Quote from: Dumarest;970556Good thing you aren't painting with a broad brush and generalizing to the point of idiocy with that statement.

Yeah, someone apparently peed in my cheerios before I wrote that. I'm actually more bugged by The Real Ghostbusters and I'm projecting onto other cartoons. I remember seeing that when I was like 12 and thinking that as being really well written and why didn't they have that when I was 6 and watching Scooby Doo and other Hanna Barbara toons. So I saw it was on Netflix and maybe it would be something my niece and nephew would like, so I watched a couple of episodes and was underwhelmed.

1980s cartoons were engrossing, funny, and really cool...
...
...to seven-year-old me.

I have no desire to find out what those 'toons look like to grown-up me. Best to let pleasant childhood memories stay pleasant.

Quote from: Dumarest;970556Good thing you aren't painting with a broad brush and generalizing to the point of idiocy with that statement.

But he's not wrong.

He's also not wrong for the wrong reasons.  1980's cartoons sucked because of the change in FCC rules regarding children's programming (on the one hand, less violence and you had to have a moral; on the other hand, you're allowed to make a 24 minute toy commercial now).  The commentary tracks from some of those box set re-releases are fascinating.

You only have to compare the writing for, say, Thundarr the Barbarian to the D&D cartoon to see the difference.

Quote from: daniel_ream;970753But he's not wrong.

He's also not wrong for the wrong reasons.  1980's cartoons sucked because of the change in FCC rules regarding children's programming (on the one hand, less violence and you had to have a moral; on the other hand, you're allowed to make a 24 minute toy commercial now).  The commentary tracks from some of those box set re-releases are fascinating.

You only have to compare the writing for, say, Thundarr the Barbarian to the D&D cartoon to see the difference.

Did I say he was wrong?

But Thundarr sucked too.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;9707331980s cartoons were engrossing, funny, and really cool...
...
...to seven-year-old me.

I have no desire to find out what those 'toons look like to grown-up me. Best to let pleasant childhood memories stay pleasant.

Having grown up in the 80's I still love watching the old stuff. I got the entire Box set of Dungeons and Dragons, Thundercats, He-Man, Silverhawks, and Tale Spin (admittedly it's early 90's). They're all still amazing in my 30's. I think, though, that I'm a big kid and easily amused.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;970632Yeah, someone apparently peed in my cheerios before I wrote that. I'm actually more bugged by The Real Ghostbusters and I'm projecting onto other cartoons. I remember seeing that when I was like 12 and thinking that as being really well written and why didn't they have that when I was 6 and watching Scooby Doo and other Hanna Barbara toons. So I saw it was on Netflix and maybe it would be something my niece and nephew would like, so I watched a couple of episodes and was underwhelmed.

My kids were going through a phase of watching The Real Ghostbusters recently. I didn't like it back when it was new and I liked it even less this time around. I guess the producers were too cheap to license the rights to make the characters look like the actors, or was there some other reason they looked nothing like the film characters? I assume the color-coded uniforms were to make it easier for kids to tell them apart.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;9707331980s cartoons were engrossing, funny, and really cool...
...
...to seven-year-old me.

I have no desire to find out what those 'toons look like to grown-up me. Best to let pleasant childhood memories stay pleasant.

The first Robotech series is still good stuff. The only part I skip over is whenever Minmay sings, although it is amusing they couldn't even bother getting someone who can hit all the notes to sing the songs.

Quote from: Dumarest;970760But Thundarr sucked too.

Those are fighting words, heretic.

Quote from: Dumarest;970762My kids were going through a phase of watching The Real Ghostbusters recently. I didn't like it back when it was new and I liked it even less this time around. I guess the producers were too cheap to license the rights to make the characters look like the actors, or was there some other reason they looked nothing like the film characters? I assume the color-coded uniforms were to make it easier for kids to tell them apart.

The first season is all right, the monsters are appropriately frightening and the plotlines are surprisingly mature (there's one where the Ghostbusters have to quit and Ray ends up working a humiliating job in a shoe store).  They go rapidly downhill after that.

We are talking about cheaply, quickly produced cartoons for kids that were primarily intended to sell toys.  Every now and again you get a Captain Power or a Land of the Lost, but looking for quality is a fool's errand.

FWIW, it's nearly impossible to get the rights to actual likenesses of real human actors. It's not even a matter of money; no sane actor will agree to it.

Quote from: daniel_ream;9707531980's cartoons sucked because of the change in FCC rules regarding children's programming (on the one hand, less violence and you had to have a moral; on the other hand, you're allowed to make a 24 minute toy commercial now).

Quote from: Dumarest;970762I guess the producers were too cheap to license the rights to make the characters look like the actors, or was there some other reason they looked nothing like the film characters?  

In both cases, those are the creators playing by the rules of the field, and I'm not particularly upset with that (pretending a 30 second segment at the end about not touching downed power lines and the other 'Knowing is half the battle' bits make your toy infomercial into educational tv is pretty crass, but in a 'look at what we can get away with' way that I kinda find amusing).

Quote from: daniel_ream;970840The first season is all right, the monsters are appropriately frightening and the plotlines are surprisingly mature (there's one where the Ghostbusters have to quit and Ray ends up working a humiliating job in a shoe store).  They go rapidly downhill after that.

I guess I just thought that they were better than they ended up being revealed to me in my rewatching, and I was disappointed. There is one episode--the Egon character falls from a building (and is rescued by their helicopter), and starts having PTSD, which allows "The Boogeyman" (his designated-nemesis-monster, fought and imprisoned in an earlier episode) to feed on his fear and escape his prison. I remember catching that episode at 13 while with younger cousins and thinking something like, "why wasn't the stuff I grew up with written with actual plots like this?" I watched that episode this past year while thinking my niece and nephew would like the show and... that was the extent of the good writing. The rest of it was, not bad, just no better than any other kids tv.  

Quote from: OmegaHave you ever actually watched the D&D cartoon? Apparently not.

I would have been 9 when it came out, so probably, but also probably not particularly invested in it. I only remember one episode (so again, projecting hypocrite for bashing it)--there was some magic treasure chest that opened up to other dimensions based on where it was placed, and they were trying to find the place where it would open up to their home.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;970892[...] pretty crass, but in a 'look at what we can get away with' way that I kinda find amusing).

If you have $20 to spare, invest in the DVD box set of Weird Al Yankovic's CBS children's show.  Not for the show itself, it's forgettable, but for the commentary tracks.  Al and the directors/producers talk a great length about the batshit insane prescriptions CBS put on them and the contortions they had to go through to comply.

Quote from: Omega;970532The cartoon isnt set in the Forgotten Realms.

I never said it was.  

However, that was  one of the things that made the FR stand out. When it first came out I remember there was this kind of impression of "this is a grownup fantasy setting", not the cheesiness that a lot of people felt Greyhawk and default D&D had become.

Quote from: RPGPundit;971422t[...]the cheesiness that a lot of people felt Greyhawk and default D&D had become.

I can see Mystara, it's transparently written for 12-year-olds, but Greyhawk?  It's cut-and-paste real historical nations. What was cheesy about it?

I love the GH map but it is funny how all the OCD grognards have no issue with its geography, despite being based on the US from what I've read, makes no sense. Of course it is a fantasy world so I could not give a fuck about the 'realism' of a fantasy world's geography but I've seen this used as an attack on Mystara and other worlds.

Quote from: Voros;971466OCD grognards

To be fair I think the thread I came across was on Enworlds, which seems to specialize in such obsessive close readings so the groginess of the posters is questionable.