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Oh cool, I didn't know that Genndy had started a new project. I thought he was still doing Hotel Transylvania. The revival season of Samurai Jack was...alright. It was about what I'd expect, considering how it was trying to do a finale to a story that the original series had no real intent to finish. Kinda shows why it's not always the best idea to go back to old material.
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Jun 8, 2019 23:48
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The first season of Aggretsuko felt like it was so focused and trying to make a statement, and the second season kinda felt like it was all over the place both with no clear goal. The detour into post-singularity space communism techbro messiah futurism just felt weird and bizarre, and the exact reverse of how season 1 went against the idea of Retsuko dreaming of an easy escape and I just didn't understand what was happening. The way that she eventually dumped him over his refusal to conform to the one social structure that she cared about in his very techbro-style rejection of what wasn't convenient for him kinda remedied some of the issues I with it, but still the season felt weak. But honestly? What I disliked most about the season was the fact that the biggest theme of the first season of the show was people's inner lives, mostly Retsuko's, but also the high-power office ladies, Haida, Fenneko's investigation into secrets, Kabae having a secret spy life underneath all that talking, even Mr.Tone's in a bizarrely sympathetic-to-the-villain moment, and then the stark contrast of Resasuke's utter emptiness inside. The metal karaoke wasn't just an expression of Retsuko's feelings at the moment, it was an illustration of having deeper feelings and reactions deep down inside. But then season 2 leaves most of the extended cast high and dry with no real thought to how they're doing, and almost as bad, what new developments happen don't get really explored. Hanai's a weird psychopath, but that just clears up halfway through the season with not much thought to what the flying gently caress was going on inside him. Washimi has a big revelation about marriage with no details or even like a clear philosophical statement about what she thinks about marriage. Tadano's anti-marriage comments were the closest he ever really got to "tipping his hand" as to whatever inner life he had. Like overall, there just was a lot less of what I loved about season 1. Mr.Tone's bizarrely inspirational speech wasn't him being an ol' softy, it was the same as season 1, he's just a big bastard willing to come down hard on Retsuko. Some revelations hurt, and nobody's more willing to hurt Retsuko than Mr. Tone. Also he really needs to keep a full staff to get work done, so of COURSE he's going to try to talk her out of quitting. Not his fault Retsuko has easily-exploitable doubts.
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Aug 17, 2019 03:03
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I mean there's a number of ways that Hanai could've made sense, but the show just chose to never elaborate on what the hell was going on inside his head and why exactly he just chilled. I did love that yakisoba rap though. Haida's not that bad, and Retsuko's big turndown of him was a fairly ambiguous "I can't deal with this sort of thing right now", which seemed like it was literally true from how the show was going rather than a clear "no never". I kind of see his whole weird deal of wanting to hang out with Retsuko but being unable to effectively break the ice as more just generic social ineptitude (similar to the social ineptitude that causes many other problems in the series) rather than a one-sided romance. Although really, I'm more grumpy about Fenneko barely featuring in the second season, she's my favorite character. But overall, it's a show about being a small person with no power in a big world and having to eke out whatever living or happiness you can while you're at it, and having to deal with the hardships of life rather than finding some easy escape, because systemic problems or whatever, you gotta deal with the world as presented to you.
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Aug 18, 2019 01:02
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I never thought of the "men can't control themselves around women" argument from the perspective of a guy who can personally control himself, but wants to protect powerful executives who he knows will choose not to control themselves.
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Aug 23, 2019 21:03
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I feel like this is basically the streaming companies slowly reinventing the cable TV network system since traditional cable companies hosed themselves by deciding to be satisfied with a stagnant equilibrium. All these new services you have to buy separately are a lot like what cable was before bundling. Of course, I don't think any attempts at bundling these new services are going to work much, since unlike the early days of cable, alsmost all of these big streaming services are owned by huge corporate conglomerates that are vertically integrated every step of the way, so I'd expect them to try leveraging what control they have to stamp down on competitors rather than being open to making deals with some third party trying to bundle everything. Maybe something will happen to disassemble these massive companies and we'll get a new network systems that provides wider access, or maybe one day everything will be owned by one single company that will only need one subscription but also won't bother to make all their material accessible at once.
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Oct 31, 2019 02:09
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I feel like I've seen a premise like this a thousand times on deviantart, it only makes sense that one of them would get picked up to become a final product one of these days. The animation is weirdly...jiggly. The graphic style's not my thing, although I'm sure it's up some people's alley. That's a LOT of red though. Flourescent monochromatic color schemes get tiring to me. Oh god, now it's the pink and cyan and now my eyeballs hurt. Rand Brittain posted:My main take on Hazbin Hotel is that it doesn't really seem to have anything useful to say on the topic of "rehabilitation" and I don't really have any reason to believe it's got anything better waiting in the wings. You'd think that if the reward for reformation was heaven, that'd be some draw on its own. Or that there'd be some bigger implications about being the eternal afterlife and whatnot. I'm not really sure what morality the show's going with if alcohol counts as sinful, and that's a pretty important thing that the show's resting on. And without the fantastical elements, it's a high status white girl in the ghetto. Not that anybody comes off as nonwhite, for better or worse.
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Nov 11, 2019 02:52
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It's also not great as a pilot, since it doesn't give an adequate idea of what the show proper would be like. Is it going to be about finding some kind of nugget of good to foster, or is it going to just be a dark comedy about everything being bad? The afterlife aspect is confusing since there's no real reference to people having done something in life they have to atone for, and there's not exactly a confirmation of the existance of heaven? And then a couple people mock the idea of dying in hell, which seems to contradict the event that the hotel is supposed to prevent. It's also a...bold decision if they're planning to do multiple songs each episode. It works as a first episode, but a pilot's job is not supposed to be to start a story, it's to be a proof of concept to pitch around. Although maybe they're not even hoping to get picked up by a real network, maybe they're trying to just go direct to the internet for everything.
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Nov 11, 2019 17:51
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Honestly, I'm more bugged by the abstract pointy blob people than the animal people, although the juxtoposition of furries with psuedo-animal anatomy next to pointy blob people with no anatomy highlights the weirdness of each. I'm not really clear on how many of these people are born demons and how many are dead humans who somehow have weird funky souls for some reason. Or if their mortal existence has any bearing on their afterlife at all. Like I know the reason it's hell is because they want to have an excuse to do a bunch of jokes off of how superbad all the characters are, but I keep on coming back to the weird implications of their worldbuilding or lack thereof. And if they want to riff a bunch on everything being terrible, how long does that joke last before everything bad dissolves into a monotony of terribleness?
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Nov 28, 2019 19:12
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Escobarbarian posted:Is this where I talk about the Harley Quinn show because god drat that first episode was funny as hell It might be. Although you might have more luck with the Comic Book Animation Thread.
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Nov 30, 2019 08:10
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Well that's a very new interpretation of the Penguin.
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Dec 17, 2019 00:58
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It's a pretty old debate of how far into stereotypes can somebody play even if their identity makes it improbable that there is actual malice intended. Taking offense isn't like a mechanical process that can be invalidated if the source has an excuse, it's a complex combination things that mostly remind that you are in some way an outsider to the rest of society. Or if you remove the identity politics, it's the age old question of how far is too far. There's not even a right answer, just a balance between offense and how well the humor works, which can even be effected by context. I generally side against dumb stereotype jokes, but not out of my own personal virtue or anything, but because I'm not very receptive to a lot of that sort of thing and by the time I figure out what the actual joke is supposed to be about, I'm already annoyed by the references I don't get.
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Dec 18, 2019 01:50
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I'm pretty surprised that everybody's already down on it even without John K's involvement. Like I personally hate it automatically because I hated the original show and don't think the IP has anything to offer the current era, but I always got the impression that a lot of people somehow remembered it fondly. I guess it's impressive that so many people have changed their minds about the cartoon after learning about the abuse.
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Aug 6, 2020 01:35
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Lord_Magmar posted:I’m pretty sure the art is the way it is because that’s the art the creator grew up liking, it’s pretty consistent with the stuff they drew and put online as a teenager. It just seems like a really weird way to say you don’t like it, which is fine. It does sort of look like an artsyle that I've seen a lot of artists go through as adolescents before maturing as artists and adopting whatever they would go on to do as adults. Even more than that, I feel like the whole edginess of the show feels more like a teenager thing, because that's the age that most people are usually obsessed with edginess, whereas I feel like actual adult stuff is less worried about sex and violence and more worried about the meaninglessness of life and struggling to keep afloat in a world that does not care, but that sort of edginess obsession does permeate the rest of "adult" entertainment as well.
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Aug 12, 2020 19:09
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When I became an adult capable of understanding all the references in Animaniacs, I also found that I don't really enjoy reference comedy like that. Hopefully people who enjoy movie industry references will still enjoy the new series, but if it doesn't take off, well, that's life. It's not like how well the reboot does will have an effect on childhood memories. Animaniacs was also ahead of the curve in making fun of goons on forums back in the early 90s. The internet is old. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOtmdHiCJNY
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Oct 13, 2020 01:00
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I know I've heard the story of a crazed stalker fan, but if that's the inspiration for that bit, something was lost along the way, because they only seem to be referencing the fairly benign obsessing over minor errors or exploring the little gags.
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Oct 13, 2020 21:17
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It's also a Canadian show, and those have a lot less longevity just in general. I do think Clone High is a bit embedded in the whole MTV aesthetic and tropes of the time, but it doesn't really matter if you don't get the references.
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Oct 30, 2020 15:42
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The original Animaniacs was weirdly adult too, stuffed full of references to the film industry that could easily be over 50 years old. I tried rewatching some of it, jumping to random episodes, and there's one where Rita and Runt hang out with Ross Perot, and the episode didn't really seem to comment on any of the politics about him, he's just a recognizable guy (within the very small window of time the episode was written) with a funny voice. There's also the Ben Stein episode that's a joke on the very adult experience of meeting someone at a party who is just incredibly boring but you can't get away.
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Nov 20, 2020 18:41
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I fell off liking Adventure Time somewhere around the point where Finn had his first boner and there was a whole episode where he loses his girlfriend trying to recreate the experience. Around then is where the world of the show stopped being fun with new things everywhere and started getting consumed in its lore. There was a real theme of just an uncaring, hostile, and incomprehensible world and all the characters started sinking into ennui, becoming less self-actualized over time, and it was basically a different show, possibly because of the changes in its staff as Pendleton Ward stepped down and other people went off to make their own shows. I still followed it, but by that point other shows cropped up that drew more of my attention like Steven Universe and Gravity Falls and then Over the Garden Wall, and heck, Regular Show had stories going about adults in an adult world maturing in a way that wasn't totally draining them. You're not wrong in that fusion was kinda creepy when at first it had sexual overtones which isn't good when it's a thing 12-year-olds were doing (the first Stevonnie episode was especially creepy, and not in the way the show intended), but I think the sexual overtones got downplayed later on. I do disagree with your take on characters being toxic though. Lars started out as basically Squidward, but instead of the jokes about his suffering increasing to the point that he attempts suicide multiple times, the show eventually gives a little respect to his character and shows him as just kinda dumb and confused at the age where most people are dumb and confused. Lapis was in a complicated space after dealing with being passively tormented for 5,000 years and then actively tormented by the first Homeworld gems she met. Being mean to Peridot for an episode and stealing a house to avoid going to war again is pretty understandable. A lot of people act like jerks sometimes, but you can't just sever them every time. I guess I'm also a bit of a sucker for characters just learning to be nice and being redeemed.
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Nov 23, 2020 18:17
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After Orgalorg the show stopped being so directly destructive towards its characters. It also started doing these little miniseries with overarching narratives that worked pretty well even if it couldn't fully reconstitute the show's original magic and definitely couldn't make the show into more of a narrative thing like later cartoons became.Warbird posted:As someone with only a cursory awareness of either show, loving what? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk170gitZW0 I think the messaging is pretty clear even if we don't see the boner.
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Nov 23, 2020 19:14
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I'm still making my way through the new Animaniacs, since I can only do so much at a time. I didn't expect them to get rid of all of the side characters aside from Pinky and the Brain and Ralph. I think the original show had the intent of having a whole original cast like a new Looney Tunes, and they're just leaving it behind. I do like some of the bits where they totally break from the normal show style, but they're hit and miss. There doesn't seem to be any reference to Yakko, Wakko, and Dot being from the 30s, and the show itself doesn't seem to have the dynamic of the studio trying to lock up the Warners, which is weird, since it's still in the theme song. I guess the idea of wrecking the movie studios probably didn't grab writers' attention as much because Warner Brothers itself as an independent entity is fictional these days, and it's just another victim swallowed up by megacorporations. It's weird how much the show seems to want to be relevant with current references, seeing as how the original show was so aggressively irrelevant.
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Nov 26, 2020 00:13
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When your first response to rap is to try to take it down with Shakespeare, it does make you sound about 4 million years old.
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Nov 27, 2020 03:23
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I posted about Animaniacs here because this is the last thread what was talking about Animaniacs.
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Nov 27, 2020 21:10
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So much about Clone High was either parodying TV targeted at teens at the time or was based in the now-extinct MTV. It's gonna be real different having it around now. I just hope it has time to find its feet and not clog itself up with marveling how mechanically different cell phones are as a method for doing mostly the same things that were being done 20 years ago.
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Feb 11, 2021 08:17
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Raisins was a parody of Pink Floyd.
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Feb 11, 2021 23:04
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I actually recently rediscovered American Dad and what's great about it after it was one more thing I just really didn't want to deal with with the looming trump administration to think about. It doesn't seem like they actually referenced it, but I didn't want to take the chance. So many comedians wanted to make Trump jokes but none of them could distract from the crushing bleakness of it. I remember American Dad started as a half-baked satire of the W days, but it didn't really work well and only came into its own when they pushed the current politics to the background. They freed up Stan to be a more reasonable and occasionally sympathetic character instead of just an avatar of darkness, they let Haley develop into a character just trying to find her way in the world, and Francine and Steve could just get extremely weird. I'm glad that they didn't try to return to their roots. No.1 Special posted:Birdgirl premiered tonight. It was okay for the most part. Curious to see how things shake out. How many Colberts are there?
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Apr 6, 2021 06:19
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Ghost Leviathan posted:You think the stoned college kids of the 00s hadn't grown up on The Simpsons? I do think that the Simpsons rapidly loses relevance as you get to younger age groups as you get to people who never saw what Simpsons was parodying and didn't live in the sort of world that it was originally designed for. It stops being uniquely insightful and just seems like another sitcom like the others on TV only it's a yellow cartoon with swears. I think that's reflected in how Family Guy came along and did basically what the Simpsons had become at the time and only started taking off by developing some kind of unique gimmick of its own (and still never hit the peaks that the Simpsons once did).
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Apr 6, 2021 19:14
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The superhero genre is founded upon a pretty thin premise and it's actually extremely easy to conceive of how people with superpowers could go horribly awry, to the point that it features heavily in horror and sci-fi and is even heavily featured in superhero stories for all the supervillains and whatnot. So trying to make an edgy take on how maybe superheroes would be bad is barely subversive at all, and it feels a little like making a big deal out of how professional wrestling isn't real fighting and is actually choreographed and plotted beforehand. It's a very unimpressive goal that doesn't really carry much weight on it's own. I think it's actually been harder for newcomers into the genre to muster the belief in themselves to play the whole thing straight than it has been to make an edgy take on how everything is bad.
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Apr 10, 2021 16:53
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The style reminds me a lot of animated Beetlejuice. I've seen similar things here and there around various art corners of the internet, and I have it associated in my head with a lot of teen angst and hot topic expressiveness, and I guess that enough of those people grew up while holding onto the same sensibilities. Ccs posted:In other news I am on episode 10 of season 3 in my Legend of Korra rewatch. Holy moly how did this show ever air on Nickelodeon. It’s incredible what they’re getting away with. Season 3? It didn't.
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May 2, 2021 05:14
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Also when Ducktales visits the superhero genre, they pretty much drop all pretense of self-awareness or attempting to subvert genre expectations, which is weird considering how much of a parody the original Darkwing Duck was.
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May 19, 2021 16:17
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I kinda liked the 2016 take that the Amazing World of Gumball had, which also didn't really get the political machinations right, but it did sure do a neat job of laying out the issues. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1pNAu84c8c Bust Rodd posted:Right, like how people IRL act irrationally or selfishly all the time but if someone in a video game or a cartoon does something irrational or emotional it gets lampooned as bad writing It's more that if you want to rest the plot on characters being stupid or disfunctional, you either need to depict them aesthetically as stupid or disfunctional, or else you need to give them an excuse for how this time is an exception rather than trying to portray someone as competent and yet they only seem to make everything in the story worse. It's a contradiction in the way the story is told, and isn't very fun or satisfying to follow. Last Jedi basically tries to have it three ways at once. Either the hotshot pilot is a maniac for trying to run the entire war and attempting a coup after being demoted, or the admiral is a garbage leader who doesn't know tactics and can't inspire any loyalty or obedience in her subordinates, but the movie also tries to play both of them as heroes by the end without really earning it.
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Jun 6, 2021 19:39
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I really don't feel like The Last Jedi shows the characters being in any way better off at the end of the movie than they are at the beginning, where 90% of the people they were trying to save are dead, with a whole scene definitively demonstrating how literally nobody throughout the galaxy cares about their struggle and the entire universe is under Kyle's control except for one space-winnebago. And it's definitely not a Shakespeare thing to try to save face for the other big name characters to make the audience feel better about liking them even after they were a jerk. It's not just that the movie itself refuses to acknowledge that one of these opposing characters should be wrong, but the characters themselves don't seem to really value the things they were arguing about before. Which there are atguments you can just kinda forget, but people died for the sake of both of these idiots' dumb plans and people were held at gunpoint. That's not something that you can just drop. It's just so weird and seemingly out of character how Holdo is all positive about Poe before she goes off to sacrifice herself in a way that apparently the nameless fishmen she had dying horribly onscreen in the name of her plan weren't allowed to do. And definitely the New Republic features in zero themes in the movies because literally nobody mentions the New Republic ever existing. readingatwork posted:Gumball owns and this episode is good but it’s doing another thing that bugs me in election episodes where it conflates liberal status quo technocrats with leftist firebrands so it loses a few points there. I swear to god I’m going to give myself a stroke trying to explain the difference to people someday. Idaho talked more directly about redistributing resources, but sadly he was too busy spinning in the air to weigh in on anything. There are a lot of problems with the way that popular perception of politics doesn't seem to line up with what actually is happening, but I don't know what can really be done about that. Most mainstream media really doesn't want to deal with intra-party politics, so a lot of people are simmering with their own idea of what happened that they will never talk about unless they're screaming at somebody else with an opposing view.
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Jun 7, 2021 00:26
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Yo there's another thread for this: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3911970&pagenumber=62#post515294921
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Jun 7, 2021 01:31
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Transgressive, but irrelevant. Not a good mix.
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Aug 1, 2021 04:11
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I fell off on watching Rick and Morty, but I can easily see how they would get into a bit of a rut and go into decay, since where I stopped watching it was already super dark, an it can't get much darker without becoming too depressing and losing the comedy, but also it seems pretty oriented against showing the characters improve and develop from where they were, so there's not much of a direction for it to go other than just treading water.Data Graham posted:There are examples of shows that just keep getting better until they suddenly end, right? I think foreign media in England or Canada have better odds of being good through to the end because they're more likely to just end sooner, while American shows are more prone to extending indefinitely until interest dies. Something to do with the difference in how their respective industries are run.
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Aug 3, 2021 18:47
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I think it's good, but not like amazing. It's about the level as Chowder. Funny and weird. I don't think it has like any particularly deep cuts or insightful takes on the Hanna-Barbera characters, but then my brain isn't really attuned to that frequency to really say. A couple of characters got their genders flipped to better round out the cast (and I think it worked out best with the yellow scarf fox), and Yogi, Booboo, and Cindy Bear are all doctors for some reason, which sets up some fun things. Huckleberry Hound is the mayor. There's a lot of kazoo music.
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Aug 9, 2021 06:10
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I'm not sure if I'd call Jellystone a love letter, since it's not like it's really illustrating or demonstrating what people liked about the original cartoons, but that's not the only angle for making use of a classic IP.
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Aug 11, 2021 22:57
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Warbird posted:I really need to get around to finishing Bone. Was there ever a good animated adaptation of it? I vaguely recall there being some on YouTube a million years ago. That would probably be the Bone Telltale game, which is animated and fully voiced. If you want to check it out, you'll probably either have to watch a longplay or do some  , because the game was lost in the mix after the demise of Telltale, and the people who picked up the scattered remains haven't seen fit to resurrect it like they have with Sam and Max. I think even before Telltale fell apart, it was a bit unclear how to buy it, since it was one of their heavily sidelined early comics.It's interesting to hear it actually voiced, because it really drives home that people are talking with american accents and dialects, which normally most fantasy demands that it be put through a british filter for whatever reason. Bust Rodd posted:Not to be contrarian but Avatar? I feel like that show does a really good job of making how lovely the the Imperialism of the Fire Nation is really front and center and doesn’t really ever let up as the story progresses. That's less a silly outside hiding a darker inside, and more just something that has broader appeal across all age ranges. Which a lot of stuff actually gets produced for broader audiences, despite how animation often gets pigeonholed as just children's media.
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Aug 29, 2021 16:50
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I don't doubt that Rick and Morty is still doing funny things or making impressive sequences, but after seeing most of their shtick in the first two seasons, it just seems like it'd be really depressing to keep watching. There's only so much bleakness I really want to maintain in my life.
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Sep 6, 2021 15:44
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The problem with making a TV show into a theatrical movie is that you've got a much bigger budget that you need to make use of, and you need some kind of big plot or grand escalation of concept to justify or make use of the higher production values. Making the show into a finale is a good way to do that, although a number of times something was supposed to be a finale, but either the show ends too soon or the show doesn't end. Another method is to make the movie way different from the normal show to really show off all the show's aspects by putting them against new contexts. I actually watched the Simpsons movie recently, and it doesn't seem great, just a longer episode of the Simpsons that doesn't particularly do much new or different. Weirdly it has a similar basic premise as the Recess movie, but with Recess, suddenly fighting a federal bureaucrat gone rogue was a massive escalation of stakes, but with the Simpsons it was just a wednesday. Also Recess managed to fit in more character arcs and some kind of broader exploration of the rest of the show by having the teachers and kids team up for once.
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Sep 12, 2021 16:06
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I'd guess that it was meant to be the thing to ratchet up the movie's rating. It's a funny twist on the classic gag of contrived ways to cover up privates, but yeah, weird thing to do just because they could.Wikipedia posted:The scene of a naked Bart on his skateboard was Groening's idea, who had always wanted to have Bart skateboarding naked, and Scully had the idea of showing Bart's penis for two seconds. Which doesn't make it less weird. I guess that's a way to step up from Bart's normal causing chaos skateboarding?
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Sep 12, 2021 16:39
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