Animation for Adults: Basically, it's Anime but for Western Audiences

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > Animation for Adults: Basically, it's Anime but for Western Audiences

doomrider7: Nov 29, 2018

IShallRiseAgain posted:

Its meant for the sequel game, which looks like it going to be a trainwreck.

They released a remake/remaster of the first that was supposed to be free and have seamless transfer and well...that didn't pan out AT ALL. And that's BEFORE all of the technical bugs and assorted clusterfuckery. NeddyTheNoodle who is THE definitive ARK lore guy watched it and said it was fine, but so derivative that it has to bearing or resemblance to the games or the lore from them in any way. He was very mixed on it in his review and other people online have echoed that sentiment.

IShallRiseAgain posted:

So I checked out Ark out of curiosity, I couldn't even finish the first episode. It was pretty clearly just a random story they hacked together using elements from the game, and it leans heavily on the character babbling random technobabble.

Pretty much this, which is SUPER disappointing since ARK does have a pretty drat cool and interesting story.

doomrider7 fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Mar 27, 2024

# ¿ Mar 27, 2024 03:26

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 21:20

doomrider7: Nov 29, 2018

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?

Afterward the cookie cutter nature of these shows, lack of budget and seemingly near total lack of effort and passion really shines through, you see something like The Roman Holidays and its painfully obvious it was just running the Jetsons/Flintstones format even further into the ground. The superhero shows like The New Adventures of Batman or Superfriends just don't seem to have anything to them, even compared to the shoestring budgets earlier series based on the same characters had, its kind of amazing to watch this stuff in terms of just how hollow it all seems, and the fact that tv animation went from this to things like BTAS in the space of about a decade is even more amazing.

One of the things that prompted me to ask about this was the show Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, which I find kind of fascinating as an attempt to make a primetime animated sitcom not directed at kids with no standards, and accordingly had a little bit more effort put into things like voice acting, animation and the script than you otherwise saw. Not that I'd say it really holds up still, the canned laughter is especially badly aged, but some of the scenes are interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4jBnFL8naE

I wanna say that clip is a fandub even though I know it's real. Holy poo poo is that clip wild.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2024 20:58

doomrider7: Nov 29, 2018

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 original Johnny Quest is pretty wild. A ridiculous body count for one.

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.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2024 02:53

doomrider7: Nov 29, 2018

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.

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.

The CG in QuestWorld or whatever it was called always freaked me out; it was uncanny, even for 90s CGI.

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.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2024 21:07

doomrider7: Nov 29, 2018

Bifner McDoogle posted:

A lot of mid-late 90's media, from what I remember, was very bad at making diversity feel natural. The Burger King Kids Club is the go-to example because it's a promotional thing, so even if the characters did have well-considered personalities the fact is that everyone just saw there was a disabled kid named "Wheels" front and center.

There are shows that did show a lot of character diversity where everything felt extremely natural, though. I give Hey Arnold! a lot of credit for that in particular. It's set in a city, there's a wide cast of characters and some of the backstories these kids have could get pretty dark without ever being in focus.
It's kind of brilliant how Helga Pataki is charafterized, she could have just been a bully because she's shy about having a crush on Arnold and that's it. But if you pay attention it becomes clear that there's a bit more going on; her mom is an alcoholic and her dad is a fireman who isn't emotionally available. I grew up with that dynamic (lots of people did), and appreciate that the show was able to portray the issues that come from that dynamic in a 'funnier' light. Yeah, being the lost child of an alcoholic parent isn't funny at all, but they were courageous enough to craft the story from the kids perspective and exaggerate the absurdity so it worked.

Helga's dad was a sketchy owner of a beeper company not a fireman. And yeah, Hey Arnold really set a gold standard for being REAL about it's depiction of inner city kids.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2024 17:08

doomrider7: Nov 29, 2018

Bifner McDoogle posted:

Ha, don't know how I forgot that, but it's absolutely true. The bizarre pride he takes in the beeper business is one of those things that's funny as a kid and funnier as an adult.

The creator did eventually confirm that Mr. Simmons is a gay character, the guy he's with in the Thanksgiving episode was his partner. It was pretty much impossible to have an recognizably LGBT+ character on cable in the 90's, so it was unconfirmed until pretty recently. As obvious as it was even then, admitting it would get the show instantly cancelled at the time.

I can't remember where I read it, but the showrunners of "As Told By Ginger" wrote Courtney as being closetedly lesbian and having a crush on Ginger hence her whole thing of wanting to include her in stuff. They had an arc where she comes out to her, where Ginger politely declines, but supports her about it without outing her.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

lol. i remember the bobs beepers or some poo poo. I also feel like he probably didnt evolve with the times but didnt lose everything because of medical folks using them still.

The movie has them fall on hard times because he never segued into cellular and just stuck with beepers.

Edit: I always thought Phoebe was Korean or Filipino. Mr. Hyunh was definitely vietnamese as shown in the Christmas episode.

doomrider7 fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Apr 16, 2024

# ¿ Apr 16, 2024 21:31

doomrider7: Nov 29, 2018

Larryb posted:

He also says it outright as a throwaway gag in an earlier episode

Out of curiosity, where was it established that the snow took place in Seattle? An interview or something?

Something like that yeah which always felt weird. I do know that it was kept vague so that it felt like it could be ANY city in the US, but certain things always gave it a SUPER East Coast vibe(local harbor, random small islands just off the coast, Revolutionary War stories).

# ¿ Apr 16, 2024 23:35

doomrider7: Nov 29, 2018

Larryb posted:

What is the official explanation for the magic weakness anyway (assuming it�s still a thing in modern day)?

It's not so much a weakness in as much as lack of resistance to it.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2024 21:28

doomrider7: Nov 29, 2018

starkebn posted:

I think AI stuff like that can be cool in a brainstorming / concept art way, but it completely fails at being a good piece of art. I liked the idea.

I've seen some FromSoft games as movies/anime/tv series AI videos that are just AWESOME and would definitely be stuff I'd love to watch.

Here's my personal favorite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IPXMkPdXEo

That you can tell what most of them are even without the subs is impressive.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 02:45

doomrider7: Nov 29, 2018

Megillah Gorilla posted:

I've been watching Delicious in Dungeon and it's great light-hearted fun for the most part.

The idea of a dungeon being an ecosystem and all the bizarre creatures filling important roles and the importance of surviving in the dungeon without disturbing that ecosystem too much is a brilliant idea. Also, no one does cooking and making food look delicious like anime does.

But, like the last light-hearted silly anime I watched, Mashle: Magic and Muscles where a guy born without magic goes to wizard school and cheeses every test with his muscle and fitness, you get half way through the season and it takes a sudden swerve into body horror.

I know the idea is to up the stakes so people don't get bored, but it's just such a tonal shift from what were silly little comedies up until that point. I've never liked it when comedies do that.

The Robin Williams movie, Good Morning Vietnam is a great comedy until half way through when they suddenly remember, oh Vietnam was a poo poo show, and rest of the movie bears almost no resemblance to the first half. And it's that movie which made me really dislike comedies which suddenly decide to be dramas.

You can have comedies with drama. And dramas with comedy. But a pure comedy switching to pure drama doesn't work and more than it would the other way around.

tl:dr I'll have a Wendys burger.

It's a very complicated balancing act to nail. I think Helck and Yuusha ga Shinda are the only two that immediately come to mind that REALLY nail it well. Little off-topic, but if dungeon crawler series are your jam, look into Undead Adventurer. The anime was alright and got the main points across, but the manga is VERY solidly done.

# ¿ May 5, 2024 17:54

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 21:20

doomrider7: Nov 29, 2018

Larryb posted:

Wait, they actually improved? I�ve been hearing it was just more of the same poo poo so how so out of curiosity?

I've read the spoilers and yeah it's more of the same.

# ¿ May 10, 2024 20:02

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > Animation for Adults: Basically, it's Anime but for Western Audiences