Underappreciated cartoons
Mar 17, 2018 3:38:12 GMT -5
Post by edmonddantes on Mar 17, 2018 3:38:12 GMT -5
Was tempted to add some stipulation like "no anime," but that tends to lead to arguments about what constitutes "anime" (no joke I've heard people say Thundercats--the original 1986 one--is anime, and there actually was some solid logic to back that up). Basically though... we already have an anime thread so let's try to not turn this into a copy of that.
There's something that bugs me about the state of non-Japanese animation. Seems like there are only three categories that are well known *and appreciated* :
A) very recent stuff that becomes a fad, invariably getting forgotten after people realize it sucks (My Little Pony, Steven Universe, etc.)
B) stuff based on a comic book, usually by DC (oddly the Marvel stuff tends to get ignored--people remember X-Men and Spider-Man from the 1990s but by contrast people can and do remember the ENTIRE DCAU).
C) stuff from the 1980s which has now gotten a sort of retroactive recognition for nostalgia.
You'd think I'd be happy about that last one, as I myself have said that the 1980s gets a bad rap despite being one of the more significant eras of animation and also that my favorite cartoon of all time is He-Man and the Masters of the Universe...
But it does bother me that there are still gaps. I mean, in some ways the 1990s was a more interesting decade for cartoons that actually felt experimental. I have to admit when I got box sets of both She-Ra and the Highlander cartoon, I wound up using up the latter series far faster than the former.
Anyway, here's some cartoons I think deserve more love:
Skysurfer Strike Force
This one caught me by surprise, as I remember when it aired on TV and at the time, I hated it--I thought the concept of people on flying surf boards was stupid. Years later, some budget company put out DVDs (the kind you see for one buck at Wal-Mart, in those thin cases that always smell of petroleum when you open them) and getting one... I was a little shocked to find that the show was actually pretty damn good.
Granted, there are elements that are just kinda whack... like, one of the bad guys has the power to "travel along a person's time stream" (in the ep that introduces this, he demonstrates by, after failing to find a woman they wanted to kidnap, instead grabbing one of said woman's friends and time-space travelling to the last time the two had direct contact THEN grabbing the woman he was after in the first place). Like.... how is this NOT the single most broken superpower ever?
The main plot, by the way, just concerns a dude trying to prove his dad didn't really blow up a lab... which he didn't. The real attacker is a dude who now goes under the name Cybron. The hero is trying to find out who Cybron really is, basically, or at least find any evidence at all that clears his dad (who is stated to have gone into hiding). Just gonna say... one flaw here is that Cybron has a daughter, who doesn't wear a disguise because, you know, girl in an action cartoon. Just find out who SHE is and draw the lines from there!
Still, the concepts and action make it work.
Mega Man and Street Fighter
One more reason Discotek Media are my effing heroes: They've rescued both these cartoons and put them back on DVD (though its not like the old ADV sets were rare or anything).
Mega Man was a show I liked when it premiered (it actually kinda got me into the games--at the time I had only played the third one), but I remember hating Street Fighter originally. When I saw it again via DVD though, I was actually kinda shocked that it had genuine good qualities. Oh sure, these guys don't know how to pronounce "Ryu" (they say it the same way your friends on the playground did back in grade school) and some of the characterizations are kinda out of nowhere (Dhalsim worked with computers? Honda is a hacker?) but... the weird thing is, and this was during a time when I was binging the Street Fighter game canon... none of these things really felt bad.
One thing I especially liked is... Blanka had a huge role. Blanka was always my favorite as a kid, but most versions tend to treat him as just window dressing. It's nice to see him actually have some prominence. Another positive quality is they found creative uses for the characters' known traits and abilities (the same ep with Dhalsim has him being able to remove a microchip that should be humanly unreachable because of how squishy and bendy his body is from all that Yoga). It's weirdly a satisfying example of western writers being able to take what's there and really think it through, which is better than most anime which prefer to just replicate special moves from the games in situations where most players would never use them or else give characters new B.S. superpowers (I really disliked the ending of the Fatal Fury anime movie for this reason).
Sadly, any western-created version of a Japanese product invariably gets sneers due to "glorious nippon" types who dislike any violation of canon (which is really ridiculous with Mega Man, considering it turned out some of the things they were upset about--like Proto Man being evil--were demanded by Capcom themselves and actually DO have some basis in game canon). I once knew a girl who, when talking about the Zelda cartoon, actually thought that Sprite was Navi but renamed for arbitrary reasons. I had to explain to her that Sprite existed ten years before Navi did...
Highlander: the Animated Series
Kind of in a similar vein to the above, for some reason there's a stigma against "cartoons for children based on movies for adults." Which I find silly because honestly, sometimes the children's cartoon is more interesting.
Let's be honest: Highlander TAS isn't really Highlander, its more like a remake of Thundarr the Barbarian. The premise is similar: its half past the post-apocalypse and our heroes travel the destroyed Earth, obstensibly seeking "Jeddatores," who are Immortals who gave up pursuit of "The Prize" so they could give their wisdom to a prophecized one who will overthrow Kortan, an evil Immortal who now rules the most powerful settlement on the continent... wherever it is.
One thing I find kind of interesting: Kortan's city is extremely high-tech and has really advanced science and clearly lots of resources, which when you contrast it against the shanty little towns you see the "good" people inhabit, it kinda makes you wonder if this guy doesn't have the right idea about how to rebuild civilization. Actually, there's a lot of little things about this show, its people and its world I find interesting or a good take on things... from the afformentioned villain (who comes off like he has a secret noble side sometimes) to our hero Quentin sometimes seeming a little crazy, to how his little sister Clyde is actually one of the smarter and more rational child characters in animation.... which makes sense because they both used to travel with a tribe of survivalist nomads and you don't survive long in such a setting by being stupid.
(I will say though, there is one episode I would love to strike from canon... I forget its title, but I remember it as "the Library of Alexandria episode." No, its NOT the one where there's a library on a dam, its a different one where Ramirez preaches about the joys of reading to a Clyde who doesn't get it until she finds a book with pictures... despite behaving the exact opposite in a DIFFERENT episode with a library)
Incidentally, the DVDs of this are quickly becoming collector's items, so you might wanna grab them now if you're interested (last I checked they go for forty dollars).
Anyway.... so, what are your favorite cartoons nobody ever seems to remember/talk about?
There's something that bugs me about the state of non-Japanese animation. Seems like there are only three categories that are well known *and appreciated* :
A) very recent stuff that becomes a fad, invariably getting forgotten after people realize it sucks (My Little Pony, Steven Universe, etc.)
B) stuff based on a comic book, usually by DC (oddly the Marvel stuff tends to get ignored--people remember X-Men and Spider-Man from the 1990s but by contrast people can and do remember the ENTIRE DCAU).
C) stuff from the 1980s which has now gotten a sort of retroactive recognition for nostalgia.
You'd think I'd be happy about that last one, as I myself have said that the 1980s gets a bad rap despite being one of the more significant eras of animation and also that my favorite cartoon of all time is He-Man and the Masters of the Universe...
But it does bother me that there are still gaps. I mean, in some ways the 1990s was a more interesting decade for cartoons that actually felt experimental. I have to admit when I got box sets of both She-Ra and the Highlander cartoon, I wound up using up the latter series far faster than the former.
Anyway, here's some cartoons I think deserve more love:
Skysurfer Strike Force
This one caught me by surprise, as I remember when it aired on TV and at the time, I hated it--I thought the concept of people on flying surf boards was stupid. Years later, some budget company put out DVDs (the kind you see for one buck at Wal-Mart, in those thin cases that always smell of petroleum when you open them) and getting one... I was a little shocked to find that the show was actually pretty damn good.
Granted, there are elements that are just kinda whack... like, one of the bad guys has the power to "travel along a person's time stream" (in the ep that introduces this, he demonstrates by, after failing to find a woman they wanted to kidnap, instead grabbing one of said woman's friends and time-space travelling to the last time the two had direct contact THEN grabbing the woman he was after in the first place). Like.... how is this NOT the single most broken superpower ever?
The main plot, by the way, just concerns a dude trying to prove his dad didn't really blow up a lab... which he didn't. The real attacker is a dude who now goes under the name Cybron. The hero is trying to find out who Cybron really is, basically, or at least find any evidence at all that clears his dad (who is stated to have gone into hiding). Just gonna say... one flaw here is that Cybron has a daughter, who doesn't wear a disguise because, you know, girl in an action cartoon. Just find out who SHE is and draw the lines from there!
Still, the concepts and action make it work.
Mega Man and Street Fighter
One more reason Discotek Media are my effing heroes: They've rescued both these cartoons and put them back on DVD (though its not like the old ADV sets were rare or anything).
Mega Man was a show I liked when it premiered (it actually kinda got me into the games--at the time I had only played the third one), but I remember hating Street Fighter originally. When I saw it again via DVD though, I was actually kinda shocked that it had genuine good qualities. Oh sure, these guys don't know how to pronounce "Ryu" (they say it the same way your friends on the playground did back in grade school) and some of the characterizations are kinda out of nowhere (Dhalsim worked with computers? Honda is a hacker?) but... the weird thing is, and this was during a time when I was binging the Street Fighter game canon... none of these things really felt bad.
One thing I especially liked is... Blanka had a huge role. Blanka was always my favorite as a kid, but most versions tend to treat him as just window dressing. It's nice to see him actually have some prominence. Another positive quality is they found creative uses for the characters' known traits and abilities (the same ep with Dhalsim has him being able to remove a microchip that should be humanly unreachable because of how squishy and bendy his body is from all that Yoga). It's weirdly a satisfying example of western writers being able to take what's there and really think it through, which is better than most anime which prefer to just replicate special moves from the games in situations where most players would never use them or else give characters new B.S. superpowers (I really disliked the ending of the Fatal Fury anime movie for this reason).
Sadly, any western-created version of a Japanese product invariably gets sneers due to "glorious nippon" types who dislike any violation of canon (which is really ridiculous with Mega Man, considering it turned out some of the things they were upset about--like Proto Man being evil--were demanded by Capcom themselves and actually DO have some basis in game canon). I once knew a girl who, when talking about the Zelda cartoon, actually thought that Sprite was Navi but renamed for arbitrary reasons. I had to explain to her that Sprite existed ten years before Navi did...
Highlander: the Animated Series
Kind of in a similar vein to the above, for some reason there's a stigma against "cartoons for children based on movies for adults." Which I find silly because honestly, sometimes the children's cartoon is more interesting.
Let's be honest: Highlander TAS isn't really Highlander, its more like a remake of Thundarr the Barbarian. The premise is similar: its half past the post-apocalypse and our heroes travel the destroyed Earth, obstensibly seeking "Jeddatores," who are Immortals who gave up pursuit of "The Prize" so they could give their wisdom to a prophecized one who will overthrow Kortan, an evil Immortal who now rules the most powerful settlement on the continent... wherever it is.
One thing I find kind of interesting: Kortan's city is extremely high-tech and has really advanced science and clearly lots of resources, which when you contrast it against the shanty little towns you see the "good" people inhabit, it kinda makes you wonder if this guy doesn't have the right idea about how to rebuild civilization. Actually, there's a lot of little things about this show, its people and its world I find interesting or a good take on things... from the afformentioned villain (who comes off like he has a secret noble side sometimes) to our hero Quentin sometimes seeming a little crazy, to how his little sister Clyde is actually one of the smarter and more rational child characters in animation.... which makes sense because they both used to travel with a tribe of survivalist nomads and you don't survive long in such a setting by being stupid.
(I will say though, there is one episode I would love to strike from canon... I forget its title, but I remember it as "the Library of Alexandria episode." No, its NOT the one where there's a library on a dam, its a different one where Ramirez preaches about the joys of reading to a Clyde who doesn't get it until she finds a book with pictures... despite behaving the exact opposite in a DIFFERENT episode with a library)
Incidentally, the DVDs of this are quickly becoming collector's items, so you might wanna grab them now if you're interested (last I checked they go for forty dollars).
Anyway.... so, what are your favorite cartoons nobody ever seems to remember/talk about?