The 1980's animation appreciation thread

I worked on so many of those shows, it makes me nauseous. What was really awful is that a lot of the good people who worked on this crap really loved good animation, but couldn't do it because these shows just had no time and money. A lot of the time, we sat in the bays finishing these shows in post, and would have to avert our eyes because the pictures were so abysmal. The producers had no illusions about the quality of the work.

I don't dispute there were some good moments in some of these cartoon shows, and occasionally the writing and voice work was well done (or at least as well done as you can get away with in 1980s TV). The best work I ever saw during this period were the shows we did for Disney, which included Duck Tales, Gummi Bears, and The Wuzzles. Those were actually pretty well-animated shows with a lot of style and a sense of fun, but they were very costly and sometimes very complicated. Muppet Babies also had some good moments, but that was another fairly high-budgeted series.

Mark Evanier did a good job writing the Garfield shows, and I think those at least had some occasional funny moments with dialogue and character. I was a big fan of Animaniacs and Pinky & The Brain, and I would probably pick those two as being the hands-down best American show of this period... though that was actually early 1990s and lot 1980s.

I don't dispute that your opinion could change if you were a kid in this era. Still, I look back to the stuff that was out when I was a little kid -- back in the Cro-Magnon 1960s -- but to me, the stuff that was cheap and horrible was bad then and still bad now, and the handful of good stuff is not that bad today.

 

I always liked when they'd use footage from live action movies and TV shows in Muppet Babies.

Of course, this is why you'll never see complete seasons of the show on DVD...

 

I just read an article about why you never saw Skeeter outside of Muppet Babies!

 

Basically, yeah. Skeeter was created to add another female character to the show.

Skeeter »

 

Yep, kickin' back on a Saturday morning, watching cartoons, and then this would come along and ruin my good time!

 

I dunno. They were pretty clever about that and I think they would generally negotiate for all rights for the live-action footage. I'm positive by this era, they were aware of the potential for re-releasing the shows on home video.

I can remember once dropping in a shot of TIE fighters into a Muppet Babies sequence, and I remarked to the associate producer that it was amazing that Lucas was willing to let them use the footage. She agreed but said that Lucas cut them some slack "because his kids liked it." Muppet Babies was a lot of work, because (at the time) this was a rare show doing live action & animation, where the animated characters would open up a door or something and there'd be a live-action clip there. The trick there was, they had to use blue screen with Kermit -- since he was green -- but on other sequences, they had to use green screen -- like with Gonzo, who was blue. Complicated show.

 

Thundercats!

 

I remember in the Fall of 1984, there was suddenly some pretty good animation on Network TV, even though the scripts were still vapid. There was some even better stuff Fall '85.

 

The Problem with Muppet Babies was the colors were changing in many episodes
Somebody was turning blue and then red it was weird..

 

Garfield was severely dumbed down and made to nice..
Compared to the comic strips which I still enjoy..

 

He-Man And She-Ra were so awful even as a kid I thought hey were stupid...
The writing was in word awful times 10. The recycled animation oh god something very bad.
They made fun of Filmation on Animaniacs ep called Back In Action. laughing..

 

I tried to re-watch He-Man as an adult and...

Yeah it stinks. The action figures are actually a lot cooler than the cartoon itself.

 

The nostalgia!

 

This cartoon was terrible. I thought about this theme song for years afterward, though

 

Anyone remember Shirt Tales? It's kind of silly (okay, very silly) but entertaining.

 

Hand-drawn animation had so much soul. Digital will never be half as good...

 

That's very funny!

 

I used to cringe when I'd get a Muppet Babies show dumped in my lap, because those sequences were very complicated. Bear in mind that this was the bad old film days when everything you saw in the show (for the most part) came from a piece of film color-corrected and transferred by a human being. Now, it's all digital files and is infinitely easier.