny ears, but that idea was scrapped when the show got more and more popular.
 
Technology. Making cartoons has never been easier and as you can expect more and more people have started making cartoons. Look at things like ToonBoom, Flash, Go Animate! There are literally dozens of options to speed up the process, but just because we have more access to this doesn't make 100% better toons.


I sincerely disagree, Flash blew open the doors to lots of fresh and good ideas that would've never seen the light of day otherwise. Gone were the days where you had to kiss executive ass & bend your vision to an unrecognizable shadow of the original to get published. Producer meddling was obliterated at that instant, which sadly isn't so much the case anymore. I don't really think the technology impacted the quality of the content itself, bad writing has always been a thing. There's a difference between using poor tools and using tools poorly.

Because TV is a money influenced industry & producers get heart attacks when a show doesn't make money, the craptacular nature of modern TV in general is due to marketing; they need as wide an audience as possible to make what they do worth it & in an era where you can screw yourself by screening your ideas on the internet for free, they need to make sure their show appeals in such a way that people would feel inclined to not only watch it but to also help pay for it.

They are essentially pan handling for people to buy their product & thus have to bend over backwards to be as inoffensive as possible. This also means they have to invest in it as little as possible because if it turns out to be a bust and they threw everything at it, they're screwed. On the flip side, if they invest in it as little as possible and it makes money, that's even more incentive to keep the budget low because it means more profit. Why would you need to try harder when you're already successful? Too many important lessons were learned the hard way by deviating from this course of action.

Fortunately there's an alternative to all this where the internet & TV come together, where the idiots that don't know no better than to give away their ideas for free on the 'net get an active audience which catches the sight of TV producers; they notice this penniless bumpkin has a viable product & audience but no market to speak of & they realize this shit can be played to their advantage. This is how we get new & good IPs on TV now, such as China IL & Ax Cop & that shit grows out to sister shows like Golan the Insatiable. This also unfortunately means we get more cynical cash grabs like Annoying Orange & Problem Solverz but it's ultimately for the better than for the worse. The independent circuit now works symbiotically with the mainstream, rather than simply fighting each other.

By the way, Go Animate doesn't matter because no professional would ever use it and it was largely only ever used for "YOU'R GROUNDED, GROUNDED, GROUNDED" videos. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think that software wasn't even capable of letting you import your own audio & forced you to use its shitty, built in version of Speakonia. How the Hell could you ever sell that shit on DVD?
 
Did Life in Hell ever make it to film or was it always kept on paper as a concept?

I think I should have worded it better. Because what I was saying while making cartoons is much easier we have both good toons and bad toons. The video you linked was one I wanted to link but I couldn't remember the name. Basically what I mean is while it is easier ot make cartoons is that we usually get a bunch of bad ones (My Life me, Pixel Pinkie, and Allen Gregory) and really good ones (Little Foot, Gumball, Bob's Burgers, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, etc etc)

I'm just saying its quite easy for anyone to pick it up and make a.. bad show.
 
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The cartoons you watched when you were a kid were great because you were a kid when you watched them. When you're eight years old, you don't give a shit about cheap animation, recycled ideas or blatant merchandising. Take, for instance, the beloved Hanna Barbara studios. Their standard formula was:

1. Find something popular (e.g. I Love A Mystery) .
2. Invent a cartoon that's similar enough to cash in without being so blatant that you get sued. Keep the animation cheap (e.g. Scooby Doo).
3. If popular, recycle basic formula over and over again (e.g. Speed Buggy, Funky Phantom, Captain Caveman, Jabberjaw).

They later added a fourth step, which was "recycle old, unprofitable animation as postmodern adult cartoon," e.g. Sealab 2021, Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast, Harvey Birdman.

In short, cartoons have always been 90% shit.
 
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