Most Obnoxious Fandoms

[Drtooth]

To me, saying


I hope it's clear I was being sarcastic in my previous post. I have close friends of both genders who I consider just friends, and nothing more (a lot of them are married or in relationships, and I'm content in my bachelorettehood, but I digress).

Oh yeah. I was just agreeing. Forced shipping is the worst.

Of course, after seeing Kung Fu Panda 2 again, I totally get the Po X Tigress stuff. I was watching the cartoon spinoff too long.


Anyway, Know what really gets under my skin? Militant 90's kids that think the world of animation belongs to them. And how every single cartoon made that wasn't their favorite is in on some huge Illuminati-esque conspiracy theory to somehow deprive them of watching the same half of the series worth of reruns or even more insane, that somehow shows made 10 years apart are the reason something that had a good enough run was cancelled. Yeah, every generation of cartoon viewer has their head up their butt about how great their generation's shows were, even if they weren't... but 90's kids have a very spoiled sense of entitlement about these things. Why? They didn't live through the dark ages where parental groups and cowardly and or greedy network execs made toothless, merchandise driven pablum. Don't get me wrong, I do love most cartoons from the 80's. I love Transformers, TMNT, G.I. Joe, and Inspector Gadget as much as the next person, but the shackles of network repression were tightest from the 70's to the very early 90's. Shows like Animaniacs would never have been made back then, and if they did, the characters would either be cloying Smurf knockoffs or some other toy related thing that wouldn't be as good.

As one who grew up with the rise of things like Ren and Stimpy, 90's kids never got to experience that aha moment, and other than the dark days of 2005 (when crappy live action tween coms ruled the Earth) there hasn't been a single backstep. Cartoons of today owe themselves to 90's cartoons and the rise of the creator driven program even the ones based on toylines. This is an amazing time to be an animation fan, and we have people whining that Dexter's Lab isn't still being produced, even though they hated the last 2 seasons of the show anyway. And if it's reruns they freaking want, hello... Bit torrent maybe? If they're that desperate?

 

[mr3urious]

That whole attitude about "all of today's cartoons suck" implies no one should ever make anything new again and just show the old stuff for all eternity. If fans of the Golden Age had their way back in the '90s (and some did complain about Tiny Toons and Dexter's Lab on the web back then), we wouldn't have all those wonderful shows from that decade.

 

[Drtooth]

Exactly. And they seem to forget the creators of the cartoons they hate oh so much grew up on the very same cartoons they put upon a pedestal and were influenced by them to make cartoons. Sure, there will always be a fair share of bad stuff being produced, but that's no different from any other medium out there. Just because someone didn't make another Citizen Kane doesn't mean every movie we've got since is Jack and Jill.

Then again, if you can't find anything to like in modern cartoons, that's a sign you're too old to actually like them, and only hang on to the older stuff you remember for nostalgic reasons. Most die hard animation aficionados can find at least something to like in every era. And I do. I actively try to set out to find things I like because I'd rather like a whole bunch of things than to hate too many things.

 

[CensoredAlso]

That whole attitude about "all of today's cartoons suck" implies no one should ever make anything new again

To me it just means there are upward trends and downward trends in entertainment. And during a downward trend, people get very anxious to get back to the last time when things were going well.

 

[CensoredAlso]

And they seem to forget the creators of the cartoons they hate oh so much grew up on the very same cartoons they put upon a pedestal and were influenced by them to make cartoons.

That's the case sometimes, but other times there's studio interference. As Frank Oz pointed out, in recent years the business types over powered the creative types.

 

[D'Snowth]

That's the case sometimes, but other times there's studio interference. As Frank Oz pointed out, in recent years the business types over powered the creative types.

Yup. Sid & Marty Krofft put that into perspective too: when they started production on H.R. PUFNSTUF, they put out the casting calls themselves, and only two people auditioned for the role of Witchiepoo - the first of whom was Penny Marshall, whom they felt wasn't right for the part (she would've been a New York Witch as they put it, lol), the second was Billie Hayes, who ran into their office, jumped up on their desk, delivered the trademark cackle, and they hired her on the spot. That was then, Marty said if that happened today, there'd be forty different network execs auditioning over a hundred witches, and not even give him or Sid a say in who gets cast.

Of course, I read Ken Levine's blog regularly, he puts all of this into perspective.

That's why I personally feel discouraged from really trying to continue my work any further than the confines of YouTube, because I know in this day and age, there's no room for little independent guys like me who won't settle for the network and execs taking over complete control of what we create and them tell us what our creations will be, who our characters are, who's going to play them, and owning what we do to boot. Heck, even community and public access stations want to own what you create!

 

[beatnikchick300]

That whole attitude about "all of today's cartoons suck" implies no one should ever make anything new again and just show the old stuff for all eternity. If fans of the Golden Age had their way back in the '90s (and some did complain about Tiny Toons and Dexter's Lab on the web back then), we wouldn't have all those wonderful shows from that decade.

I actually wrote a journal entry on my deviantArt page on this very topic (since I was getting perturbed by people whining about '90s kids and calling us names for disliking modern cartoons): http://earthangel87.deviantart.com/journal/Are-cartoons-made-after-the-90s-bad-by-default-501943378

If you don't want to click the link (or for some reason can't see the entry), I basically say I did like a lot of cartoons from the 90s (some being just as good as I remember them), but bad cartoons did exist then, just as some good one exist today. I regret not saying that maybe these complainers, instead of being mad at '90s kids, they should be mad at what channels like Nickelodeon, and to a lesser extent, Cartoon Network, do to shows that are quality, because I think maybe that's part of the problem.

 

[Drtooth]

Not saying CN can't take a hatchet to something great (look at what happened to MegasXLR... where was that show all my life?!) and worship something awful (A Johnny Test marathon on Christmas Day... really!?!?). But what my big beef about militant 90's kids over all the other decade nostalgia favoring cartoon fans is that they don't have the historical context of what television cartoons were like before then. Sure, G.I. Joe had some surprisingly inappropriate and deep stuff for a show selling kids toys. But the sheer amount of corporate meddling in that decade and the parental groups that turned the 70's into bubblegum pop Scooby-Doo and Archie knockoffs... I'll give them one thing, at least they should be praising the memorable shows from that decade. I've seen people defend Maxie's World, and that's one of the worst cartoons I've ever seen. The 90's was the rise of the cartoonist taking over, and the rise of darker elements in super hero cartoons (except Spider-Man for some strange reason). They were indeed an impressive turn around from the past 2 decades since Action for Children's Television was formed and whined about those 60's Super Hero cartoons.

But that movement never exactly stopped. We're in a post-90's cartoon world where we're still getting away with stuff we could never get away with in those 2 decades. Only there's swings between action and comedy, sometimes both. There were always garbage cartoons since the dawn of animation, and like movies we either remember the really good ones or the really bad ones. There will always be something amazing that fails to find an audience and fall by the wayside (coming from a Fox Kid's cartoon fan, I know all about that), and something that somehow is more popular than it deserves. My main complaint however is that matter of taste does not equal quality, and what makes a show/movie/cartoon/whatever bad is usually universal. there's a difference between "I really don't care much for Super Hero movies" and "Mac and Me was one of the worst movies ever." No one can defend Mac & Me, even ironically. And if someone manages to do so, it's on nostalgic merit.

And that trolling on deviantart for shows you don't like to complain about them in an immature, thoughtless, and disturbingly time consuming manner (and that just happened to me which is why I'm ticked off) is a waste of everyone's time.

 

[mimitchi33]

I'm not sure if anyone has heard of it before, but there's a video series called Pooh's Adventures, where they take Winnie the Pooh and other cartoons and edit them into another movie, where they do nothing but comment on what's going to happen next. The fandom is equally as annoying-adding rules left and right other than the main ones (one of these was "No live action characters at all!"), telling people what things they should include in their parody movies, giving random characters makeovers which are mashups of other cartoon characters, and horror of horrors, shipping random cartoon characters like Vinny (from Family Guy) and Elsa, as well as Thomas and Twilight Sparkle! They also block users who say disrespectful comments about their work.

 

[Harleena]

I'm not sure if anyone has heard of it before, but there's a video series called Pooh's Adventures, where they take Winnie the Pooh and other cartoons and edit them into another movie, where they do nothing but comment on what's going to happen next. The fandom is equally as annoying-adding rules left and right other than the main ones (one of these was "No live action characters at all!"), telling people what things they should include in their parody movies, giving random characters makeovers which are mashups of other cartoon characters, and horror of horrors, shipping random cartoon characters like Vinny (from Family Guy) and Elsa, as well as Thomas and Twilight Sparkle! They also block users who say disrespectful comments about their work.