The I Love Cartoons Thread!

We’ve had threads about toys, kids tv shows, kids tv show hosts, and even a few for specific shows, but I don’t think we’ve had one about the pure joy that is cartoons. Particularly “kids” cartoons as opposed to the often trying too hard to be edgy “adult” ones.

These days it feels like if you’re a writer and want to get your idea out there with a minimum of executive meddling, making it a cartoon is your best bet (apart from creating the Gizmoplex, of course). Don’t put in too much that’s not kid-friendly and it’s surprising what you can slip past the suits. Or at least it was, but we’ll have to see what happens as megacorps absorb more and more content producers.

I could start with MST-related cartoons, but apart from Patton, who’s in everything, I can only think of Joel’s appearance in Steven Universe. I could never get into that one, despite the fantastic steps it took towards representation, so I can’t really talk about it.

But Patton does appear in Gravity Falls as one of the Lilliputtians, animated golf balls who live on a mini-golf course. This show was awesome, and probably one of the best paranormal mystery series ever. The first season was better and liked to subvert expectations (the suspected zombie ended up being a bunch of gnomes), while the second season, which suffered a little from creator burnout, played things more straight and went a bit darker. I highly recommend this one to anyone.

Keeping with more recent cartoons, I’ll also mention the new Duck Tales, which I loved. David Tennant as Scrooge McDuck? Yes, please! This one’s a lot more self-aware and embraces and plays with the franchise. Huey, Dewey, and Louie are distinct characters this time around, and it also makes Webby, of all characters, interesting. I thought the show kind of fell apart a bit at the end, with a slightly unsatisfying finale, but it’s not the first show to have that problem and it won’t be the last.

I’ll just leave at those two recent shows for now, but we’ve got decades of material that might be someone’s favorite.

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You can pry my Complete Goofy Disney Treasures DVD set out of my cold dead hands.

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One thing that annoys me about Disney Plus is that they don’t have a Classic Shorts section. Sure, a lot of them are floating around in there somewhere, but unless you search for a specific title they’re not easy to find.

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I was never into Disney shorts as much as I was Warner and MGM. I just don’t find them as funny. They certainly have less of an edge to them. It doesn’t help that Mickey has pretty much zero personality. But Tex Avery, now his cartoons I can’t get enough of, whether Warner or MGM. A genius when it came to the sort of anatomical distortions you can only achieve in cartoons and developed a whole cartoon visual language which is still used to this day (like eyes popping out when the character is surprised).

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I definitely prefer Looney Tunes (got my Complete Golden Collection next to me) to Disney. Like you said, they had more of an edge and had the “we make what we find funny” thing going for them, which is the magic that elevates some cartoons to another level.

It’s a shame that so many of the other classics, like Terrytoons and Fleischer, are so hard to get hold of these days.

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A lot of Fleischer is public domain, so most of them are on YouTube. My daughter loves Fleischer, so she watches them. Terrytoons I think are pretty universally bad, so I don’t care so much about their lack of availability apart from historic preservation purposes.

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Mickey, yes, but Donald Duck?

And anyway, I’d say that only applies to the “classic” shorts. The new ones they’ve been doing the past few years have been bonkers. For instance, there was one for Mickey’s birthday that turns into full on spaghetti western homage as Mickey fights off a gang of pinata. The lead pinata is voiced by Danny Trejo.

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I agree, the new shorts are lots of fun and give Mickey much more of a personality.

But back to the classic cartoons, even Donald’s personality isn’t as complex as a character like Bugs Bunny. Basically he gets angry a lot (at least Three Caballeros added a tiny bit to his personalty and also made him a horndog). Again, in the new cartoon that is rectified.

That is not to say there aren’t classic Disney shorts that are very good. Off the top of my head- the Mickey short that parodies Alice through the Looking Glass is fun, the one where the trio go to the haunted house is good, and the one where they are driving a camper through the mountains is a lot of fun.

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Another thing I will give to Disney- their early Silly Symphonies, while not especially funny, are masterpieces of animation which have rarely been surpassed. The colors are gorgeous if you see a decent print.

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I wasn’t much of a Disney fan as a kid, and preferred Looney Toons and Hannah-Barbera. One reason for that is likely because Disney wasn’t on TV much when I was young. If you wanted to watch a Disney cartoon on TV, you had to watch the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse with their boring live action crap, or wait for a special to come on. Those specials usually came on on Sunday night, and my parents would generally want to watch something else at that time.

With Looney Toons, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck were fun, but a lot of the jokes went over my head. I remember wondering often who that Wendell Wilkie guy they were always talking about was. I still don’t know. I was a big Roadrunner fan though, there was no anachronistic dialogue there to confuse me. Foghorn Leghorn was another favorite, with Henry the Chicken Hawk so full of bravado. Sylvester and Tweety was always a blast as well. But the one that really sticks out for me as my all time favorite Looney Toons cartoon was with the other Looney Toons cat, Tuxedo Cat.

“Oh no, not that, not the Happy Birthday!”

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Even as a kid I didn’t like the Warners or Disney, etc type toons, I thought Bugs Bunny was an a-hole, but so was Fudd. A few exceptions, Duck Amuck was imaginative - and Tex Avery’s MGM cartoon Symphony in Slang (1951) was cute

Going more modern, I liked the Tick that played on Saturday mornings. When it and MST closed shop, that kind of put an end to the era of ‘must watch’ shows for me. Oh, there was TV I liked, but not in the same way… Firefly and Wonderfalls might have continued that tradition, if they’d stuck around.

And going waaay back before I was born, before TV, I like exploring the beginnings and development of animation, like Fantasmagorie from 1908

Or Winsor McCay’s work, Gertie, The Flying House, Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend: The Pet.

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Speaking of Hanna-Barbera, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? I mean, it’s a massively successful franchise and deeply imbedded in pop-culture. And I would have gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids (which wasn’t said in the original run)! It has a lot of the normal Hanna-Barbera problems, but it’s got cool monster designs and some of the backgrounds are gorgeous. It’s funny to see this one bashed so much, but I think it was a hipster trend for a while, and a lot of them clearly haven’t watched it. It’s much less reliant on formula than people think, and it’s almost never a real-estate scheme.

I love the original episodes, but they drop off in quality after that. Some of the earlier movies, like Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School, are pretty good, but I never got into the more modern movies or the early 2000s series. A lot of people seem to like Mystery Incorporated, but I completely bounced off of that one. It felt like someone’s weird fanfiction, which at this point I suppose all of it is.

Now, I really liked Be Cool, Scooby-Doo, which gets bashed a lot. It follows the established formula, but is very self-referential and finally does something interesting with Daphne by making her a bit crazy. It’s also full of references to the original episodes, outright copying monster designs a lot of the time, which I think the detractors completely missed. But that’s the thing with a long-running cartoon franchise. You mix it up, play with things, and will eventually end up with audiences who appreciate different things.

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If we’re going back to the silent era, I love the Felix the Cat cartoons where he does things like walk up a sight line after looking at something in the air. Great fourth wall-breaking insanity.

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Another great from the silent era. Beautiful surrealism from the Fleischers.

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I really got into classic cartoons in the 90s when I was editor of a multimedia website, and we put up a ton of public domain cartoons.

I have all 6 volumes of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection and the two-volume almost-complete collection of the Hanna & Barbera Tom & Jerries. I also have a large Betty Boop collection and all the Fleischer Supermans, plus a box set with hundreds of public domain cartoons on it.

I don’t have much Disney, because they have always been so damned stingy with their content. They put out a lot of premium collections of their cartoons, then pulled them in order to drive up their value.

I would love to have a complete DVD set of Tex Avery’s shorts, which would have been a possibility when WB owned MGM, but probably isn’t now.

I liked most of the Saturday morning stuff I grew up with in the 70s. By the 80s I was too cool to watch cartoons… except for The Smurfs, which I loved until it jumped the shark.

These days I obviously like more adult-oriented animation like Venture Bros., Harley Quinn and so forth, but I also like quite a bit that’s aimed at younger viewers, like Hilda and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.

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Noice, that’s one I’d not seen, so cool beans, now I get to mark that as watched.

I’m trying to scour my brain on what I did like as a kid, and there wasn’t much, I just didn’t like jerks as a lad (or even now) and it always seemed like much of the comedy was centered on jerks (stealing, scheming, maiming, chasing in an attempt to hurt or eat something). If you’re going to have that kind of action, have a clear hero. So, I’d watch the Alex Toth designed Space Ghost, or the Herculoids.

I also liked Marine Boy, man you couldn’t get that song out of your head.

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I got to do this and a few other remixes for Hanna-Barbera right before WB made them close up shop.

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I LOVE these. They’re fantastic.

It’s such a brilliant take on the characters. I love seeing something a bit irreverent with Mickey Mouse. I love it every time Goofy is on the screen. I love Donald’s expressions. I love Potatoland. I love the one where Goofy thinks the time machine is a bathroom, accidentally travels back in time and becomes ruler of the cave people. Almost every episode is a classic.

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I’ve got to believe a lot of MST3K fans are also Freakazoid fans.

WHERE MY FREAKAZOID FANS AT?

Freakazoid

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I’m a big fan of the Cartoon Planet/SGC2C stuff they later did with them. I LOVE all things Brak.

Andy Merrill (Brak) told me he wants to work on MST3K.

BrakMP

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