This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Komodin: Hmm, this page seems a little too slanted against the cartoons of the '50s - '70s. Though I've never watched most of the cartoons myself, I'm having a bit of a hard time buying that nearly every 'toon produced during this time period was mediocre-to-ironically good-to-outright horrid?
Surenity: It did get pretty bad, animation-wise, though admittedly some of the cartoons had good writing to make up for the bad animation. Maybe some more mentions of what Disney was doing, they never got too bad during this time, though they weren't quite at their best.
Tannhaeuser: I strongly disagree with this page. What kind of "Dark Age" produces Whats Opera Doc?, Sleeping Beauty, and Jonny Quest? Even if things like Scooby Doo or Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle are not considered high art, they are cerainly well-regarded enough to have established themselves as more than mere trash. I will grant that there was great deal of simplifying done, but to condemn four whole decades of animation is excessive. Frankly, I believe this trope could easily be split, following the comic book model, into a Bronze Age (say, 1955-1970) and then an Iron Age (or Dark Age, if one prefers) (from, say 1971-1985 or so) when the really bad things (like Fangface or Baggy Pants and the Nitwits) were coming out.
The use of the John Kricfalusi quote is rather disingenuous, when one considers that it goes on to say of character design in the so-called "Renaissance Age of Animation": "Today, there is a whole separate category of character designers culled not from the animation process itself, but rather from sketchbooks, high schools and colleges. The words 'character design' to me have lost their meaning. Anybody can be a character designer today. It's a handicap if you can draw really well and you have to dumb-down to stay employed in most places."
