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Didn't The Flintsones also air on prime time for a bit back in the day (it literally started off as Animated Stone Age The Honeymooners after all, I think some of the really early episodes even had laugh tracks)?
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# ? Apr 13, 2024 22:03 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 04:20 |
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Larryb posted:Didn't The Flintsones also air on prime time for a bit back in the day (it literally started off as Animated Stone Age The Honeymooners after all, I think some of the really early episodes even had laugh tracks)? Everything Hanna-Barbera produced had a laugh track, a tacit admission that they knew it all wasn't funny.
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# ? Apr 13, 2024 22:09 |
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Madurai posted:Everything Hanna-Barbera produced had a laugh track, a tacit admission that they knew it all wasn't funny. When did they stop doing that out of curiosity? Flintstones also had a narrator that went away early on as well (or at least they did for one episode) Larryb fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Apr 13, 2024 |
# ? Apr 13, 2024 22:14 |
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SlothfulCobra posted:
Yeah, I think the activist group you are talking about is 'Action For Children's Television' led by Peggy Charren. I've seen this specific organization mentioned a lot by people who worked in animation or have looked into its history as one of the main forces that stripped away anything remotely edgy from TV animation that helped make it so flat during the 70s, with the influence dying away during the 80s and 90s. In fairness, some of ACT's positions sound reasonable in terms of advertising on kids programming and the provision of educational tv, and unfortunately those positive things were also reversed during the Reagan years. Of course, softening that kind of censorship was what allowed much more memorable cartoons to exist later on, I'd say Peggy Charren probably would not have approved of something like Ed, Edd 'n Eddy in the slightest! https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1983/10/22/the-new-war-on-kids-tv/d931c745-8938-4953-a0d5-840fb875eb9d/ Its interesting reading this WP article from the early 80s where they are bemoaning the shift away from heavy censorship and treat 70s animation as some kind of golden era lol. Larryb posted:When did they stop doing that out of curiosity? It would have to be the Simpsons right? That was the next attempt, after Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, at primetime animated sitcoms, and much more successful. It was also one of the first major American sitcoms to not use a laugh track, which I think had proven to be almost totally unworkable in an animated format.
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# ? Apr 13, 2024 22:14 |
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I could have sworn the laugh track eventually went away in the later episodes of Hanna-Barbera’s early stuff as well (or at the very least it got stripped out during reruns)
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# ? Apr 13, 2024 22:19 |
I think by the time the Simpsons came around (which I agree is one of the first big adult-targeted animated series to not use a laugh track, and obviously the one that was the biggest hit, so everyone copied it), there had been things like DuckTales and the other higher-aiming Disney Afternoon shows that indicated TV animation could treat its audience like a film audience rather than a TV variety show with a bunch of live humans in the studio bleachers being shown a LAUGH sign. Feels like a shift from "we are guiding our viewers through an experience that we control" to "we are creating a work that must stand or fall on its own merits, divorced from the medium in which it's shown to them" or something like that.
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# ? Apr 13, 2024 22:23 |
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khwarezm posted:Something I was just thinking about, in light of how things like 80s and 70s anime or 40s and 50s Hollywood animated shorts have a ton of retro and historic appeal, are there any 70s and early 80s American television cartoons that are actually, like... good? (I'm being kind to things like Transformers to specify early 80s lol) Call me one of those fans of Star Trek The Animated Series, it's basically the continuation of TOS. And I'm pretty sure it's canon. Yesteryear is pretty much Spock's canon origin. (moreso than any of his adopted siblings should be) The original Johnny Quest is pretty wild. A ridiculous body count for one.
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 02:44 |
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Call me one of those fans of Star Trek The Animated Series, it's basically the continuation of TOS. And I'm pretty sure it's canon. Yesteryear is pretty much Spock's canon origin. (moreso than any of his adopted siblings should be) The 90's series was also pretty brutal. The one with the fish monsters had a bunch of people die and quite brutally off-camera.
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 02:53 |
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Semi-relatedly, I watched a documentary about the downfall of tv animation jobs in the west in the late 70s and early 80s, where most of the actual animation was leaving for Asian studios. But I had a hard time mustering much sympathy because this is a case where the shows being done in California were at such a low level of quality that in a lot of cases outsourcing actually improved the shows. Probably because Japan already had a large amount of highly trained animators who were doing better work on domestic productions. I can't think of another industry that sent work overseas to a workforce that was already highly skilled at that type of work. In the vfx industry studios have been trying to send all the work to India for decades but they have to train the crews up from scratch because India doesn't have its own movies with Hollywood-quality vfx. Ccs fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Apr 14, 2024 |
# ? Apr 14, 2024 03:54 |
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Ccs posted:Semi-relatedly, I watched a documentary about the downfall of tv animation jobs in the west in the late 70s and early 80s, where most of the actual animation was leaving for Asian studios. But I had a hard time mustering much sympathy because this is a case where the shows being done in California were at such a low level of quality that in a lot of cases outsourcing actually improved the shows. The rub of that, though, is that the quality went up and the comparative cost of animation went down as well so it was win-win and likely a matter of time anyways. Japanese animation now is even doing their own outsourcing to places like the Philippines and SE Asia because the quality is sufficient enough there that they can ship labor over at a cost lower than Japanese animators now call for.
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 04:04 |
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I AM GRANDO posted:There are good character designs for Thundaar and some of the other Hanna-Barbera shows of that time. Blackstar and He-Man had good designs too. It’s just that all the actual animation is cut-rate garbage. Didn't he have a double-show with the Herculoids? I had a glow in the dark Gleep* toy as a kid that went with me through half a dozen homes. Loved that stupid thing. * or maybe it was Gloop
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 09:35 |
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khwarezm posted:Most of these are late 80s though, you know? Things were starting to pick up and leading into the 90s being probably the best decade of American animation since the rise of television.
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 10:08 |
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It's funny that that old, unfathomably terrible style of animation survived to the modern day through Adult Swim, first through shows like Sealab and Space Ghost Coast to Coast literally reusing footage then Aqua Teen and Harvey Birdman etc keeping up that style in part as well. I'm not sure anyone has gone back to it otherwise, I think it will completely die with Adult Swim because no-one else actually liked it enough/was literally forced to use it in order to be influenced by it in the modern day. Not even in the early days of amateur flash animation did people use it as their influence.
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 15:17 |
I've always been kind of fascinated by how every studio trying to maintain a budget outside the theatrical/feature world invented its own form of limited animation, from Clutch Cargo to anime to UPA to ATHF to "this is an ARM, drawn by NOBODY, it is worth NOTHING", but H-B and Tom & Jerry was the progenitor of all those and somehow survived as a thru-line through all those iterations even to the point where Zorak once said "NOBODY moves much in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon".
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 15:42 |
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Data Graham posted:Clutch Cargo gently caress that style. So loving creepy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN0vMgE0t3o&t=5s
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 16:54 |
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Megillah Gorilla posted:gently caress that style. So loving creepy. Who thought that was a good idea? wtf
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 17:01 |
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You can watch the whole series on YouTube and it just gets worse. The mouths are all so red and damp.
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 17:29 |
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Neeksy posted:Hanna Barbera was probably not doing their best work in that period, either. It wasn't very good, but I wouldn't be surprised if Hannah-Barbera was the most successful TV animation company in America in the 70s. I'm not really sure if you could get conclusive data on it, but just looking at the list of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, there's so much they put out in the 70s, and much of it I actually recognize compared to what I see in like DePatie-Freleng, Rankin/Bass, or Filmation. Part of that is because when Hanna-Barbera was bought by Turner and remade into Cartoon Network, they designed their programming schedule to dive into everything that Hanna-Barbera did, but also the impression I get when I look at HB's library is that they must've been having some kind of success with Laff-a-Lympics because they kept hammering down on that premise with Yogi's Space Race and Yogi's Treasure Hunt. They don't really seem like the result of a company on the rocks. And then the 80s hit and the companies that survived the 70s have tons of work, often still relevant. Some companies come out of nowhere, like Sunbow Entertainment, which started the whole toy commerical cartoon trend, some came out from working in film and specials to make regular TV shows like Murakami-Wolf and Raph Bakshi, some branched out from overseas; anime hadn't fully crossed the pond yet, but DIC Entertainment finally made the jump, and got Canadian Nelvana into the US market in the process. Megillah Gorilla posted:gently caress that style. So loving creepy. I like the spoof The Incredibles did of that in a DVD extra. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRWpQjdwdB0
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 18:57 |
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The Filmation style basically is what happens when you want to have relatively realistic human figures who look and move like humans on fuckall budget, rather than having more stylised cartoon characters who also happen to have designs made for animation shortcuts. (Yogi Bear wears a collar and tie because it makes animating him turning his head easier, and that's just the start) It pretty much stayed there for a few reasons, mostly that it was more trouble than it's worth if you actually care about making animation look interesting and have a budget to speak of, and even kids can tell it's cheap. Adult Swim revels in it for those exact reasons, since a lot of the subversive themes also involved loving around with the trappings of animation itself.
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 19:21 |
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Didn’t Filmation also not have a huge budget for voice actors or was that just the case for He-Man and She-Ra?
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 19:24 |
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The Filmation style basically is what happens when you want to have relatively realistic human figures who look and move like humans on fuckall budget, rather than having more stylised cartoon characters who also happen to have designs made for animation shortcuts. (Yogi Bear wears a collar and tie because it makes animating him turning his head easier, and that's just the start) It pretty much stayed there for a few reasons, mostly that it was more trouble than it's worth if you actually care about making animation look interesting and have a budget to speak of, and even kids can tell it's cheap. Adult Swim revels in it for those exact reasons, since a lot of the subversive themes also involved loving around with the trappings of animation itself. It's like that time Bart bought an Itchy and Scratchy animation cel and it was just an arm.
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 19:25 |
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khwarezm posted:I sort of find the year 1970 itself to be a cutoff point, before that there's something to say about some of the shows they made even though you can absolutely see the limitations they were working under, so things like the Flintstones or whatever were much more script focused. Scooby-Doo's original run ended in 1970 I think? Wait Till Your Father Gets Home is weird to me because I was pretty sure it was a fever dream for years and years until the internet started making it easier to look up poo poo like that. I saw it on a pre-[adult swim] late-night block on Cartoon Network, and had the theme song stuck in my head for years. Ghost Leviathan posted:Call me one of those fans of Star Trek The Animated Series, it's basically the continuation of TOS. And I'm pretty sure it's canon. Yesteryear is pretty much Spock's canon origin. (moreso than any of his adopted siblings should be) They reference TAS a couple times in Lower Decks, which is canon, so it's likely canonized at this point. It wasn't for a while though, iirc. doomrider7 posted:The 90's series was also pretty brutal. The one with the fish monsters had a bunch of people die and quite brutally off-camera. The CG in QuestWorld or whatever it was called always freaked me out; it was uncanny, even for 90s CGI. Neito fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Apr 14, 2024 |
# ? Apr 14, 2024 19:32 |
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Neito posted:Wait Till Your Father Gets Home is weird to me because I was pretty sure it was a fever dream for years and years until the internet started making it easier to look up poo poo like that. I saw it on a pre-[adult swim] late-night block on Cartoon Network, and had the theme song stuck in my head for years. Same. I remember watching episodes of EONS ago on old CN same for a huge chunk of the stuff on that Hanna Barbera link. Reminder that I need to watch lower decks. The CG didn't actually bother me, but a lot of the episodes were legit nightmare fuel like the pianist one, the black pearl one, or that...thing whatever the gently caress it was that could mimic peoples heads and voices. You know the one. Ironically I REALLY did not do well with horror movies as a kid, but those never bothered me.
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 21:07 |
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doomrider7 posted:Same. I remember watching episodes of EONS ago on old CN same for a huge chunk of the stuff on that Hanna Barbera link. Lower Decks is divisive among Trek fans; some feel it's a celebration of the series, making the kind of jokes they've been making for years, and some feel it's mocking the series. The CGI Quest World stuff was nightmare fuel for me at least in part because there just weren't a lot of CGI cartoons back then, and I think I saw one of the freakier episodes first, which poisoned the whole thing for me. Plus, kid brain tends to make weird things into horror fuel, like that one episode of Punky Brewster, or the Castlevania 2 cover of issue like, 3 or 4 of Nintendo Power.
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 22:29 |
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Neito posted:Lower Decks is divisive among Trek fans; some feel it's a celebration of the series, making the kind of jokes they've been making for years, and some feel it's mocking the series. The Punky Brewster where she gets stuck in a refrigerator or the Punky Brewster where one of her friends gets merged with a rock and calls out for help?
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 22:34 |
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The Filmation style basically is what happens when you want to have relatively realistic human figures who look and move like humans on fuckall budget, rather than having more stylised cartoon characters who also happen to have designs made for animation shortcuts. (Yogi Bear wears a collar and tie because it makes animating him turning his head easier, and that's just the start) It pretty much stayed there for a few reasons, mostly that it was more trouble than it's worth if you actually care about making animation look interesting and have a budget to speak of, and even kids can tell it's cheap. Adult Swim revels in it for those exact reasons, since a lot of the subversive themes also involved loving around with the trappings of animation itself. Funnily enough, one of the complaints about the new ATHF season is that it's actually animated competently.
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 23:35 |
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I AM GRANDO posted:The Punky Brewster where she gets stuck in a refrigerator or the Punky Brewster where one of her friends gets merged with a rock and calls out for help? The latter.
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 23:43 |
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When Family Guy first came out, I thought it was a remake of Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, which I also thought was a fever dream because I only saw a couple episodes of it on Cartoon Network as a child.
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# ? Apr 14, 2024 23:55 |
That nintendo power cover ruled
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# ? Apr 15, 2024 00:17 |
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Data Graham posted:That nintendo power cover ruled I love it now, but it hits different when you're 7 and never really experienced horror movies before.
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# ? Apr 15, 2024 00:31 |
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Neito posted:Lower Decks is divisive among Trek fans; some feel it's a celebration of the series, making the kind of jokes they've been making for years, and some feel it's mocking the series. I wouldn't say my problem with Lower Decks is that it mocks the series, the writers clearly love Star Trek, and they love TNG era Trek especially. The one issue I have with the show it that it kind of beats you round the head with the references sometimes, not like Family Guy cutaway level, but not exactly subtle, and it can take me out of the world a bit that everyone knows the ins and outs of the plot of, like, Data's Day or Sub Rosa in-universe sometimes But, its generally a fun light show with good characters- the senior staff are always fun to see- and it's on the better end of modern Trek for sure.
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# ? Apr 15, 2024 00:50 |
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Hanna-Barbera did take one last shot at a prime time cartoon in 1982, and it bombed hard. Jokebook. No plots, kind of a sketch show format. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7EedgbrAIs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdCynP_fakg
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# ? Apr 15, 2024 00:51 |
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Watched Scavengers Reign, liked it a bunch but I don't think it needed the sequel hook. Also really annoyed at Sam just use your words when weird poo poo happens to you, don't just keep going like nothing happened
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# ? Apr 15, 2024 01:27 |
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Doctor_Fruitbat posted:It's funny that that old, unfathomably terrible style of animation survived to the modern day through Adult Swim, first through shows like Sealab and Space Ghost Coast to Coast literally reusing footage then Aqua Teen and Harvey Birdman etc keeping up that style in part as well. i mean that to me is part of the joke. like carl runs like 3 runs times and its all over women. Ccs posted:Semi-relatedly, I watched a documentary about the downfall of tv animation jobs in the west in the late 70s and early 80s, where most of the actual animation was leaving for Asian studios. But I had a hard time mustering much sympathy because this is a case where the shows being done in California were at such a low level of quality that in a lot of cases outsourcing actually improved the shows. yeah basicaly animation post disney dying and up intil 80s kinda sucked poo poo. alot of western animations out sourced to japan for anything good. rankin bass used them exclusivly for all their classics. hell i am pretty sure alot of stuid gibblies intial teams were made up of the people who made the last unicorn for rankin bass which was their last big animted movie before the company imploded. still one of the best animated movies out there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxoJLJx-mJw good movie.
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# ? Apr 15, 2024 01:28 |
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Data Graham posted:I'll cop to looking past that part yeah, but it is drat difficult to do. I don't know enough about Final Space to try and defend Gary, but I've watched enough Futurama to be willing to go to bat for Fry and Leela as a couple. Fry and Leela like a lot of the same stuff, are always supporting each other, and are on the same career path. They're a good match and work will together, the writers just decided to drag out the "will they won't they" subplot way too long
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# ? Apr 15, 2024 01:31 |
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Know what deservered better? Bravestarr It had great toys too. Of all the things Filmation worked on, this might have been the greatest. Animation wise it was a big jump over their previous works.
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# ? Apr 15, 2024 01:36 |
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TaurusTorus posted:Watched Scavengers Reign, liked it a bunch but I don't think it needed the sequel hook. I mean, it depends on what you're talking about. It's entirely possible that he wasn't able to think normal when the LATER weird poo poo happened to him, which made it harder for him to go "Hey, there's a chance something weird might be happening to me."
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# ? Apr 15, 2024 02:21 |
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An Taoiseach posted:I wouldn't say my problem with Lower Decks is that it mocks the series, the writers clearly love Star Trek, and they love TNG era Trek especially. If anything, it's too gentle. Starfleet is consistently presented as noble and capable of rising to any challenge, at least in the ones I've seen. It's like the kind of comedy show that the federation would produce in-universe.
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# ? Apr 15, 2024 02:59 |
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I AM GRANDO posted:If anything, it's too gentle. Starfleet is consistently presented as noble and capable of rising to any challenge, at least in the ones I've seen. It's like the kind of comedy show that the federation would produce in-universe. Eh, it is nice to have a modern Trek that actually tries to keep the idealism.
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# ? Apr 15, 2024 03:07 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 04:20 |
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I Am Fowl posted:I mean, it depends on what you're talking about. It's entirely possible that he wasn't able to think normal when the LATER weird poo poo happened to him, which made it harder for him to go "Hey, there's a chance something weird might be happening to me." I did take this as totally typical I'M FINE toxic masculinity bullshit, not alien brain worms bullshit.
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# ? Apr 15, 2024 07:28 |