Present-Day Anime Animation

[Kriven]

The thing about the Hannah-Barbera cartoons is... they were also complained about in their time.

But by the time you got to our generations, which I'm assuming is pretty solidly the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, the cartoon stations weren't just playing contemporary shows... they were playing a little of the old stuff, a lot of new stuff, and depending on where specifically on this twenty-year timeline a person falls, a whole lot of old-stuff-that-was-new. By the year 2000 Nickelodeon was still playing most of its 90s Nicktoons, a healthy slew of new stuff, a sizable portion of Kids WB material (I remember Animaniacs, Freakazoid, and Ninja Turtles), and some older stuff... and if you were young enough not to be ashamed to catch the end of Nick Jr., you got treated to Franklin, Little Bear, and the Muppet Babies, too.

And then on Disney Channel you had Recess and the Disney Movie Shows (Aladdin, Hercules, Little Mermaid), but you also had the 1980s Disney Afternoon line-up... DuckTales, QuackPack, GoofTroop, Rescue Rangers, Darkwing Duck, The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Gargoyles, The Gummi Bears, TaleSpin. Then you started getting some of the newer stuff like House of Mouse and Kim Possible, and even though they started phasing out the old stuff in this process, there was still this big pool of cartoons reaching further back into the station's history.

On Cartoon Network you not only had the original Hanna-Barbera stuff (Scooby-Doo, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, sometimes Jabberjaw), but the original Looney Tunes short, the Bugs and Daffy Show, Speed Racer, The Flintstone Kids, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, Tom and Jerry, The Tom and Jerry Kids, and all from the point of 1995-2005 you were getting new Cartoon Cartoons that didn't replace these shows but were aired alongside them: Dexter's Laboratory, The Powerpuff Girls, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Codename: Kids Next Door, Cow & Chicken, I Am Weasel, Johnny Bravo, Two Stupid Dogs, Secret Squirrel, Ed, Edd, 'n' Eddy... They even ran Speed Racer in the afternoon, which eventually became Toonami/Miguzi, and then you had Pokemon, Sailor Moon, Samurai Jack, Dragon Ball Z, Yu Yu Hakusho, Rurouni Kenshin, and Code Lyoko.

Kids WB and Fox both had their Saturday Morning Line-up (a concept which is sadly lost...)... The Whole DC Animated Universe, the new TMNT, etc.

So when we (or at least I) are complaining about "Sameness", I'm doing that with the knowledge that each station/era has traditionally produce similar content in a similar timeframe... it's just that they used to air the new lineup right beside the old lineup. Instead of having six contemporary shows to choose from, you had five (or more... I remember ABC Family doing something. Did they have Bobby's World?) channels running three decades worth of content. You didn't grow tired of that Hanna-Barbera look, or that Screwball Looney Tunes look, or that 90s Nicktoons look, or that Disney Afternoon look because all of these styles were cut together.

These days all the old programs have either been completely removed or, more common I find, moved to specialty channels like Boomerang and The Nineties Is All That.

So I'm not trying to hate on today's cartoons. There's actually a good handful of stuff that is among the best stuff we've ever had. It's just that all we have in general is a handful of stuff, and that didn't used to be the case. I'm hating more on the network's business models, I guess.

Edit: Lately I've been finding box sets of some of my old favorite cartoons at Walmart and such... for Christmas I even got The Complete Angry Beavers (and then some anime... Dragon Ball GT, Sailor Moon, Cowboy Bebop...). I've seen the Disney Afternoon stuff, a lot of Nicktoons, and a few early Cartoon Cartoons (Dexter and Johnny Bravo and Courage). I've been buying them every now and again, in addition to whatever new shows I like that come out on season sets, and ripping the DVDs so I can kind of cut my own "Channels" (playlists). Turning on my playlists is a lot more rewarding than watching television, just because of the variety. There's even some stuff in there that I don't particularly like but got at yardsales or as gifts, just so I can have that experience of "Eh, I'm not that into this" because that's part of having so much variety.