Thrift Shop Treasures of the 90s:

I was out at the thrift stores yesterday looking for animation that isn`t in my collection and again I was struck by what great animation came out of the early 90s. Darkwing Duck, Batman the Animated Series, Gargoyles, and even (to a lesser extent) Goof Troop, TailSpin and Bonkers, the kid`s afternoon block was way fun again just like when I was a kid.

I have talked about this second golden age of animation a number of times. And I have had it passed off lightly by people who should know better. The off shore animation studios were getting better before the producers moved to even cheaper markets and went back to bad quality animation. Like all there is to an animation is animation. But it is not just that, because good animation without content is just a light show.

In the late 80s early 90s the almost lost generation of animators were coming into their own. The obsessed fans that had grown up on Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and Tex Avery where firmly in control of TV animation at long last and soon to take over feature animation. The 20-year wasteland had been crossed. The torch had been past without completely going out. And it was time to kick some ass on the airwaves.

Strangely enough, the golden age of television animation started with Pee-Wee`s Playhouse, (remember the first golden age was in theatrical animation that was shown to TV audience kids to shut us up while Mom and Dad went on with their lives. The stuff being created for TV during the dark ages was very, very bad. Just ask Jerry Beck.)



Pee-Wee`s Playhouse as a show wasn`t so much about animation and it was immersed in animation. All kinds of animation, paper cutout, clay, human heads matted onto puppets, foam latex, 2-D board, any idea was possible.

Paul Rubens, or Paul Rubenfeld when I first met him in the dressing room at the Asolo Children`s Theatre Company back in our home town of Sarasota, loved all things animated and soaked his program in every imaginable type of animation process. It is this love of animation by an entire generation that brought about high quality TV animation in the early 90s, not some accident of talent ripening before being abandon to lower cost foreign workers.

Go to your local thrift shop and check the video bins, all this great 90s stuff is being sold off now that the kids are old enough not to need animation babysitting.