Personally, I didn't think the Jackson 5ive cartoon was TOO bad, considering it was a departure for Rankin/Bass to do traditional animation, as opposed to their classic, choppy/shoddy stop-motion holiday specials... I think the one thing that killed the Jackson cartoon was they, like others in Saturday morning for some reason, didn't really utilize the laugh track properly.
Uh, their choppy stop motion holiday specials built their empire.
In every other case, RB outsourced their animation to Japan... Frosty the Snowman, Night Before Christmas, and especially their first television series, The King Kong Show (which wasn't great, but still leaps and bounds over HB's horrid Godzillay Quest show). All Japanese animated.
Lemme put it this way, Filmation animation wasn't half as stiff as J5. At least the one I saw. And I agree, the only thing these bands ever seem to do is make bad jokes. Even with The Beatles.
And DOI! I'm forgetting the worst band/musician cartoon of all time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8WYh8uz3pQ
Actually, there was a GREAT comment on the video...
When watching cartoon intros on Youtube, no matter WHAT year they were made, no matter how terrible they are, the top comment is always, "Man, this was the golden age of cartoons! These people really CARED about what they were doing, unlike today! Bring back _____!"
EXCEPT this one.
Oh, MAAAAAAN! Someone's saying something I'm thinking! That totally busts me up. EVERYONE in EVERY time period with a decade biased says that crap. Sometimes I see their point if it's Animaniacs or something good... but you don't know how many crap cartoons (like Maxie's World) have those comments.
Buck back to the band/musician thing. All I can say was, the BEST musician based Saturday morning Show EVER was Weird Al. Too bad he only got one season.