What Ruined Hanna-Barbera? [video]
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Then Turner bought them I think, then WB bought Turner, and IIRC just kinda merged them into Cartoon Network because having two studios in the same city is kind of a waste or resources. Also the whole rise of sending work overseas to Asia where your dollar buys an order of more magnitude more pencil mileage; animation was at the forefront of hollowing out the American industry by substituting cheaper labor across the globe.
Or at least that's what I recall from growing up in the seventies and being in the animation industry in the nineties/00s.
People who were kids with no taste and a lot of time to fill during the time they dominated Saturday Morning have fond memories of their characters but that stuff really does not age well. It maybe ages slightly better than most Filmation work. Slightly.
Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, The Brak Show, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, Sealab 2021, many others.
And they even cheaped out on the "radio" part, in that their jokes and plots were stale, unimaginative, and just as recycled as their backgrounds.
Rocky & Bullwinkle did "Illustrated Radio" well because it had a good writing staff.
The cardinal sin of making media is condescension. Don't talk down to your audience, and don't make media you yourself wouldn't consume.
(There might even be a broader lesson there.)
Advertisers should pay attention to this more. Looking down at the "consumer" and downplaying the "audience"'s intelligence are still common practices.
As you said, the broader lesson applies to all media. The same sin affects bad entertainment and bad journalism (or infotainment).
Very true. I grew up in Germany, but we got most of the cartoons that were popular in the US (plus some Japanese stuff) as well, dubbed.
One particular situation from the late 80s or early 90s that I remember was when the channel that showed the Smurfs, which I liked, was somehow repeating the same episode over and over again. Maybe there was an error at the station (I wouldn't be too surprised if nobody paid that close attention to the children's programming), or maybe I just happened to catch all the reruns in strange coincidence. It's hard to remember the specifics.
But what I do remember well is that I watched that episode, one that I actually did not like to begin with, over and over again, disliking it more and more each time. When the episode started playing and I realized that it was that episode again within the first few seconds, I got so disheartened and disappointed. And then I continued watching it.
Nowadays, that's a pretty funny, if not somewhat bizarre, memory. As an adult, there is no way I would force myself through any show's episode that I don't like anyway repeatedly, why did I "have to" as a child? Similarly, I remember a few entire cartoons that I was not particularly fond off, or sometimes actively disliked, and I still watched those, too, "because that's what was on TV right now".
Apparently, realizing that I had agency over how I spend my own entertainment time was something I had to learn better growing up.
Now I barely touch games... Can do about an hour and a half of tv or movie max (barring good 2h+ films). Multiplayer games I can do maybe an hour or two a couple days a week, more if we're in the same room.
I mean I watched Alladin every day for a good few months once. I'm typing this out because I got distracted from Netflix just now. Something's different about me, I wonder if it's true for others?
Same here. I suspect that it's simply easier to enjoy these things socially and then do other things alone (like coding or reading).
I only ever played single player games, though. Gaming was always “me time”, and there was always plenty of opportunity to meet people to be social, without games (unless it’s board games, which I enjoy too).
I was a film projectionist at a single-screen theater in Harvard Square in 1988, the summer "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" was showing. I saw the opening scene (the baby cartoon with Roger subjected to various painful acts) several hundred times.
The first time I thought it was funny. After 10 times it was boring. After 30 it made me very uncomfortable. I probably saw it about 250 times in all.
A few months ago I started to watch it with my son (it was on Netflix or Amazon), but I had to stop a few minutes in. The feeling of mild revulsion was just too much.
ETA: Makes me appreciate the patience of editors and other film professionals who are probably sick of seeing certain scenes by the time it hits theaters or the small screen.
Regarding loss of perspective, that's why focus groups/test audiences are so important. From what I understand, they are particularly crucial for comedies where the timing of jokes matters so much and a mishandled edit can ruin the scene.
For most people, especially kids, shows had no continuity at all. I remember trying to watch Robotech (re-runs?) in the mid '80s and once in awhile I'd see two episodes in a row that were in the correct order. Doctor Who was the same way except that was on PBS and often times I could see a couple in a row. Things didn't change until my parents got cable sometime around 1985 or so.
One more anectdote I'll share: My kids both loved Scooby Doo so we bought all the old episodes on DVD. What strikes me most about the cheap animation is how few characters there were in Scooby Doo. If the gang was walking in a town or an amusement park, there were almost no local color--no people at all. That gives the show a creepy, xenophobic vibe. The gang is always all alone in an alien landscape, sort of like they were transported into an alternate reality.
The video puts the 80s era of licensed properties/toy cartoons (GI Joes, Transformers, etc.) as the first thing to really challenge HB due to the , and that during that time HB struggled to adapt and compete and that the Smurfs seemed like their only success during the era.
He says they had a revival after being bought by Turner in the 90s and making decent cartoons for cartoon network but were ultimately absorbed by WB animation after the companies merged.
They did very well for a long time, but then the 80s arrived. Suddenly there were better shows (Transformers, GI Joe) during the entire week rather than just weekends, and they lost a lot of market. They later went to Cartoon Network and created some new classics (Powerpuff Girls and co), but for some reason (not explained) that wasn't enough.
HB ones were exclusives.
(Since odds are high someone will ask, this is the bookmarklet I ended up settling on: javascript:void(document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = prompt()) This prompts you for the speed you want. It should be obvious how to specialize this to a specific speed if you want.)
I'm glad I wasn't the only one. There's a lot of misplaced upward inflection which I assume is the narrator's normal speaking voice that they're desperately trying to fight against to sound more "professional". In fact the phrases that don't do this sound like they've been pitch-corrected downwards (maybe they have, maybe it's some weird auditory illusion).
> to my mind, poor narration in long-form video essays is no different to printing academic journals entirely in Zapfino
I couldn't have put it better myself.
What the video doesn’t touch on is:
Who are these studios animating them? According to the video, the entire tv animation market was more or less HB. How could these studio rise out of seemingly nowhere and produce high(er) quality animation?
Why wasn’t HB part of these tie-ins? According to the video, they owned the market. Aren’t they the obvious choice to ask to produce, when you want a cartoon about your new toy?
Why didn’t HB pivot towards more action animation in the 80s, when going up against TMNT and Dino riders?
Are you talking about the merchandise tie ins? They weren't higher quality, certainly not on the 80s. Most of them seem to be Japanese and have that Anime thing of getting away with animating as little as humanly possible.
The only thing that sticks out in HB cartoons is every character does the moonwalk everywhere. But they actually added to detail so you had a frame of reference to tell they were doing that.
That's what Did You Know Gaming seems to be, for instance.
Hanna-Barbera were my favorite animators, hands down. I could watch their toons any day and I would not get bored.
As a kid I never noticed how commercial it all really was.
After reading some of the history you can see they've all been doing the exact same tried and true things since forever.
Merchandising, spin-offs, episodes written around new album releases, copy-cats of successful shows (e.g. Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie), etc.
So you end up with minimal janky animation, Disney child actors, and 1/2 hour toy commercials.
I have to agree that virtually nothing Hanna Barbara has done has stood the test of time. Despite being so politically incorrect a lot of it has been buried, I can think of a few Looney Tunes that are still pretty good (Bugs Bunny conducting the orchestra is quite popular, I'm also a fan of a particular Bugs Bunny cartoon in which he stays overnight in Dracula's castle), and Disney's stuff is still generally watchable and enjoyable, but I'm sitting here racking my brains and despite having seen some of those shows as a kid, I literally can not relate to you a single episode of any of them.
Is YouTube information being sent to Hackernews or is it just coincidence that my YouTube suggestions are in sync with Hackernews posts?
Not really answered.
They mention other cartoons came in based on merchandise, but don't say why Hanna-Barbera couldn't/didn't compete.
But... the ultimate reason does seem to be simply: there was a lot more competition.
In the 90s, they just had put out SWAT Kats. That could've been hugely marketable, but Ted thought it too violent, along with many other HB properties in development at the time. He changed that, and HB began a painful decline.
I'm still close to using a browser extension to disable the recommendations system entirely as useless garbage to me, but at least this one tool helps some.
The answer is more a business answer than a creative one. When a business is highly, highly successful pursuing a certain strategy, that strategy becomes part of their internal cultural identity. The entire business is macroscopically and microscopically arranged around exploiting this particular opportunity. When the strategy stops working, such a culture will virtually inevitably double down on the strategy, which in a way makes things even worse, because that usually works for a little while. By the time it becomes undeniable the strategy is no longer functional, they've usually fallen too far behind to compete. And since usually the only way to see "the strategy is unsuccessful" is precisely that there is competition pursuing other strategies eating your lunch, the competition is always already there by the time the message finally gets through.
From the outside it's so easy to see. Early in the process it's easy to say "Jeez, guys, you've got literally 10 times the resources of anyone else in this industry, why not 'just' pivot your strategy?" But it's not a matter of just pivoting; it's a matter of rewriting the entire company's culture and way of doing business. That's why even when a company tries to co-opt the new strategy, they almost always undercut themselves somehow, either by being unable to really commit, or if they are in the rare case where they succeed, they undercut themselves by trying to use this success to pivot back to the original strategies they know and love. It can literally be easier to found a brand new company and start from scratch than to reform an existing company. There's a lot of examples of a couple of creatives disgruntled about the cultural limitations of their employers going and forming a business that follows a strategy that does very well, exploiting a niche their original employer never could have. (I'm more familiar with the video game industry, where Activision is an example of that, but this sort of things happens a lot over there. Or at least it did, before video games required so many people.)
Companies that develop cultures that can navigate this mess are rare. It doesn't seem that way, because of survivorship bias. For instance, you might say "But jerf, Disney seems to manage it OK", and, yeah, they do, and that's a non-trivial part of the reason why they are a decade-spanning behemoth of multiple industries, rather than a 1940s also-ran. And there's a lot of other companies you can name that can too. But those are precisely the rare survivors.