The show was quite literally made to
sell already-produced toys, the show came afterwards thanks to deregulation and the FCC relaxing its stance on advertising to kids via children's programming.
It's a show born out of a need to sell a product, not produce a work of art by some auteur. It's slop.
Like I said already, you could apply the bolded part to a lot of classic literature.
Being based on a toy does not automatically entail that there was no serious artistry (a point you basically conceded by saying you're fine with Japanese-made toy shows).
Which is not at all an argument I understand--I've tried several from the eighties and nineties and a lot of them make me feel like I'm watching the same show, an experience I almost never get with western-made media.
I can understand why Ronin is easier to digest because it's indeed shorter and in turn doesn't feel as padded as something as lengthy as Seiya, but as someone who it all on Toonami back in the day (twice even), I can attest it's not this untouchable beacon of anime.
You're also not the first person to overstate its pedigree.
I never said it was untouchable, nor am I sure what "pedigree" I'm overstating. My statements on the matter were "it has a vibe I don't often see in modern shows" and "its more fun than Saint Seiya."
Don't be coy, you know what I meant: If you watched these cartoons with a blank state of mind past your preteen years, you'd see them for the cynical cash grabs they were. Also,
some replies in that thread put it best. I mean I get it, I can do the same thing with cartoons I grew up with, that doesn't speak to whatever objective merits they might have. You watched them at the right time at the right age, so of course you can justify why you fond memories of them as an adult.
I responded to most of those guys.
The whole "its all nostalgia!" argument is just another basic bitch "I don't wanna think so I'm just gonna repackage an NPC argument" deal, much like the toy commercial thing. How many times are people gonna make me refute the same tired cliche argument over and over?
And like I believe I've pointed out: I'm judging based on the actual
content of the shows. You're judging based on stupid superficial factors that shouldn't matter. Imagine someone hating the Batman Arkham games just because they're based on a comic book.
And some of those 80s cartoons I did actually see as reruns back in ye olden days of Cartoon Network (such as Thundercats, Captain Planet, or the gazillion insufferable "babified" versions of old Hanna Barbara shit like Pup Named Scooby Doo, Muppet Babies, etc.)
Nitpick: Captain Planet is from 1993.
Also... did you actually
watch Muppet Babies? Because I get the feeling its not the kind of show you think it is. Muppet Babies is as close as you can get to having LSD hallucinations without actually taking LSD. My experience every time I watch it is "what the hell did I just witness?"
Like, why would someone watch some old 80s cartoon where a character with a sword can't even use it on people, when later in the afternoon I can watch super powered aliens in DBZ actually beat the shit out of each other?
There's things that are bothering me here.
First thing that comes to mind is I'm having flashbacks to the Street Fighter II vs Mortal Kombat rivalry of the 1990s. At the time, Mortal Kombat overwhelmingly gained ground and letters in magazines outright admitted it was because they liked blood and being able to decapitate their opponents.
Nowadays history has pretty much shown that SFII was the real winner. Even people who loved MK as a kid (like myself) will readily admit that the original games weren't exactly good.
Second, your comparison feels a little apples-and-oranges. DBZ is essentially a fantasy wrestling match. Of course its gonna be more violent than He-Man or Thundercats, which are both more focused on adventure, exploration, and character drama. There's no particular reason either show *needs* to have the main characters slicing people in half--and both shows have heroes who have morals against killing people (and in He-Man's case, two episodes--"The Dragon's Gift" and "The Problem With Power"--tackle the kind of situations that arise because of that).
Sorry boomer, I've seen you guys spend the enitrety of '00s and '10s gloating your about amazing animated toons, and to the people born before or after that generation, they do not hold up.
This has not actually been my experience at all. I've gotten people from multiple generations interested in eighties stuff, and He-Man is the most consistent success story.
By the way, its a little weird to see someone say "80s anime was animated better than western animation" when a lot of times the exact same studios were doing both... and anime was not above being cheap (do I need to show that one episode of Macross that turned into a slideshow?)
but pointing to fucking western 80s toons as some oasis or alternative to the perils of anime
..... I'm not sure I actually did that....
is just cringe to anyone who studies the history of this stuff. There's a reason why so many animators call it "the dark time of western animation".
I've always heard that this is a very literal phrase: when they say "dark age of animation" they mean literally
animation--said people tend to point to stuff like classic Looney Tunes or Disney as "good animation," meaning they're talking entirely about the quality of the visuals on display. They're not accounting for story/writing factors at all.
Not to mention a lot of creatives tend to have left-wing values, so of course anything that reeks of "capitalism" is evil to them (when it suits them).
It's a little like calling an influx of JRPGs "the dark age of gaming" and then hearing people say that Asteroids was the literal pinnacle of video game programming, or to hear someone call Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a terrible book because its not as wordy as Dickens.
This is before even getting to that there's a degree of tunnel vision involved with how a lot of people judge "animation" anyway. Like for example I often hear Superman The Animated Series (the 1990s one) brought up as an example of the "Renaissance Age" and yet... I don't know what the technical term is, but one thing that bothers me about that (and most of the DCAU) is that most of the "animated acting" just
does not does not properly sell what it's trying to convey. The episode "Father's Day" for example tries to do that Goku thing where Superman gets a second wind and kicks ass after being wailed on, but somehow it just comes off as lame. This is without even getting into the millions of writing issues.
On the other side of the coin, they sometimes tunnel vision about that "cheap" animation
itself, completely missing a lot of what's actually going on. To use He-Man for example, as
this video shows even the "cheap" animation had a lot of challenging shots, and
this shows that they were actually putting in a lot of important details. But because there's not literally a ton of movement every frame like in a classic golden age Tom and Jerry short, its "bad" apparently.
