MickeyToon In
Writing yesterday's post it never occurred to me that I'd been focusing on live-action superhero series. Cartoons have often presented superheroes in a form more similar to their comic-book origins than any live-action producers could ever afford. Of course, TV being a business there was always a tendency to cheap out. Coupled with the prevailing notion (at least until the late 80's into the 90's) that cartoons and comics were kiddie stuff (and why waste money making any sort of quality show for the kiddies?) and cartoons often ended up with budgets so miniscule that the cartoonists sometimes resorted to just moving a still picture across an animation board.
Even with the bargain-sub-basement budget, cartoons shared the comics' advantage of being able to show fantastic vistas without actually having to build a miniature and blue-screen the actors into it, etc. Even though the art was as rushed as the rest of the production we could still see what was being represented, and as it was a cartoon anyway we were already disposed to suspend disbelief and enjoy.
The 60's saw some classic superhero cartoons, but by the 70's our national flight from personal responsibility started to gear up. Parents couldn't be bothered to actually parent their kids, and it would be downright un-American to expect the kids to take any responsibility for their own actions. It was therefore TV's fault any time a kid was violent, did poorly in school, talked back or used the wrong fork for the salad course. A hue and cry rose up for the government to more closely regulate what we could and couldn't see on TV.
After poisoning the rugrats with breakfast cereals containing near-lethal doses of sugar, preservatives and cartoon tie-ins parents were fearful that any sort of action or adventure on the plug-in babysitter might excite the kiddies. Cartoons quickly devolved into saccharine, far too cute animals- all with cute kiddie sidekicks infinitely more annoying than Gilbert Gottfried covering a Dylan tune.
Our once-proud superheroes were reduced to hanging around with kids and a DOG WEARING A FRICKIN' CAPE!!!!!!!!! Worse, the Wonder Twins landed on Earth with a mission to keep the average I.Q. of the human race down by always rescuing the absolutely stupidest kids they could ever find, thus preventing any further evolution on our part. Comics fans turned away from the tube, finding the printed versions infinitely more interesting and complex than the simplistic crap dripping from the TV.
By the 90's about the only "superhero" cartoons left were half-hour commercials for lines of cheap toys. The live-action Superman movie had been a hit, but the increasingly silly sequels turned away the audience and failed to draw in the general public. But then Tim Burton's Batman, drawing on the dark, gothic, dark, moody and dark version Frank Miller used in his Dark Knight comics started pulling in the cash. Hollywood execs remembered their own love of superheroes in their own youth and by the time the Batman sequels were getting silly the WB network had Batman back in cartoon form (yet far more adult-oriented than the last two movies before Batman Begins).
With the success of Batman came the desire for yet another success, and so the modern Superman cartoon appeared. Their joint success (as well as the profitability of the Spiderman movies and Singer's X-Men films) then brought us the recent, excellent Justice League series... which is where the profit motive turned around and bit itself. DC was wary of losing control of potentially profitable characters (Prevailing rumor has Joss Whedon's Wonder Woman coming out next year) and so after battling Luthor, the Joker, Darkseid and even the intensely erratic schedule foisted upon them by Cartoon Network, even the mighty Justice League was brought down... by lawyers.
Even with the bargain-sub-basement budget, cartoons shared the comics' advantage of being able to show fantastic vistas without actually having to build a miniature and blue-screen the actors into it, etc. Even though the art was as rushed as the rest of the production we could still see what was being represented, and as it was a cartoon anyway we were already disposed to suspend disbelief and enjoy.
The 60's saw some classic superhero cartoons, but by the 70's our national flight from personal responsibility started to gear up. Parents couldn't be bothered to actually parent their kids, and it would be downright un-American to expect the kids to take any responsibility for their own actions. It was therefore TV's fault any time a kid was violent, did poorly in school, talked back or used the wrong fork for the salad course. A hue and cry rose up for the government to more closely regulate what we could and couldn't see on TV.
After poisoning the rugrats with breakfast cereals containing near-lethal doses of sugar, preservatives and cartoon tie-ins parents were fearful that any sort of action or adventure on the plug-in babysitter might excite the kiddies. Cartoons quickly devolved into saccharine, far too cute animals- all with cute kiddie sidekicks infinitely more annoying than Gilbert Gottfried covering a Dylan tune.
Our once-proud superheroes were reduced to hanging around with kids and a DOG WEARING A FRICKIN' CAPE!!!!!!!!! Worse, the Wonder Twins landed on Earth with a mission to keep the average I.Q. of the human race down by always rescuing the absolutely stupidest kids they could ever find, thus preventing any further evolution on our part. Comics fans turned away from the tube, finding the printed versions infinitely more interesting and complex than the simplistic crap dripping from the TV.
By the 90's about the only "superhero" cartoons left were half-hour commercials for lines of cheap toys. The live-action Superman movie had been a hit, but the increasingly silly sequels turned away the audience and failed to draw in the general public. But then Tim Burton's Batman, drawing on the dark, gothic, dark, moody and dark version Frank Miller used in his Dark Knight comics started pulling in the cash. Hollywood execs remembered their own love of superheroes in their own youth and by the time the Batman sequels were getting silly the WB network had Batman back in cartoon form (yet far more adult-oriented than the last two movies before Batman Begins).
With the success of Batman came the desire for yet another success, and so the modern Superman cartoon appeared. Their joint success (as well as the profitability of the Spiderman movies and Singer's X-Men films) then brought us the recent, excellent Justice League series... which is where the profit motive turned around and bit itself. DC was wary of losing control of potentially profitable characters (Prevailing rumor has Joss Whedon's Wonder Woman coming out next year) and so after battling Luthor, the Joker, Darkseid and even the intensely erratic schedule foisted upon them by Cartoon Network, even the mighty Justice League was brought down... by lawyers.
