Yabba-Dabba-Doofascism
David Weigel | December 20, 2006, 2:10pm
Joseph Barbera is dead and
Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson is dancing on his grave.
Although everyone born in the last 60 years might imagine that they have happy childhood memories of The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound or, God help us, Scooby-Doo, the truth of the matter is that they're crap. Complete and utter crap. Worse, they're shoddily made crap, after Hanna-Barbera devised what they called "limited animation", more than halving the number of drawings from 26 per second to 3000 for five minutes, the better to fill the empty moments on TV between the ads. And thus they effectively destroyed animation for at least two generations, before it slowly began to claw its way back to respectability in the mid-90s.
Those 1990s - the age of
Batman: The Animated Series and the good episodes of
The Simpsons - were my introduction to animation. So I'm inclined to agree. But the shoddy Hanna Barbera cartoons of the 60s, 70s and 80s are directly responsible for some of the more interesting animation of the moment, starting with
Space Ghost Coast to Coast and continuing through
Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law. The tropes of crummy comic books and rotoscoped animation are the grist for
The Venture Brothers, for my money the best animated show since the launch of
South Park.
I'm fascinated by this, because the Mike Judge view (maybe he doesn't completely agree, but I'll assign this to the director of
Idiocracy) is that people who drink deep of dumb commerce and dumber culture will, in turn, produce even dumber commerce and culture, their inspiration being so bad to start with. Why, then, are animators and writers weaned on Scooby-Doo producing smart, learned and referential stuff like
South Park and
The Venture Brothers?
kevrob | December 20, 2006, 9:01pm | #
Rocky & Bullwinkle or The Simpsons,..... It's what I call "illustrated radio." - Chuck Jones interviewed in The Onion's A/V Club
This isn't a new criticism. It's also a misunderstanding about working within the limitations of a new medium, and comparing the new unfavorably to the old. As other posters have pointed out, today's technology has improved to the point that computers have allowed animators to create great looking work, without the crushing labor costs that would hit a studio if they tried to do everything by hand.
And what about those labor costs? Didn't the studios get out of theatre-quality animation in large part because of the unionization of the work force that
The Gruniad would have applauded? I'm also thinking that the Justice Department's breakup of film production and exhibition might have damaged the economics of producing and distributing shorts.
R&B was tremendously clever and funny, even if watching the show, or it's antecedent,
Crusader Rabbit was a bit like someone reading a comic aloud for you, if that someone was great at doing voices and the panels were projected one by one on a home movie screen. Naysayers slammed comic books when they first appeared, even when they were mostly reprints of newspaper strips that were considered perfectly suitable to read. It was true that Raymond's
Flash Gordon or Foster's
Prince Valiant were much diminished by the smaller pages and the inferior printing found outside of the Sunday sections. It is also true that, when new characters created to make better use of the new medium were created without slavishly imitating their newpaper cousins, a new form came into its own. A 13-page 4-color feature and a black and white newspaper daily are both "comic strips", in the same way that an animated theatre short and limited animation made for TV are both "cartoons." Pop singles and operas are both "song", but nobody pretends that they are the same species of art, if art they both are.
That said, much of the the H&B stuff was, per Stugeon's Law, crap, especially when network standards and practices were tasked to put the scenarists in straitjackets after the 1968 assasinations. One reason why
Scooby Doo was so popular is because, while it included "scary" threats that were never really visited on the crew of the Mystery Machine, it essentially was based on conflict without any actual violence.
Bugs Bunny has a hard time being funny, or
Batman adventurous, if they can't ever hit anybody. H&B tried that, with
Superfriends, and boy, did that suck!
Besides, without Hanna and Barbera, we would never have had
I love Mises to pieces! buttons!
Kevin
