Good or Good Enough

Good TV animation is the exception. It is great to have Avatar or Samurai Jack or Reboot or even early Simpsons but for every top rate TV animation there are hundreds of miss fires. Why? Why?



It has been that way since the beginning of TV animation. Jerry Beck has made a second career out of 50s, 60s and 70s bad Saturday morn cartoons with his Worst Cartoons Ever panels at Comic Con and other events. I have looked at the screen credits of quite a lot of those worst cartoons and some of these dogs have some top notch people working on them. So why do these cartoons suck?



The short and simple answer is that they don`t have to be good to sell to the kids markets. And American studios just can not see that animation is any but just for kids, silly rabbit.

I love the Super Six, still, even after I have seen it with mature filmmaker`s eyes and know that it is bad formula storytelling. Corny Cole, who worked on the project early in his career, thought I was putting him on when I told him I liked the Super Six.



The truth is that I love it because I loved it when I was a kid. And I still love it now even though I know it is bad animation. It was aimed at kids and nothing more. And that is all it had to be. The producers were doing just what they had to, to get the job done, and never one bit more.

They forget that the trick to animation is shelve-life, the resale, the new market with every generation. Good animation is forever and will always have a new audience. Saturday morning crap that does not try to be more than crap is here today and then gone forever and only the kids that grew up with it think highly enough to watch it again.