TV cartoons: why we can't go back

Artist and animation historian Amid Amidi has a great piece on the Cartoon Brew blog about how focus grouping and executive decisions have ruined the current state of television animation. The main thrust of his piece has to do with the idea of creators pitching their shows, and that sometimes too much energy is put toward making a show seem appealing to a network executive rather than focusing on the actual quality of the show itself and making something audiences will truly enjoy. He points out that lionized directors from the Golden Age of animation such as Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones and Tex Avery were unhindered by such bureaucratic bullshit and allowed to create cartoons on their own terms that are still enjoyable even today. Those old cartoons are not only great works of art, but they transcend generations. My own nieces and nephew enjoy Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny as much as I did as a kid, just as my father enjoyed them long before I was born.

Fast forward to Tiny Toons in the early nineties, and it's clear to see how lost the medium had become. While I don't think Tiny Toons was a terrible show, Steven Spielberg's attempt to emulate the feel of the classic Looney Tunes was diluted by his complete and utter ignorance of what really made those classic cartoons so timeless. There was more at work in those old hand-drawn shorts than just wacky voices and slapstick violence, there was something akin to real Art being made in Termite Terrace and other places by artists and visionaries who were allowed the freedom to make cartoons on their own terms.

What's especially appalling is that executive decisions are not only ruining modern TV animation, but also many of the classic cartoons. Recently Turner Broadcasting began to go over their library of Hanna-Barbera cartoons to remove all scenes that glamorize smoking, an act akin to a child scribbling with magic marker across the face of the Mona Lisa because he neither understands nor cares that it's a true work of art. It's been said before that we're more accepting of subversive ideas and images in this modern age, but in many ways, we've become more puritanical than ever. Not only do we not recognize that those old cartoons were meant for adult theater goers, we've also arrogantly begun to believe we have an absolute right to never be offended by them.

Amidi does not completely dismiss the importance of pitching ideas to executives, since that is the only way to get a show on television these days, but his plea to creators is to work outside the system and develop something strong before shopping it around. He cites SpongeBob SquarePants as one example, whose creator, Stephen Hillenburg, studied marine biology and taught children before bringing his idea to Nickelodeon. But SpongeBob, by contrast with other cartoons of today, shows how homogenized TV animation has become, and why creative gems like it are so rare on the television landscape.