Creator Backlash / Western Animation

• Rob Paulsen has made fun of a few characters he's voiced, particularly Bubsy and Coconut Fred. In the case of the former, he says that the one good thing to come out of it was that he was paid for his work. He's even more embarrassed of the latter, pointing out its similarities to SpongeBob in an interview. He also dislikes The Snorks, because he is one of the many people who thought it was an underwater rip-off of The Smurfs. He has also said Space Cats was an awful cartoon, but he enjoyed working with his friends Townsend Coleman and Pat Fraley on it.
• Dan Harmon has said that "Vindicators 3: The Return of World Ender" is the worst episode of Rick and Morty that the crew has ever made. He's never elaborated as to why, but some fans assume it's because the story fails to adhere to the "Story Circle" plot structure (a variation of the traditional The Hero's Journey) that he teaches and uses in all his writing.
• According to John Canemaker's Felix the Cat history book Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World's Most Famous Cat, Otto Messmer said he regretted recommending Burt Gillett to direct the Van Beuren Studios Felix the Cat cartoons in his stead—while Burt had worked on the original Felix cartoons, Otto felt his time in Hollywood working for Disney (having directed hit films like The Three Little Pigs) had gone to his head by the time he directed the cartoons, and also because he felt Gillett poorly utilized the character, turning Felix into a meek shadow of his former self and overshadowing the cat with his own cast of characters. It didn't help that when Otto tried to get work on the Van Beuren Felix cartoons (having initially passed on the offer), Burt refused to hire him because he considered his style "out of step" with his newer, slicker cartoons.
  "Felix was just a little figure in the background, instead of being the center figure. He [Burt Gillett] tried to push his own characters in there. Gillett tried to push himself, rather than the cat."
  • The second season of The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat, which tried to retool the show into being more like the Joe Oriolo era Felix the Cat cartoons instead of the surreal black and white Felix cartoons, was considered a disaster by the staff who worked on it (not helping that it was a total flop in ratings and got the show canned just 8 episodes into the season). Even during production, most of the staff absolutely hated the retool (mainly because they despised the Oriolo era Felix and had heavily pushed to use the tone of the classic Felix cartoons in the first season) and episodes were made in retaliation for it, such as "Attack of the Robot Rat", which parodies the Joe Oriolo Felix formula, and "Phoney Felix", a subtle parody of the second season's retool.
• Chuck Jones grew to hate almost all of his pre-1948 cartoons (barring his more experimental works at the time, like The Dover Boys) so much that he said if he had the choice, he would have burned the negatives to all of them. In particular, he singled out Elmer's Candid Camera as his least favorite.
  • In the book Chuck Jones Conversations. Chuck also expressed a strong dislike of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a film that he worked on, citing the main lead as an obnoxious, unlikable character (exasperated that the human leads were more sympathetic than the cartoon), and was critical of Robert Zemeckis for robbing Richard Williams of any real creative input on the film, and also for meddling with the piano duel that Jones and Williams had storyboarded.
  • Also both he and Bob Clampett grew to hate the cartoon The Daffy Doc, not because they thought it was a bad cartoon, but because it used an iron lung as a gag prop during a time when polio deaths were on the rise, which they viewed as incredibly tasteless in retrospect.
• Many Warner Bros. animators grew to dislike much of their early work, especially the sappy Disney-like cartoons and Buddy cartoons they made from the mid-to-late 1930s. Their dislike of Buddy in particular would inspire a later generation of WB animators to make an Animaniacs episode that revolved around it.
  • Additionally several WB staff such as Frank Tashlin expressed dislike for Porky Pig, due to having less flexibility and humor value compared to zanier characters such as Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. According to animator Mike Fontanelli, this resentment still stands with many modern executives at Warner Bros. and is partly why the character is so sparsely used in revival features or merchandise (and not because the Moral Guardians think Porky's stuttering is offensive to those with speech impediments). When he shows up at all, he tends to be given the Butt-Monkey treatment by those around him. Even his own creator, Friz Freleng, made fun of how much more boring he was to utilise:
  Freleng: Nobody liked working with Porky Pig much because he was sort of a square.
  • Some Warner staff, such as Friz Freleng, hated using Elmer Fudd, believing he was such an incompetent adversary for Bugs Bunny that it became difficult not to cast the latter more as a bully than a Karmic Trickster. Freleng created more abrasive foes like Yosemite Sam so he could deal with the rivalry less (though he still used Elmer in other non-Bugs roles). Some sources also claim Freleng disliked Speedy Gonzales.
  Freleng: Elmer was just too dumb. He was naïve and childish and Bugs outwitted him. It didn't take much brains to outwit Elmer. Sometimes you felt sorry for Elmer. He'd break down and cry. But that's why I didn't quite feel that Elmer filled the bill. He wasn't really a villain. He was a pitiful character. He had a duty to perform as a hunter. He had to go shoot a rabbit. But there wasn't a mean streak. He didn't really like to shoot the rabbit. You wondered why you didn't hate Bugs for doing what he did to him. It took a little more sharpness to outsmart Yosemite Sam than a chicken-brained Elmer Fudd.
  • Also of note is the little-known Looney Tunes director Norm McCabe; according to historian and animator Mark Kausler, in his later years, Norm was extremely modest about his time directing Looney Tunes shorts, dismissing them all as terrible—when a screening was held as ASIFA for his shorts along with him, it was painful for him to watch his own cartoons. Sort of justified, as most of McCabe's works are World War II cartoons and contain a lot of offensive caricatures of the Japanese (Tokio Jokio is often used as the prime example of this).
  • Bob Bergen, the current voice of Porky Pig, admitted on the Toonzone Forums (now the Anime Superhero Forums) that he does NOT think highly of the Larry Doyle-produced shorts made in the 2000s and that he had an awful time working on them before being fired and replaced with Billy West as the voices of Porky and Tweety. For one thing, the shorts originally had a LOT of adult humor that didn't belong in a Looney Tune - he specifically mentioned a lot of jokes about sex and bodily functions. While Bob is aware that the original Looney Tunes shorts were never intended to be exclusively for kids, as he pointed out they were CLASSY, not crude. Thus, he let Larry know that he wasn't comfortable with the adult humor, but it didn't do any good (ironically, the higher-ups at Warner Bros. took out all the adult humor in the shorts after Larry was fired). As if that wasn't enough, Larry wanted Bob to change the way he played Porky - he slowed down a bunch of old Porky shorts to how Mel sounded before they sped him up, then told Bob to "do" Mel, then they would speed him up to the same percentage. Despite the fact that Bob does Porky fine naturally and has done it that way for years. In addition, as Bob pointed out his voice is much higher than Mel's was - and the microphones used in those days were much different than the ones they were using on these shorts... and on top of that, Larry slowed down those original Porky shorts too much. When Bob attempted to do Porky the way Larry wanted and was sped-up, the result sounded like a stuttering Alvin the Chipmunk. Bob finally decided to call up his agent and quit the project - a very difficult decision for him, as he's wanted to voice Porky since he was a kid, but if this was the direction that they were going to take the characters in he wanted no part in it. However, when he told his agent that he wanted off the project, his agent informed him that he'd actually just been fired. Fortunately, it didn't take long for him to get the role of Porky back, just not in the shorts.
  • Strangely, Tex Avery wasn't fond of A Wild Hare upon rewatching it in the 1970s, despite fan consensus being that it still holds up to this day. He stated he didn't understand why the short was so popular or why audiences found the cartoon so hilarious. Even saying that he didn't find a single moment of the cartoon funny, and that the pacing is quite slow and boring.
  • Robert McKimson hated the cartoons he directed in the mid-to-late 1960s due to the massive amount of Executive Meddling (which forced the retirement of Bugs Bunny and Foghorn Leghorn), the new characters created by Alex Lovy, the Limited Animation, and complete lack of a budget.
  • According to one of his daughters, Friz Freleng grew to hate Rhapsody Rabbit, mostly due to the controversy it caused as a result of its striking similarities to a Tom and Jerry cartoon called The Cat Concerto, and the fact that it was the only thing about the short that fans would bring up for years. However, he eventually warmed up to the short, to the point that in a 1990 interview for Bugs Bunny's 50th anniversary, he cited it as one of his favourites.
• Chuck Jones also had a mixed opinion of his contribution to the Tom and Jerry series, claiming he didn't quite fully understand the characters' dynamic and would have likely done many things different if given another chance. On the other hand, Chuck Jones' work on the Tom and Jerry cartoons can be seen as practice for when he created the TV adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, which, unlike his take on the Tom and Jerry cartoons, is well-liked and well-remembered to this day.
  • Gene Deitch was also not fond of his work Tom and Jerry, feeling as if he didn't get the shorts' gag-driven nature.
• Shamus Culhane disliked his sole Popeye cartoon "Popeye Meets William Tell"; in his autobiography, he likened the final product to "putting a bow on a wild boar"—apparently his attempt to bring the polished, disciplined approach of Disney animation into the more comical east coast style of animation Popeye used just didn't mix well, resulting in a very uneven, bizarre short, and this was quite frustrating to him. It may have also been because he never wanted to make a regular Popeye cartoon in the first place, instead wanting to make a short centered around Wimpy, which was vetoed by the Fleischers.
  • Shamus also wasn't proud of his work in the early Fleischer Studios Talkartoons shorts, which he considered primitive compared to his later work.
  • Culhane was also not proud of how his animation on Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels was ruined by sloppy inkers and bad in-between work, and that he would have quit if it wasn't for his contract. He also expressed disappointment in how Mr. Bug Goes to Town turned out, believing the film didn't live up to its full potential.
  • Culhane also despised working on the Hearst Krazy Kat cartoons he did inking work on. In his biography "Talking Animals and Other People", he likened the screening of their first sound cartoon ("Ratskin", 1929) with the character as being akin to a tornado in a boiler factory. "It was sheer cacophony." The staff gave no reaction to the film, save Culhane himself, who spited it with a sarcastic laugh (which got him left behind when the studio moved elsewhere). In the book "Enchanted Drawings", Culhane's once again gave his humble thoughts on the shorts;
  "The films were atrocious, the worst crap you can imagine. They never used the characters. Offisa Pup rarely appeared, Ignatz Mouse was not in love with Krazy ^note  This is a mistake on Culhane's part, as it was the other way around in the comics ; they never used the desert landscapes. The staff just batted the stuff out as fast as they could for something like 750$ apiece."
  • During Culhane's brief stint at Warner Bros., while he enjoyed working with Chuck Jones, he took issue with how Leon Schlesinger ran the studio, as he recounted in "Talking Animals and Other People". He came to the studio to direct some navy-themed cartoons, and while he thought he had a good deal at first (noting that Schlesinger's hands-off approach sounded better than having Max Fleischer "breathing down [his] neck"), he quickly formed the opinion that Schlesinger was lazy. The last straw was when Schlesinger promised Culhane he would be directing as soon as he signed the contracts for some navy films, only for him to deny that he ever promised a directing position to Culhane once he actually did.
• Max Fleischer considered Mr. Bug Goes to Town to be a failure, and refused to acknowledge the film as one of his achievements in a 1950s interview—although it may have been because it was the film that contributed to destroying Fleischer Studios and getting him booted out; the fact that he and David Fleischer had a terrible falling out while they were making the film probably didn't help matters either.
  • He also hated the Made-For-TV Out of the Inkwell cartoons, and was horrified when he first watched them.
• Scooby-Doo:
  • Strange as it sounds, some sources claim that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera hated the franchise, and only kept the show running because of how insanely popular (and profitable) it was.
  • Tom Ruegger, the showrunner of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, once said that he could not stand Flim-Flam, claiming that working with the character actually made him appreciate Scrappy-Doo.
  • Irene Jimenez, the Latin American long-time voice actress for Velma, is on record for disliking the way the character was portrayed in Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated.
  • While Frank Welker speaks fondly of the writing for Be Cool, Scooby-Doo!, he said he didn't care much for the character designs in the series, feeling it was too similar to Family Guy and Spongebob Squarepants rather than Scooby-Doo, a sentiment shared by critics of the art style of the show.
    • Downplayed with head writer Jon Colton Barry, but while he liked the show's version of Velma, he does wish she had more to do.
  • Nicole Jaffe, the original voice of Velma, admits she only did the show because she needed the money, that she did not enjoy voiceover (finding voice actors at the time to be "weird" people), and was losing interest in acting in general. She retired to pursue her (very successful) career of being a talent agent, and forgot about Scooby-Doo until singer Lauryn Hill told her how much she admired Velma. Afterwards, Jaffe began to appreciate her involvement in the series a bit more. She later came out of retirement to voice the character in 2002 for an additional two features, but says she does not think her performance was nearly as good as it had been 30+ years earlier, and is glad she does not have to voice the character anymore. However, she says she is open to appearing at fan conventions to sign autographs if invited.
• As seen here, Donald Duck's voice actor, Tony Anselmo, had some issues with the first season of DuckTales (2017) due to the writers apparently making it harder to understand Donald due to being forced to read the script as is and having recordings sped up 20% that season (though he did warm up to the show later on and does consider seasons 2-3 an improvement). Meanwhile, Launchpad McQuack's previous voice actor (Terry McGovern) dislikes the show for overall "not feeling like a Disney cartoon", hates how the lack of Voices in One Room prevents the cast from properly embracing their roles, and holds a slight grudge for never being asked to reprise the role.
• Hugh Harman of the Harman and Ising duo claimed late in his life that he grew to hate all but three of the shorts he made—"The Old Mill Pond", "Blue Danube", and "Peace on Earth". And even then, Hugh admitted that he wasn't completely satisfied with how Peace On Earth turned out, and felt that the film needed to be far longer than it was.
  "Peace on Earth was a tough one to animate and to write. We shouldn't actually have made that as a one-reeler, we should have made it in about three to five reels. We cut it and cut it and cut it; we didn't cut footage that was animated—nobody in his right mind does that, unless it's bad. But cutting the storyboard and switching around. It has some flaws. I just got tired of it near the end. That's always been a weakness with me, that I get so fed up on it at the end of a picture that I would just as soon turn it over to the Girl Scouts to make. Unless it were a feature that would warrant going on with costs forever. I've observed that as a weakness in myself, that I often end up with a weak, insubstantial ending for a picture."
• Former Rugrats co-creator Paul Germain has mixed feelings for The Rugrats Movie. At the time of the movie's release, Germain had left Klasky-Csupo to work on Disney's Recess. While Germain doesn't exactly hate or disown the film, he still has a few problems with it: thinking that some moments, such as Stu giving the watch to Tommy, didn't work, as the babies and adults weren't supposed to communicate, and that he was upset that now Dil was introduced at the beginning, as Tommy is supposed to be the youngest (one of his proposed ideas for the movie back in the early `90s, when 20th Century Fox made a deal to distribute Nicktoon-based movies (a deal that did not go anywhere) was for Tommy to get a younger sibling at the very end).
  • On the other hand, Germain is not very fond at all of the spin-off series All Grown Up! because he thought the idea a spin-off where the babies being in their grown-up years made no sense as the original series was about seeing the world from a baby's perspective.
• Despite the acclaim and legacy of Batman: The Animated Series, there were several episodes that were either promising misfires, or outright duds, and were regarded as such by the show's team. They gave their thoughts on several of these episodes in an issue of Animato Magazine;
  • "I've Got Batman In My Basement," which named the relevant trope, is regarded by the production team as one of the worst episodes in the series.
    "I think that if we hadn't gotten Alan Burnett to come over, we would have had a lot more shows like this one," noted director Frank Paur of the producer who stepped in to take control of the show's script process first season. Paur also disliked arming Batman with a screwdriver, but had his hands full wrestling with an as yet unsatisfying storyboard crew. "I had to get rid of most of these boards and start from scratch," he said. "It was very time-consuming. Our schedule was so tight, that small things got by." Noted producer Bruce Timm, "I can't even watch that show. It's the epitome of what we don't want to do with Batman. Strangely enough kids like it. The script came in and it was terrible. Normally, I tell the director to do what he can to make it interesting, and nobody could figure out a way to make it interesting. The storyboard artists didn't care, and it shows."
  • While the episode was based on a good story from the comics and having decent animation, "The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy" was considered a misfire, namely for its lackluster gimmick villain, and Batman having no real motive to play mind games with him.
    "I tried to kill this show, but they didn't let me," said director Frank Paur. "We had a lot of storyboard artists who wanted to rebel on this one. The best metaphor is kicking a dead horse. It arrived dead and no matter how hard you kick it, it ain't going to give you a ride."
  • "The Underdwellers" was likewise considered a dud, namely for censorship problems, bad story elements and very Off-Model animation.
    "It was my first episode as director, and there are still things in it that I cringe at," said director Frank Paur. "Usually when we get an episode, we get to use a lot of discretion and change things. I wish I had been able to spend more time on that script. Another problem at the time, was that we had storyboard people who made things difficult. I found myself going back two or three times to fix scenes. They didn't quite understand we were shooting for a higher standard. So there was always a constant drain on my time. That whole opening sequence of the kids playing chicken with the train should have been cut. That was what we had to contend with at the beginning of the season. We had these little public service announcements worked into the scripts, a concept we nixed real quick." "It's Junio's weakest episode," said producer Bruce Timm. "We almost didn't use them after that. It was the first one that came back that really looked totally unlike our show. It was very Japanese. But I'm glad we did use them again, they've done great work. BS&P took a lot out of this show. Originally, the kids were to be victimized by the Sewer-King, but he was not allowed to be mean or tortorous to any of them. The impact is watered down. If we were doing it today, we probably would have decided not to do the show."
  • "Lock-Up" was also considered a failure, due to its awful script, blatant plot holes and bloopers (Batman changing into his costume out in the open, not letting us figure out how he escaped), and slow, aimless scenes.
  • "Prophecy of Doom" was already considered a very average episode, but its criticism was mainly singled out for its terrible animation by AKOM.
    "If that whole end sequence with the spinning worlds in the observatory had gone to Junio or any other studio, it might have come off, but it went to AKOM," said Bruce Timm. "They just weren't able to pull off that level of animation." "That broke my heart," said director Frank Paur. "I designed those planets using a circle template. How hard is it to animate circles? It was done by hand, and if we had done it now, it would have been done on computer and would have looked spectacular. When I knew the show was going to AKOM, a studio I'd had a long history with, I knew they weren't going to be able to pull it off. Admittedly, it was a tough sequence, but they should have been able to do it."
  • While not considered a "bad" episode, Bruce Timm was not satisfied with the episode "What Is Reality?", although he ironically complimented AKOM's work on it.
    "Virtual reality is too science fictiony for our show. While it may be conceivable that it will work in four or five years, Batman transforming himself into a black knight and flying around on a chessboard is unfathomable to me. Strangely enough, it's one of AKOM's better shows. They pulled off all the special effects really well."
  • "The Mechanic" was also considered dissatisfying, save for some nice action and some of AKOM'S better animation.
    "This was one of those stories in development hell for a long time," said producer Bruce Timm. "We needed scripts. I think it's a stinker, but it has some of AKOM's better animation in it." Noted director Kevin Altieri, "It was the first show that AKOM laid out itself. It's not as good as their 'The Last Laugh,' but had far fewer retakes (almost 80% of 'The Last Laugh' needed retakes.) I think they were threatened that they might lose the work, so they put their A-Team on it. It actually is a script that is similar to the '60s series, but when you do something like this comedy, you must remember that even thought the script may be goofy, you have to show that the characters are living it. When Earl drops the tires on Penguin's henchmen, he thinks Batman's dead and he's crying."
  • "Nothing to Fear", despite having some of the series best moments and nice animation work by Dong Yang (whose only glitch was straightening the Scarecrow's crooked posture), was considered to have bad pacing, a cliche way of beating Scarecrow, and an all around mediocre script.
    "It was written by Henry Gilroy, who had never written cartoons before," said producer Bruce Timm. "He was a film editor here and always wanted to get into writing. At the time we didn't have a story editor, so we gave it a go. When he turned in his first draft, which wasn't bad, we had hired our first story editor, Sean Derek. We immediately came to loggerheads over this show. Some of the dialogue she changed wasn't changed for the better."
  • "The Forgotten" was another misfire, mainly for being a message show put forth by the original story editors.
    "I didn't want to do this show from the very beginning," said producer Bruce Timm. "Sean Derek was big on doing shows with social messages. And my big problem with message shows, is that you can't solve the world's problems in a half hour cartoon. If you raise the issue of homelessness, what can you do? It makes the episode look very exploitive, because you're just using the problem as an exotic background. You can't discuss the problem on any meaningful level in a 22-minute action cartoon. So I put in the dream sequence with Bruce in the barracks where these multitudes of people are looking to Bruce for a handout, and he doesn't have enough money for them all, and they're surrounding him and suffocating him. It's not enough for him to put a band-aid on the problem at the end, by offering the two guys a job. It just doesn't work." BS&P undercut the script's essential message, as director Boyd Kirkland explained: "There was a sequence at the beginning where Batman is wandering around the city, trying to find out why people were disappearing. It was staged with homeless people hanging around on sidewalks: families, mothers and kids. They made us take all that out of the boards. They said it was too much for kids to see that maybe a woman or a family can be out on the streets. They specifically asked that we only show men as homeless."
  • "The Cat and the Claw: Part 2" was considered a dud, namely for its many plot holes, a lame villain and downright abysmal animation by AKOM.
    "The whole end sequence was geared around the explosions, and they were some of the worst you'll ever see," said producer Bruce Timm. "We retook all of them two or three times. They were still awful, but we ran out of time and had to air them."
  • Bruce Timm really came to regret The Joker's redesign in the New Batman Adventures revamp; it looked good in concept, but he felt it was followed on too literally, and it robbed the Joker of a lot of his fearsome personality.
  • Bruce Timm has stated that he considers "The Terrible Trio" to be not just the worst episode of Batman: The Animated Series, but the worst episode of the DC Animated Universe in general.
• Ian Pearson and Gavin Blair of ReBoot fame were once famous for the computer animation in the Dire Straits Money For Nothing music video. They were proud of their work... at the time, but they despised that they had the suffix title of "Those guys who did Money for Nothing." They showed their feelings in an episode of ReBoot, where two look-alikes for the CGI movers from the video audition at Enzo's birthday party, only to get sandbags dropped on them from high offstage.
• Donald F. Glut was one of the few members of The Transformers staff who openly expressed distaste for the series, lambasting its quality as actual art (including the episodes he wrote) and claiming that he only worked on it for the money.
• Several staffers at Filmation have not had kind things to say about the company or its shows. John Kricfalusi described how lousy it was working there;
  "Ironically, my first job at an "entertainment studio" came a decade and a half later at the dreaded Filmation. They hadn't changed their style or approach in all that time. They believed in boredom. They went on throughout their 30 or so year life span barely changing their monotonous bland ways. Working there, I finally saw why and how. You literally were not allowed to draw anything unless you were in the model department. In layout, animation and assistant animation you had to trace the model sheets. Or xerox them off the model sheets. Each character had maybe 3 pre-designed poses and if the show went on for 10 years, you'd have 130 half hours of the same 3 drawings of each character."
  • Disney Animator Will Finn likewise described his tenure at Filmation as a sour experience.
    My first week on He-Man, the cleanup crew were given model sheets of Ram Man where the designer had drawn his thumbs on the wrong side of his hands. In his "full front" pose and side pose, the thumbs were right, but in the rear pose, they were drawn incorrectly, it was an obvious mistake. When we pointed this out to the clean up supervisor, she went ashen and told us we had to follow it anyway, until the proper protocol had been addressed to look into the problem. Whenever he turned his back, we had to have Ram Man's thumbs inbetween around to the wrong side of his hand to be perfectly "on model." I swear to God I am not making this up. It took a couple of weeks, but we were eventually given new "corrected models" and the crew went into overtime to re-do all the incorrect clean up we had been doing in the interim. If Kafka had ever written pure farce, even he could not have topped FILMATION."
  • Even the company's founder, Lou Scheimer has expressed his distaste for a few of the shows his company put out, in particular Uncle Croc's Block. Scheimer also considers his time working as an animator on The Ruff & Reddy Show one of the worst experiences in his career in his autobiography (with a good dose of Hanna-Barbera bashing to boot).
    I had the worst trouble drawing one of the damned bad guys. I can't remember which one it was, but the background guys had to be able to use the drawings, and the animation was so limited that stuff hardly moved. Every time I sent drawings of the damned bad guy through, they would return them to me and say "Not on character, please do over." But it was as close as I could get to on-character. Every morning that fucking thing would come back. So, I went in to see Joe, and I said, "Joe, you know how to draw this character, show me what I'm doing wrong." And he picked it up and looked at it, and he drew it. And I said "Is that correct? If I turn that in, I won't have any problems?" It was Joe who was sending the stuff back to me everyday. And he said, "No, that's perfect." So I took it back to my desk and put all the scene numbers on it. I sent the drawing back in and the son-of-a-bitch sent it back the next day. It said "Do over, not on character." He rejected his own drawing! So I said "Screw this, I gotta get out of here." There was clearly no way I was going to win.
• J. Michael Straczynski expressed a similar opinion for his work on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983).
  • Probably tied to his hatred of Merchandise-Driven work. He came up with "spoo" in the He-Man Spin-Off, She-Ra: Princess of Power. "Spoo Is."
• Trey Parker and Matt Stone don't seem particularly proud of the early seasons of South Park, which had the highest ratings of the show's run and a glut of memorable episodes for those who prefer the older, more Toilet Humor-based episodes to the later episodes which have abandoned toilet humor for social satire. Parker states outright in a 2011 Entertainment Weekly article: "It's just embarrassing to watch".
  • The only season 2 episode that they even seem to remotely like is "Terrance and Phillip in: 'Not Without My Anus'", as they cited it as something "weird and different". Most fans do not agree, however, seeing the episode as pointless filler that interrupted the conclusion of the "Cartman's Mom is a Dirty Slut" two-parter in which Cartman tries to find the identity of his biological father. But it was April Fool's Day when it aired, so it was fitting.
  • Everyone working on "Pip" (except for Matt Stone) hated the episode, none the least of which was Trey Parker himself. Its longer than usual production time and its focus on a character who had been disappearing from the show by that point were two driving factors.
  • They also hated the episode "South Park is Gay!", particularly because of the Crab People portion (They felt ashamed that they could not come up with something better).
  • They weren't happy with the way "A Million Little Fibers" turned out, feeling the two subplots of the episode didn't work together because it was "weirdness on top of weirdness". They have stated if they could go back and redo any episode, it would be this one.
  • The episode "Marjorine" was painful for them to watch, because they felt the three subplots (Butters pretending to be a girl, the boys treating the girl's paper fortune teller as a real scientific device, and Butters's parents believing they had brought Butters back to life a la Pet Sematary) should have been their own episodes, and were wasted as is.
  • They also have a fair amount of disdain for Season 8, claiming they were going through a bout of writer's block due to the grueling schedule they were under while filming Team America: World Police. In particular, "Good Times With Weapons" was deemed a weak episode by them, despite being one of the show's most fondly remembered episodes. ^note That said, Parker and Stone do seem to have since warmed up to the episode, as it was on the 2006 DVD South Park: The Hits and is included in the iTunes collection "Matt and Trey's Top Ten."
  • They regret their portrayal of Gary Condit and the Ramseys in "Butters' Very Own Episode", due to portraying them as guilty until proven innocent.
  • Also, they were not happy about the "201" censorship. Trey even threatened to quit the show afterward.
  • They've also admitted to disliking "Stanley's Cup", admitting that it was strictly a filler episode to get the tenth season finished, and absolutely hated the experience of working on it; it wasn't completed until Trey Parker and Matt Stone were forced to, with Stone comparing the process to childbirth and Parker fearing that the episode's Troubled Production could have gotten the show cancelled. Fortunately for them, a lot of fans seem to agree. However, they have stated that they find the ending hilarious, despite the fandom considering it to be way too cruel even for South Park.
  • Likewise, they've also dismissed "Chef Goes Nanners", admitting that the episode was rushed so they could have some time off on the 4th Of July. They've said that making the South Park flag so blatantly racist caused the debate to fall too heavily on Chef's side and made Jimbo into a Straw Character that no one would realistically sympathize with.
  • The two of them weren't satisfied with how season 20 turned out, feeling that, even if the ending didn't get derailed by Donald Trump's upset election victory, the serialization made the writing too difficult and forced them to take too much focus away from some of the characters.
  • They have come to regret "ManBearPig", having changed their minds about the danger of climate change. A two-part episode would air in 2018 that depicted the ManBearPig, the show's metaphor for climate change, as a real threat instead of a ploy for attention, and had the boys apologize to Al Gore for not taking him seriously. Gore is still made fun of as an egotistical blowhard, but it is stressed that all of the hype he gave ManBearPig as a threat is real.
• The Simpsons
  • "The Principal and the Pauper", which retconned Principal Skinner's past, saying instead he had assumed the life of the "real" Skinner and then brushed these revelations under the rug in a blatant reset button. Both Matt Groening and Skinner voice actor Harry Shearer have publicly criticized the episode. The later "Behind the Laughter" episode referred to this one as "gimmicky" and "nonsensical."
  • "A Star Is Burns", a crossover with The Critic forced upon the show by the network. Groening removed his name from the episode in protest and doesn't appear on the DVD Commentary for the episode. This was because he felt that the episode was just an advertisement for The Critic, and didn't want to seem like he was associated with it. Despite this, the episode is still considered to be a classic.
  • Nobody on the team liked the various Clip Shows, being that they were born out of executive mandate (Fox wanted four clip shows a season, the writers talked them down to one clip show every one or two seasons). During the DVD commentary, their complete distaste for "Another Simpsons Clip Show" is evident to the point that they barely even talk about the episode in favor of instead talking about the production pipeline. Two of them went so far as to be credited under false names.
  • The writing team has also apologised for "Homer vs. Dignity" due to the infamous panda rape scene, which is considered one of the most shameful and tasteless gags in the show's history.
  • Groening also expresses embarrassment for the Tracey Ullman shorts for their crudeness. He and the staff were also so appalled by the original attempt at the pilot of the original series "Some Enchanted Evening" (due to its similar cruder, more abstract animation) that they had it reanimated (the original cut is shown on DVD with commentary from the staff, in which none of them have a single nice thing to say about it between them).
  • An in-universe example: In "Dude, Where's My Ranch?", Homer wrote Flanders a hate song. Said song eventually became an in-universe meme. Its popularity rose to the point where even Homer himself had enough.
  • Hank Azaria says he hated how the episode "No Good Read Goes Unpunished" dismissively shrugged away the criticisms raised by the documentary The Problem With Apu about how Indian-American and South Asian-American characters such as Apu from The Simpsons are stereotyped in pop culture.
  • Despite being one of the most popular episodes of the series among fans, most of the cast hated "Marge vs. the Monorail." Yeardley Smith in particular described the episode as "truly one of our worst."
  • In the DVD Commentary for the "Treehouse of Horror X" segment "Life's A Glitch, And Then You Die", the writers express regret over including Spike Lee and Al Sharpton among the doomed celebrities in a rocket ship headed towards the Sun. They also said that someone they would have preferred to be on that ship was George Steinbrenner.
  • Harry Shearer was vocally critical of the show's decision to recast all non-white characters with people of color, noting that a major point of acting is being able to play characters outside the actor's natural range.
  I have a very simple belief about acting. The job of the actor is to play someone who they are not.
  • The staff came to regret casting Michael Jackson on "Stark Raving Dad" when child sex abuse allegations against him were first brought to light in 1993. It got to a point where Bart made a quip about Jackson being a lie parents make to scare kids in the 1995 episode "Bart Sells His Soul". Not until the controversial 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland did they go to great lengths to get "Stark Raving Dad" pulled completely.^note Well, almost completely, as the episode still occasionally airs on FXX in syndication and is available on Google Play.
• Speaking of The Critic, Jay Sherman has an in-universe outburst about a film he wrote, Ghostchasers III, begging the Crips and Bloods to stop killing each other and go kill network executives.
  • A more direct example would be the webisodes. Mike Reiss wasn't thrilled with how they turned out. He and Al Jean had to work on them from 10 PM to midnight every day, after already working a full work day, so they were exhausted. And the ability for the show to quickly parody movies that were just released in theaters was rendered null by the various animation studios taking too long to produce them. And when they did go up, they were released with little fanfare.
• Chris Sonnenburg has shown his displeasure over Tangled's Varian despite his popularity amongst many fans. It all came to a head in a Discord server where he implemented a 'no Varian talk' rule and when a fan stated that Rapunzul should have the main focus, his reply was You…the REAL fans…are who this show is for.” Part of his dislike of the character may have been due to him supplanting his favorite character Cassandra.
• Disney director Wilfred Jackson was so ashamed of his first directorial effort, a Mickey Mouse short called "The Castaway", that he vowed never to make a film that didn't feel like a Disney picture again.
  • Walt Disney (the man) hated the 1935 Silly Symphonies short "The Golden Touch". After he finished it, he never directed a short again. According to Jack Kinney's autobiography, he allegedly blasted an animator over a mistake and the animator, intending to take his boss down a peg, shot back that he was the one who directed The Golden Touch. An enraged Walt stormed out — but came back later and angrily warned him to never, ever mention the cartoon again.
  • Walt also had some dislike of Goofy, as mentioned in Neal Gabler's biography on Walt. According to Gabler, Walt "threaten[ed] constantly to terminate [the Goofy series of shorts] before relenting, largely to provide work for his animators." The dislike most likely stemmed from a bitter falling out that Walt had with Goofy's voice actor Pinto Colvig in the late 1930s. After Disney and Colvig reconciled in the early 1950s, there was evidence that Walt had warmed up to the character, even dedicating an episode to him on the Wonderful World of Color television show. It should be noted, however, that Gabler's book cites no source for the claim of Walt hating Goofy. Some of his alleged hatred of Goofy may have also stemmed from his dislike of the character's primary animator, Art Babbitt, who had instigated the infamous 1941 Disney animators' strike and thus made enemies with his boss for life.
  • Jack Kinney disliked the retool of Goofy in 1950s cartoons due to Walt Disney trying to give more personality to Goofy into The Everyman with the gag-based nature of the older "How-To" cartoons giving way to Slice of Life scenarios.
  • There is also an unsubstantiated rumor that Walt hated Donald Duck; however, according to "Of Mice And Magic", many of the staff such as director Jack Hannah really did hate working on Donald Duck shorts.
• The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack creator Thurop Van Orman HATED a handful of episodes from the second season. You can instantly tell which ones these were thanks to the presence of a Laugh Track, along with a "drawn in front of a live audience" gag.
  • Whilst many of the crewmembers on Flapjack such as Patrick McHale and Pendleton Ward have spoken fondly about their time on the series, others like Alex Hirsch and Ghostshrimp have been more openly critical; the former felt that the show's Depending on the Writer approach to storytelling and Off-Model animation made it unfocused and distracting, whilst the latter - a freelancer who was unfamiliar with the studio environment - found the work ethic in some of the staffmembers to be sloppy and unprofessional, and a poor reception to one of his pitches led to him being axed from the show.
• The Bananaman cartoon series was hated by virtually every cast member that starred in it, as well as Steve Bright, who wrote the Bananaman comic strip. To a lesser extent, this also applies to the strip's original artist, John Geering, who liked the series overall but wasn't fond of how his characters had been redesigned.
• Tex Avery MGM Cartoons: Tex Avery expressed a dislike for his character Screwy Squirrel, even going so far as to kill him off for real at the end of Screwy's fifth and final short. In a BBC documentary, Mark Kausler once told Avery he sent him letters with drawings of Screwy Squirrel on them in the hope that his hero would be more prone to open and read them. As it turned out, Avery simply threw each letter with Screwy's face on it in the trash can!
  • This was implied to be his desire to move on from his "screwball" work he did with Warner Bros. Justified given his bitter falling out with Schlesinger over The Heckling Hare.
• An in-universe example from Rocko's Modern Life: Rachel Bighead (then Ralph) creates Wacky Deli for the sole purpose of being released from her contract in order to become a real artist. It doesn't work.
• John Kricfalusi of Ren & Stimpy fame has warned his fans not to study his cartoons from the original series. He summed it up saying "For one thing that we did right, there was a million mistakes". However, when using examples of a well-constructed story and good dialogue, he uses the cartoon "Stimpy's Invention" quite a lot. In general, John is actually pretty critical of the original show, to where he claimed once that he can't really enjoy watching his own cartoons, because all he can see are the mistakes he made on them. He also felt the original show in its initial seasons (sans the Carbunkle episodes) were very inconsistent from a drawing and animation perspective, and had many bad drawings in them (hence why he discourages his students from studying them). Some episodes he singled out for criticism include;
  • "Nurse Stimpy" was an episode that turned out so bad, that John flat out disowned it and refused to put his name on it (crediting himself as "Raymond Spum" instead)—mainly for the cuts Nickelodeon wanted (who axed a good chunk of footage out of the cartoon) and many artistic failings; "The timing was bad. The drawings are bad. The colors are bad. From an artistic standpoint, to me, it's a really ugly cartoon."
  • "The Littlest Giant", mainly for its very slow pacing and sparse gags. He derogatorily nicknamed it "The Littlest Jokes".
  • "Marooned"; he felt that the premise had merit, but was undermined by the episode's horrible timing (which was freelanced to another company) and some artistic mistakes that came from having to rush aspects of the episode.
    John K:"Marooned had great ideas, but the execution fell short; the timing was horrible. We freelanced the timing on that one and it was just way too slow...We just rushed through it, and so you see a lot of really bad mistakes. You see the aliens at the end, the giant brain guys. They're on overlays, but we were rushing through it so fast that you can see the tear lines around them—they're on cut-out pieces of paper glued to cels. It looks awful."
  • He also considered the episode "Black Hole" a failure for several reasons;
    John K:"Its a complete failure. In every aspect it's bad; it's drawn bad, there's no direction to it at all, the timing's bad. It's a winner by default; somehow the premise managed to get through, even though the specific story points don't illustrate the premise very well. It was lucky."
    • Later on, he singled out the cartoon for criticism again, but this time for its poor structure;
      John K:"I produced a cartoon that really suffered from poor structure: Black Hole. The premise of the story was simple. Ren and Stimpy get sucked through a black hole into another dimension where the physical laws are different than ours. Thus, they begin to mutate into weirder and weirder forms. Or...they should have. Instead they morph randomly and not in a building progression. The funniest morphs are early on, and then later they are less weird, so I considered that cartoon quite a failure. I've made other crap too, but my goal is always to have good solid structure and momentum."
  • "Monkey See, Monkey Don't". While the episode wasn't directed by him, he singled out this particular episode as "the worst Ren and Stimpy cartoon ever made." (of the first two seasons)
  • While he liked how "A Visit to Anthony" turned out, he was dissatisfied at how undirected the acting of Anthony's dad turned out, and he felt the sound effects and music (added by Games) were "clumsy and inappropriate".
    "I directed the recordings of all the characters EXCEPT my Dad, ironically and was very disappointed when I heard it. It sounded like the actor didn't know the story and was reading it for the first time, so he didn't give it the meaning that the drawings conveyed. It was a professional live-action actor and I think whoever directed him was afraid to actually give him any direction. And also didn't know my Dad." "I think the animation was done at Rough Draft and it was amazing. The fireplace scene was especially impressive with all the cool effects. The sound effects and music was clumsy and inappropriate as per usual in the Games episodes. That's something they just never got, even though I sent them a long treatise on how to make the sound match the moods of the story."
  • John stated in a web chat that he felt the early Games episodes had good art, background and story ideas, but were ultimately mangled by lousy direction. In the DVD Commentary for "Stimpy's Cartoon Show", he criticized some aspects of how the final cartoon was handled, namely for muddling its "Artist Vs. Non-Artist" message by changing Ren from executive to producer—while he did submit it in the cartoon as that in an attempt to avoid executive scrutiny, he felt Games used it as a chance to turn the cartoon into an attack on him instead of meddling executives (although he was ok with that), and that there were weird expressions that didn't really work in context. He also criticized the Games episodes for their mean spiritedness and ruining the chemistry between the two leads.
    "Elinor Blake and I wrote Stimpy's Cartoon Show and I had planned for that to be an epic, but the direction was pretty bungled. I explain it all on the commentary. The first Games DVD is coming out soon. I'd say it's definitely worth getting. Lots of good artwork, great backgrounds and some good stories-alas, no discernible direction."
  • He didn't hate the episode 'Fire Dogs II', but he felt it suffering from very poor timing.
    "Incidentally, this cartoon suffers from some piss-poor timing, because we had just started the new episodes and were trying out a new system of shooting storyboards and timing them to music. A lot of the gags would play better if I could go back and cut them tighter. I apologize in advance! (Just run it in fast forward!)"
  • Billy West does not like talking about working on the show and refuses to work with John Kricfalusi ever again, citing having a bad experience with him on and off it. In particular, Kricfalusi demanded West quit the show alongside him in order to force the network to hire him back, even though West needed the job and could have been blacklisted alongside Kricfalusi had he done it and failed; West just saw the show as a job anyway, and didn't feel any obligation to be loyal to Kricfalusi. He also referred to Adult Party Cartoon as "an advertisement for NAMBLA", as well as "one long gay joke that wasn't funny to start with." He refused to reprise his role as Stimpy for the series, not only because he assumed the failure would damage his career if he did, but because he was still mad at Kricfalusi for abusing him during the run of the original show, then launching a smear campaign against him and everyone else when he got fired. Not helping that he was nearly bribed into reprising Stimpy under the promise of not having to work directly with John, for a meager $45 an episode.
  • Bob Camp enjoyed working on the show, but has bad memories of working with Kricfalusi and executive demands, and wasn't satisfied with a lot of his directed episodes during the Games Animation seasons. He also hates the Adult Party Cartoon revival for its shock humor and how it temporarily torpedoed any chance of the series getting any future revival, namely his own attempt at pitching a Ren and Stimpy movie in the mid-2010s.
  • Animator/character designer Robertryan Cory, best known for his work on Spongebob Squarepants and Gravity Falls, worked for Kricfalusi on Adult Party Cartoon, stating it was a dream of his come true having wanted to work on Ren and Stimpy since he was a kid, but he said Kricfalusi was very demanding of him and didn't treat him very well.
  • On a non-Ren and Stimpy note, He is equally critical of his work on Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures. He talks about it on this blog post.
    • He detested his work with Heathcliff & the Catillac Cats, which he deemed "mediocre." Other people who worked on that series, including Chuck Lorre, Scott Shaw and Eddie Fitzgerald, share his sentiments despite the cartoon being fondly remembered among those who grew up watching it.
    • He described working at DiC Entertainment as a bad experience (especially since they butchered and then abruptly cancelled his attempted Beany and Cecil revival there), and that the studio was even worse to work for than Filmation.
  • The Ripping Friends is apparently very hard for him to watch because of all the Executive Meddling.
  • William Wray, who often describes John Kricfalusi as "deeply unhappy" when sharing anecdotes about him, refused to talk about the show for many years because doing so brought up a lot of bad memories of his and Kricfalusi's relationship, especially since Wray allegedly took it upon himself to befriend John and help with his depression to no avail. One less-than-pleasant anecdote involved John trying to teach Wray how to do his job with a painting "lesson" to get Wray to paint backgrounds exactly how he wanted him to (this despite Kricfalusi never having painted in his life). Wray initially refused to be interviewed for Thad Komorowski's book Sick Little Monkeys, and even after coming around was described in the book as "tearful" when recalling the nightmare that was John K.'s firing. When Kricfalusi's 2019 short film Cans Without Labels (which actually plagiarized several of Wray's paintings) was leaked online, Wray's critique on his Facebook page turned into a massive thread of former colleagues and other non-fans more or less confirming every single negative rumor about the man.
  • Artist Stephen De Stefano has very bad memories of working on the show.
  • Outside of the show, and in stark contrast to many of the other Spumco staff who contributed to or tipped their hat to it, Kricfalusi absolutely abhors the unauthorized book of the show's history, Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren and Stimpy Story, as it brought to light many unflattering anecdotes about him. He not only refused to have any part of it, he even took snipes at Komorowski on his blog in the post "Fanboy Admission and Genetics", drawing a disparaging caricature of him as an acne-ridden, angry, troll-nosed puppet with the text and caption taking an incredibly mean-spirited snipe with the caption "Puppet Asperger's" (Thad himself had the doodle colorized and used as his pic for a while). He abhorred the book so much that he would go as far as burning bridges with anyone who dared to support the book — he notably ended his 30-year friendship with animation historian Jerry Beck for posting a glowing review of the book on Cartoon Brew.
  • Jamie Oliff, the director at Lacewood Productions, was not happy with how his studio's episodes turned out, and actually asked John to not send them any more work. He said that the crew members had really bad attitudes and weren't as grateful as they should've been to be working on such a unique cartoon.
  • Character designer Katie Rice has frequently admitted her contempt for Adult Party Cartoon. In addition to dealing with John Kricfalusi as a person, she was given the task of designing and voicing a self-caricature for the sole purpose of getting fondled in "Naked Beach Frenzy." To say nothing of the live-action segment of Kricfalusi talking to her in an uncomfortable way on the DVD intro, which she avoided watching for years (when she finally saw it, she threw the DVD away the next morning).
  • While Richard Pursel still loves "Ren Seeks Help", he has made it clear that he does not like the parts with the brutally abused and suicidal frog, which were added into the episode by Kricfalusi despite Pursel being strongly against it and vocal about it.
• Family Guy:
  • One seems to get this impression watching the third Star Wars special, It's A Trap!. In the opening scene, the entire family groans and an annoyed Peter says "Let's get this over with." followed by the opening scroll that turns into a rant about how the Family Guy crew was considering skipping Return of the Jedi and only acquiesced so Seth MacFarlane could do Ted without Fox complaining. Given that Family Guy does a lot of throwaway lines, it can be hard to tell they really meant it (though admittedly this seemed even more hostile than usual), at least until you listen to their DVD commentaries; turns out they meant every word of it.
  • Episodes of Family Guy use tons of Self-Deprecation gags about the show or other works the creators are responsible for (the Star Wars specials also include several jabs at Seth Green's Robot Chicken).
  • The episode "Fore, Father" is Seth MacFarlane's least favorite episode.
  • Seth MacFarlane dislikes "Turban Cowboy" due to the Boston Marathon bombing, which resulted in someone splicing two unrelated scenes together to make it look like Peter bombed the marathon. MacFarlane (who is mostly apathetic towards the series nowadays) was disgusted by the video.
  • The Cutaway Gag of Quagmire raping Marge Simpson and proceeding to kill the entire family damaged MacFarlane's friendship with Matt Groening, and MacFarlane himself eventually realized that the gag was a bit too extreme.
  • Seth MacFarlane lent his support to the WGA strike in 2007, resulting in the Family Guy production crew finishing three episodes ("Padre de Familia", "Peter's Daughter" and "McStroke") without his approval. He was not happy when he found out.
  • Bob Jaques (yes, that Bob Jaques) directed one episode, and had absolutely nothing nice to say about it when it was brought up on the What a Cartoon! podcast. He compared working on Family Guy to writing an article where you're only allowed to use a limited set of words. Ironically, the episode in question, "Da Boom", is one of the show's most beloved episodes.
• Seth MacFarlane outright admitted that he stopped voicing Tim the Bear after a single season of The Cleveland Show because he felt the character was horrifically unfunny. Incidentally, when Cleveland Show was cancelled and the characters returned to Family Guy, Cleveland's introductory scene was a few straight minutes of other characters lampooning the show.
• Phil Vischer - upon giving an interview regarding the series Jelly Telly - mentioned that he now considers his earlier series, VeggieTales, as something of a failure because it stressed basic morals while largely downplaying the Christian beliefs behind those morals; Vischer says that Jelly Telly was created to rectify this problem. Though in a later podcast Phil posted (which no longer exists), he says that he still likes working with the show, and knows that it's in good hands with Doug TenNapel.
• Thomas & Friends:
  • Though the Awdrys cooperated a lot with early seasons of the show, they voiced some dislike for some of the show's original stories, due to the unrealistic plot points occasionally used (particularly the episode "Henry's Forest"). Wilbert Awdry in particular wrote letters of disgust to series writers David Mitton and Britt Allcroft, accusing them of becoming "big headed" with his work. Christopher Awdry also resented having to write new installments of The Railway Series with Thomas as the main character to tie in with the show's popularity. He wrote "More About Thomas The Tank Engine" solely to give the show more material for episodes, and was rather dissatisfied with it.
  • Neil Ben has commented on The Engine Inspector's review of the episode, "Wonky Whistle", an episode that he wrote and is often considered the worst episode of the series. In his comment, he explained that he was amazed that he got recognized for it, but still finds it a real shame, since the script he wrote looked very different to the final product, and he has done some pretty good things in his career before and since.
    But Mr Engine Inspector, I promise never to use a cheap rhyme,
    to make sure my scripts are all fine,
    when I write in future I'll take my time
    and denounce all responsibility saying "that script's not mine!"
• Lauren Faust has expressed regret for the episode "Feeling Pinkie Keen" of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, over the fact that the moral was incomplete. She has also expressed disapproval of the decision to make Cadance and Twilight into alicorns, citing Uniqueness Decay on the part of Celestia and Luna. She also didn't care for "Magic Duel", a Season 3 episode that was originally written for Season 2. She wanted to do something else for Trixie, even wanting the episode pulled.
  • She has also disowned the Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends episode "Everyone Knows It's Bendy", citing that the title character was an unlikable and unsympathetic Karma Houdini. She hated the episode as much as the fanbase did, and the character was then permanently written out of the series.
  • She has also made tweets expressing disgust for My Little Pony: Equestria Girls's dolls, and an interview with her husband said that she's "not a fan" of Equestria Girls, and apparently that would have made her leave if Hasbro approached her with it.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Storyboard artist Jim Miller saw the fandom's negative reaction to "Princess Spike" and admitted that the show went too far on Spike's treatment. True to his word, later episodes considerably dialed back the "Spikeabuse" and instead focused on his All-Loving Hero aspects and giving him more character development.
  • M.A. Larson indicated in a Q&A panel and (now-deleted) tweets that he wasn't happy with "Fame and Misfortune", as he felt the way it played out was very needlessly mean-spirited for an otherwise lighthearted show and lacked any clear story arc or Aesop in the end. He didn't even like the premise of the episode in the first place and he knew that fans would be furious with how it portrayed the Brony Community. He tried to rewrite it as a Pinkie Pie-focused episode where the harassers had a Jerkass Realization and apologized to her at the end after she called them out, but the higher-ups wouldn't let him do it any other way. He even asked the fans who genuinely did like the episode to not give him any credit or praise for it.
  • Many of the higher-ups felt this way about "The Last Roundup". They folded to Moral Guardians who called Derpy Hooves ableist, not helped by a miscommunication that led to the voice actress believing she is male which led to Vocal Dissonance, and made a swift edit of Derpy Hooves into something less offensive, only to spark flame wars all over the internet. It got to the point where they had to apologize to both sides of the fiasco.
  • John de Lancie originally felt that this would be the way he'd feel about playing Discord, as the reason he did so was for the money. He had actually forgotten about it and it took the massive amount of fan-mail he received (plus a conversation with Tara Strong) to continue reprising the role, which he is now quite appreciative of.
  • "The Mysterious Mare Do-Well" is one of the earliest and most enduring examples of this for the series, having become infamous for its alleged Broken Aesop to the point where the creative team rarely discusses it openly with fans.
• My Little Pony: Equestria Girls:
  • In response to fan complaints to the majority of the villains being Easily Forgiven across both Equestria Girls and the main series, EG series director Ishi Rudell revealed that he is also sick of the trend and would be happy to do otherwise, but it was out of his control^note Whether Rudell meant that the executives or the writers are responsible for that trend is ambiguous.
  • Less the actual work and more so how it was advertised: Although he liked how the Spring Breakdown special turned out, writer Nick Confalone did not like how trailers hyped up the Equestria aspect of the movie, as the focus of the film was the girls coming to terms with being superheroes rather than interdimensional hijinks. He even apologized for anyone who was disappointed.
• Matt Braly of Amphibia acutally hated the lyrical version of the theme song, up to the point where he threw up, according to his Reddit AMA. Fortunately he had his ways and the lyrical version ended up getting replaced by the instrumental version.
  • According to a QNA he did on the Amphibia Reddit page, Matt's also not a fan of the rollout season 1 had, calling it "Yuck".

• Co-creator David X. Cohen has stated that he feels that he "went too far" with the Futurama episode "In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela", in which the last scene consists of Leela trying to force herself onto Zapp.
• Judging by the Credits Gags, the writers of Tiny Toon Adventures didn't care all that much for some of their episodes; to list some of them;
  • "Hare Today, Gone Tomorrow" had "Moral of Story - We Need More Animators", this is episode is considered to have some of the worst animation of the series.
  • "The Wacko World of Sports" had "Moral of Story - Not Every Show Is Perfect"
  • "Career Oppor-Toon-ities" had "Don’t Miss Our Next Show – It’s Actually Entertaining"
  • "Strange Weird Tales of Science" had "Number of Retakes - Don't Ask". In this case, the backlash goes beyond just the gag credit^note which isn't just a joke, by the way; both this episode and the other two episodes animated by Encore Cartoons were held up in production for many retakes due to Encore repeatedly turning in horrendously subpar animation, as the episode features animation so atrocious that the director for two of the shorts featured in the episode took his name off of them. The episode itself even includes a moment where Babs expresses disbelief that the viewers are still watching the episode at the beginning of one of the episode's framing sequences (which Tom Ruegger himself confirmed was thrown in during the episode's frustrating production and "[was] code for: 'we know this episode is pretty wonky'"):
    Babs: "You came back? Hey, Buster! They came back!"
  • "Hog Wild Hamton" had a fake disclaimer reading "The Humor In Today’s Show Does Not Represent Anything That Was Ever Found In Any Way Funny By Anyone Who Ever Lived".
  • "Playtime Toons" had "Congratulations! - You Have Just Wasted A Half Hour Of Your Life!"
  • "Flea For Your Life" had "It Didn’t Work On Paper – It Doesn’t Work On Film"
  • "Grandma's Dead" had "TV Guide Said That Writer, Deanna Oliver Was 'Deliciously Clever' - But That Was Another Episode".
  • "Weekday Afternoon Live" had "We Thought This Would Be Funny – But Noooooooo!"
• Craig Bartlett really detests the infamous Hey Arnold! episode "Arnold Betrays Iggy", which created a tidal wave of fan backlash. It was rumoured that as a result of it, he made the staff issue a public apology for making it. Though he debunked that rumour in an interview, the character Iggy was indeed shelved, not appearing in a speaking role again until the final season, and the episode itself would see infrequent airings (allegedly being barred from airing on television until it was seen again on NickRewind).
• Similar to the examples from Tiny Toon Adventures, after the third "Muscular Beaver" episode of The Angry Beavers the first of the many Credit Gags seems to indicate what the writers thought of said episode:
  "Something stinks! Oh, wait, it's just 'Muscular Beaver 3'"
• In part due to the fans' backlash over the season and their own distaste for having to incorporate more character development instead of the usual brand of off-the-wall humor or violent montages, Stephen Warbrick and Christy Karacas of Superjail! fame have all but disowned season 2 and have grown more vocal about how they disliked that portion of the show. One interview also stopped short of Karacas blaming a writer "John" (likely John J. Miller, who'd written "Lord Stingray Crash Party" and "Hot Chick") for issues with season 2.
  • Tellingly and fittingly with the show's Negative Continuity stance, some revelations in season 2 were later disregarded or overwritten in the following two seasons. In particular, "Jailbot 2.0" had caused very vocal backlash due to confirming Alice as a transgender woman rather than letting fans guess her gender, causing Karacas to regret ever making the reveal. "Special Needs" subtly altered her backstory to suggest she always had a more feminine identity (thus trying to rectify the explanation that she only transitioned to not be seen as gay to her boss), while "The Superjail Six" retconned her and Jared's arrivals at the jail and presented her as a lot more feminine than her present-day nature.
• Andy Thom, who was the art director for Little Einsteins, has admitted his extreme distaste for working on Ultimate Spider-Man (2012).
• The Hobgoblin was a popular villain on both the comics and Spider-Man: The Animated Series—but this is a sentiment not shared by producer John Semper, who absolutely hated the character and thought the Hobgoblin was useless, and only included him because of decisions made by his predecessor as show runner and toys being made based on that decision.
• Derrick J. Wyatt came to dislike his experience working on Ben 10: Omniverse, due to both how the network screwed the show over and the widely divided reception among fans that eclipsed that of previous installments.
  • He also doesn’t seem to tolerate the new reboot very well either, as one of his Ask.fm posts states that he has no plans of checking out the new film, despite ironically using the OV designs of Way Big, the Incurseans, and some aliens of the same species as Walkatrout, and the reboot itself having Billy Billions turn up in several episodes.
• Miraculous Ladybug: Thomas Astruc is generally never happy when promotional materials end up spoiling future reveals, such as Alya, Chloe, and Nino wielding the Fox, Bee, and Turtle Miraculous respectively.
  • He also wasn't happy when a TV network revealed not only the names of season three episodes but also the descriptions. The things that they spoiled included the return of a few villains, characters who had been Akumatized before being turned into new villains, and Chat Noir getting Akumatized into Chat Blanc.
• Jason Marsden admitted in an interview that he thinks Xyber 9: New Dawn is awful and that it was a ripoff of Star Wars.
• Batman Beyond: Max Gibson was hated by the production team. Going by interviews, the only reason they added her to the show was that the higher ups demanded a character girls could identify with.
• Mark Newgarden, one of the original people involved in creating the Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, has voiced his distaste for the unaired (in the US) Garbage Pail Kids Cartoon, which he considers even worse than The Garbage Pail Kids Movie.
• Total Drama:
  • Despite preferring Gwuncan over Duncney, allegedly Drew Nelson (Duncan) wasn't too keen on the way that the former couple came to be in World Tour.
  • Megan Fahlenbock (Gwen) supposedly said that she wasn't proud of Gwen's overall behavior in that season, mainly her handling of the love triangle.
  • Christine Thompson (an employee at Fresh TV in charge of their social media profiles) was greatly against the producers' decision to have Gwen and Courtney's friendship fail once more in All-Stars, in order to keep the drama between them going.
• Gary Chalk didn't like how Optimus Primal was written in Beast Machines, comparing how Primal was there to a cult leader. In fact, every actor not named "David Kaye" hated the Darker and Edgier route the show and characters took from Beast Wars.
• Alex Hirsch has admitted that "Dipper Vs. Manliness" is in fact the weakest episode of Gravity Falls. That said, he is still proud of it overall since it's still had some memorable jokes, and how the message hasn't aged in regards to a heightened awareness of toxic masculinity in the modern social climate.
  • Minor example, but former writer/creative director Michael Rianda said they regret giving some characters like Dipper and Mabel only four fingers based on what looked visually better rather than being consistent, since the author of the journals having six fingers is a plot point.
  • Another minor example; Alex Hirsch regrets the placement of "Roadside Attraction" being the second to last episode before the three-part finale.
  • Years later, Hirsch still remains understandably bitter about Disney's refusal to allow explicit homosexual characters in the show. When they posted an image of Disney characters in front of a Pride flag for 2021's Pride Month, he gave a very vitriolic response where he even advised any other showrunners currently fighting with them over the issue to shove the picture in their faces.
  • Alex also went on a series of angry tweets around the show's ten-year anniversary, revealing several emails he got from the Standards and Practices team about changes he had to make during the show's production, most of them being very minor infractions in his opinion. He drew special attention to a line in "Headhunters" which S&P claimed could be rhymed with "Fuck" (The rhyme in question being "There once was a man from Kentucky.") Alex protested that he already censored the rhyme, purely by replacing "Nantucket" with "Kentucky," while giving a demonstration rhyme as an example of what could be made from "The once was a man from Kentucky." S&P's final reply before Alex asked to speak to someone personally was "S&P still feels that 'Fucky' would come from 'Ducky.'" This despite one of Disney's three main mascots being Donald Duck. All of this over one line, which was "censored" to "There once was a dude from Kentucky."
  • Hirsch is, according to a reddit thread, not terribly fond of the 11-minute pilot used to pitch the show, though he did release it as a reward for completing the Cipher Hunt.
• One of the storyboard artists for Avengers Assemble, Ben Bates, said in an episode of the webseries Cutshort regarding a failed Captain Marvel spinoff, that he "didn't like" any of the Marvel cartoons in The New '10s, and that was part of why he pitched Captain Marvel.
• Marcell Jankovics, one of the creators of the Soviet-era adult oriented Hungarian series Gustavus, said he found the humor he had to inject into the shorts uncomfortable, as they made fun of a struggling everyman in a time when real life people had it almost just as hard.
• While she liked working on Animaniacs, animator Mary Hanley said she regrets how terribly she drew Ms. Flamiel in "Wakko’s America".
• Co-creator Dan Povenmire's least favourite Phineas and Ferb episode is "Boyfriend from 27,000 BC", feeling it felt flat, had a lack of good jokes, and no song.
• Robotboy: Series creator Jan Van Rijsselberge isnt a big fan of series 2 (seasons 3 and 4), as he feels Bob Camp "didn’t get" the show and the episode quality was hit and miss.
• Final Space:
  • On Reddit, Olan Rogers referred to "The Lost Spy" as his least favorite episode of Season 2, remarking that the network was responsible for adding in more jokes in addition to the Clarence subplot.
    Olan: You'll find out early in doing TV pick your battles. This one battle I tried to fight and we lost. Which is way [sic] it's not one of my favorites.
  • Olan has also expressed regret for the "piss battle" joke in "The Happy Place", adding that it was a joke the writers disliked but the executives loved.
• Adventure Time:
  • Pendleton Ward has expressed some regret for the sexist undertones of the episode "Wizard Battle", with Princess Bubblegum being treated as a literal trophy and, he now feels, the script not doing enough to criticize Finn's proprietary attitude towards her.
  • Jesse Moynihan absolutely hated how "Betty" came out, since it was originally planned to be an half-hour episode before being reworked into a 11-minute episode, with most of the scenes planned for the episode, including a scene focused on Huntress Wizard (Jesse's favorite character), being cut for time.
  • During an episode of "The Ship-it Show", Flame Princess' voice actor Jessica DiCicco declared that she was and still is not happy with how the show handled Finn and Flame Princess' break-up.
• Milton Knight has grown very cynical of his work on Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog stating that he is tired of fans asking him about it, he had very little to do with it overall, it did little to further his career in animation, and referred to it as “a show for babies”.
• The Venture Bros.:
  • Hammer and Publick referred to "the Manstrong Curse", in reference to the fact that they considered both episodes featuring Bud Manstrong to be the worst of their respective seasons. Funnily, this has little to do with Manstrong himself, as they do have a fondness for his concept and performance; they just feel that neither episode ("Careers in Science" and "Guess Who's Coming to State Dinner?") works on its own merits.
  • They weren't fond of "Love-Bheits", largely due to being an episode focused on Baron Ünderbheit (whom they feel never really worked) and an ending (specifically, the villain being defeated through accidental homosexuality) that they feel was handled horribly. That said, Publick liked its role as the first appearance of "The Bat", and the scene where Brock discovers a mook has cancer.
• Many of the cartoons that originally aired on the Disney Afternoon block avert this, such as Gargoyles, DuckTales (1987), Darkwing Duck, Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, and to a lesser extent Goof Troop, despite being a Franchise Original Sin. However, there are still a few that play this trope straight;
  • TaleSpin, starring some characters from The Jungle Book (1967), was a particular old shame, mostly due to legal issues surrounding the originally unauthorized use of King Louie.^note  King Louie was played in the movie by jazz singer Louis Prima. When the character appeared in TaleSpin, his widow sued Disney on the grounds that Jim Cummings's impression was so accurate that it gave Prima retroactive rights to the character. Bizarrely, she won. However, Disney seems to have gotten over it, giving it a complete DVD release (and putting it on Disney+), giving Don Karnage an appearance in the DuckTales reboot — later being joined by the now-adult Kit and Molly — and heavily merchandising it alongside its other most popular Disney Afternoon shows.
  • Quack Pack is shunned for its attempts to update Donald and the nephews for a new decade falling straight into Totally Radical territory.
  • The Shnookums & Meat Funny Cartoon Show appears to be one as well. It was heavily accused of being a ripoff of The Ren & Stimpy Show, and was cancelled after only thirteen episodes. To date, it has never seen an official VHS or DVD release.
• Looney Tunes:
  • Chuck Jones once said that if he were allowed to, he would burn the negatives to every Looney Tunes short he made before 1948 (which had slow pacing and were too much like something Disney's animation company would do). The one short that seemed to get the most contempt from him was Elmer's Candid Camera.
  • Fellow Looney Tunes animator and director Norm McCabe was seen later in life visibly cringing during showings of his cartoons. ^note He made an exception for the three Daffy Duck shorts he directed. He was especially ashamed of his World War II propaganda cartoons Tokio Jokio and The Ducktators - he absolutely hated working on these propaganda shorts, knowing they were horribly racist against Japanese and Japanese-American people. Shortly before his death, he publicly apologized for them.
  • According to this interview with his son, Robert McKimson hated the cartoons he made in the mid-to-late 1960s Audience-Alienating Era and hated working on them even more. Due to Executive Meddling, he wasn't allowed to use Bugs Bunny or Foghorn Leghorn. He thought the budgets were awful and that the new characters were even worse, and was told after directing Daffy's Diner that he couldn't even use the remaining classic characters (Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales) anymore.
  • Warner Bros. also feels this way about some of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies characters from the early years (1930-1935) and later years (1967-1969) of the original series and their cartoons, such as Buddy, Cool Cat and Merlin the Magic Mouse, often treating them as The Scrappy. They are almost never shown on TV anymore, typically do not appear in any newer Looney Tunes productions or products aside from a Take That! to Buddy on Animaniacs and recurring Cool Cat cameos in The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries as well as one in Looney Tunes Cartoons, and are usually left out on home video compilations, with exceptions being the "Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 6" DVD set, which includes some Buddy cartoons; the "Porky & Friends: Hilarious Ham" DVD which includes both Bunny and Claude shorts; the "Mouse Chronicles" DVD/Blu-Ray set, which includes the first "Merlin the Magic Mouse" cartoon, and HBO Max having restored Cool Cat and Merlin shorts^note "Fistic Mystic" and "Bugged by a Bee".
  • Also from Warner Bros. Animation, two Younger and Hipper (and Totally Radical) reboots of two of their popular franchises, Loonatics Unleashed and Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get A Clue!, are seen this way by Warner. Cartoon Network and Boomerang, which would normally show most of the Looney Tunes and Scooby-Doo material out there, refuse to rerun both shows, at least in the United States. Loonatics Unleashed in particular has only gotten negative acknowledgements since it went off the air, as the show was given a Take That! in Animaniacs (2020), Teen Titans Go!, and New Looney Tunes.
  • The 2003-2004 shorts produced by Larry Doyle also suffered from this. Bob Bergen (the current voice of Porky Pig) hated the cartoons because they suffered all sorts of issues: a more mean-spirited tone, Flanderization, and inappropriate humor that didn't belong in a Looney Tune (ironically, the innuendos were taken out after Bergen left production). He was considering quitting, but before he could, he was informed that he was fired. Executives at Warner Bros. were likewise appalled, causing them to fire Larry Doyle and halt production after only seven shorts, scrapping all other planned shorts.
• According to Lauren Faust, Quest for Camelot is this for all the animators who worked on it due to the Executive Meddling involved that ultimately led to it failing in the box office.
  • And The Powerpuff Girls episode "Equal Fights", citing that the subject of feminism is too strong for a children's cartoon show.
  • As well as the Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends episode "Everyone Knows It's Bendy", due to the title character infamously being a Karma Houdini.
• Don Rosa and some of the 9 Old Men grew to hate DuckTales (1987) for not being true to the stories that Carl Barks wrote, as well as its sapping TMS's resources away from Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (in fact, two of the Old Men — Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston — did work on Little Nemo just so that they could do something that was outside of what Disney was dishing out at the time).
  • Carl Barks himself was not that negative, liking the early episodes before losing interest citing citing too many characters and the complicated plots.
  • Don Rosa at least mellowed out and admitted he really did not hate the show and more or less said it was to the Donald Duck comics what Superfriends was to the DC comics.
• Maurice LaMarche hated working on Popples. He is quoted as saying each recording session made him want to vomit because of how sickeningly cute the show was.
  • He also, along with everybody else involved (with the notable and understandable exception of Cree Summer), disliked working on Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain for having retooled the wildly popular Pinky and the Brain. This is evidenced in Brain's line, "I deeply resent this" at the end of the theme song, as well as this line:
    Theme Song: It's what the network wants/ Why bother to complain?
  • In a slightly more subtle way, it's evidenced even further through:
    Theme Song: The Earth remains a goal/ some things they can't control
    • However, in the Cree Summer episode of his podcast, Talking Toons, Rob Paulsen seems to not have any disdain toward the spinoff, although one suspects that Paulsen wouldn't have wanted to hurt Summer's feelings.
  • As for the main Pinky and the Brain series, Maurice LaMarche stated in the book The Magic Behind the Voices that he disapproved of the episode "Fly", where Brain plans to flood everything below the 39th floors of buildings to become the ultimate landlord, feeling that this scheme was too dark for the character to come up with.
    Maurice: It was very gratifying for me as a viewer to see the Brain get the absolute living hell kicked out of him for six months straight by that dog. The little bastard deserved it. It'll teach him for coming up with a plan that could hurt children.
• Father of the Pride: The DreamWorks animated sitcom about a family of white lions is mostly remembered as one of the most colossal flops in the history of prime-time animation. DreamWorks proceeded to bury it in their animation archives, abandoning it and receiving more credit and success in children's shows.
• Scott McNeil feels this way about the Battletoads pilot.
• The Wacky World of Tex Avery was this for animator Andrew Gothicson and almost everyone else who worked on it.
• Subverted with KaBlam!, which has become obscure (no DVD releases, no uploads of episodes, etc.) not out of old shame, but, per this comment that Nick Studios left on an upload of the theme song:

  "We love KaBlam! (just like all of our shows). However because it was an anthology show, the legal rights are complicated and prevent us from re-airing it or releasing it on DVD."

  • Mark Marek, who did the Henry and June segments on the show, did not care for how The Henry And June Show came out, and has said "Believe me, you don't want to see it" after fans asked if he would put it up on his website (averted with KaBlam! itself; he has stated that he really enjoyed the show and would be willing to do it again if Nick wanted a revival). Nickelodeon seems to feel the same way about the pilot to the failed spin-off, and never aired it again after its one airing in June 1999 or acknowledged it since.
  • The issues with the individual segments seem to be sorted out in recent years, as not only did NickRewind air a few episodes as part of two programming stunts (Nicktoons' 25th anniversary in 2016 and Creator/SNICK's 25th anniversary in 2017), but selected episodes of the show have also been made available to stream on VRV as part of their NickSplat channel.
  • Now it seems that they are also trying to hide the fact that Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! exists as well. The show does not appear anywhere on Nick Jr.'s website, and it's not even included on the Noggin app either. Despite this, it is still one of the most talked-about old Nick Jr. shows. This might be because the show is owned by Starz Media's parent Lionsgate, and it's possible that Nickelodeon no longer has the rights to it. It could also be the reason why Wubbzy never appeared on any Nick Jr. compilation videos (for example, the Nick Jr. Favorites volumes.)
• Jon McClenahan wasn't satisfied with the end product of The Jetsons Movie, he said it was the worst animated film he had ever seen and felt embarrassed to have his name in the credits.
  • Joe Barbera hated the film as well due to all the Executive Meddling, most notoriously the replacement of Janet Waldo with pop singer Tiffany as the voice of Judy Jetson (after Waldo had already recorded all her lines). Strangely enough, William Hanna thought the film was okay.
  • The casting director Andrea Romano was also dismayed by the meddling that caused Waldo to be let go and replaced, and requested that her name be removed from the credits so that she would not be blamed for it.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • Series creator Butch Hartman (as well as most of the crew) have actually apologized for the episode "It's a Wishful Life" due to the very sadistic treatment of Timmy.
  • The staff also regret "Twistory" due to its unflattering depictions of British people. Said episode is now almost never rerun.
  • Sparky was a character hated by fans and most of the staff, which led him to be removed in the tenth season.
• Toei animator Junichi Hayama was embarrassed to have worked on Muppet Babies (1984). He said he was a fan of the original The Muppet Show but did not enjoy this incarnation. Most fans consider this to be bizarre since Muppet Babies is equally as well-beloved as the original Muppet Show.
• Disney Animated Canon examples:
  • Most of the package films from Saludos Amigos to The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad did not receive wide theatrical re-releases, with Disney instead attaching select segments to some other movies' theatrical runs, and most of their home video releases did not receive large advertising campaigns. Disney seems especially ashamed today of Make Mine Music and Melody Time, the two usually regarded as "Fantasia with pop music and/or more dialogue." These were Walt Disney's last Canon films to come to Blu-ray, remaining unavailable until November 2021. Make Mine Music is also the only Canon film that's never been on Disney+.
  • The Black Cauldron is the biggest one, partly because it performed so horribly upon release that it nearly killed their animation department. And that's not even getting into the troubled production that saw it go through multiple edits to make it more palatable for audiences unfamiliar with its source material. To add insult to injury, it was beaten at the box office by The Care Bears Movie. A VHS release of the film was not granted until 1998, a full thirteen years after the movie's original release, and this was only after considerable pressure from the film's growing fanbase.^note The Black Cauldron does predate Disney's decision to release their newest animated movies to video only a few months after their theatrical runs, but this does mark one of the longest gaps an '80s Disney Animated Canon entry experienced between its theatrical premiere, and its VHS debut. The other '80s DAC film that took this long, The Fox and the Hound, at least received a theatrical re-release during its gap. Even with this and two DVD releases (in 2000 and 2010), the film remains virtually unseen among the studio's vast array of merchandise. It does not help that it eventually became the last of the Disney Animated Canon's post-Walt traditionally-animated movies to hit Blu-ray. On top of that, it is very rare to see the characters from the film appear in any capacity, apart from the memorable villain, the Horned King.
• Almost everyone who worked on Allen Gregory regrets it. Even Fox is ashamed of it and removed it from every site that was offering episodes for sale within weeks of its cancellation (The only legal digital offer for it currently is on iTunes... in Britain). As a matter of fact, the animators despised the series even before it was released.
• Season 2 of Superjail! is this for creators Christy Karacas and Stephen Warbrick. Karacas in particular wound up feeling shameful over how they spent too much time on character development and not enough on just making it weird. The fan backlash over the confirmation of Alice being a trans woman also helped seal its fate as Old Shame, causing Karacas to regret ever having her backstory shown.
• Genndy Tartakovsky was not impressed with The Justice Friends, feeling that it was short on character development and humor. This is quite ironic, as many fans considered their segments one of the best things to come out of Dexter's Laboratory.
• Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa
  • Between the film's airing and its rediscovery, none of the cast members have ever mentioned the film let alone include it on their resumes, and they probably intend to keep it this way.
  • The producer's daughter has expressed her and her father's feelings on the final film on her twitter account with some (hopefully) Self-Deprecating Humor added in:
    Kennedy Rose: That movie was my dad's biggest disappointment. Besides me, of course.
  • Paige O'Hara joked that she was surprised someone actually remembered the special when asked about it by Pan Pizza.
  • Played with regarding Mark Hamill: He has zero memory of working on the special.
  • Grey DeLisle referred to the film as a "secret shame" on her Twitter.
• Arthur:
  • PBS and the crew behind the show now seem to feel this way about the Season 12 episode "Room to Ride" and the Season 13 episode "The Great MacGrady," as both prominently feature former cycling champion Lance Armstrong as a Celebrity Star; in the wake of the doping scandal that saw Armstrong stripped of all of his Tour de France titles, both episodes have rarely been rerun on television as a result, with the latter eventually remade with recurring in-universe "Uncle Slam" Wilson in Armstrong's place.
  • WGBH (the Boston PBS station that produces the show) was never entirely pleased when the show became a major source of memes, with many being NSFW. Their basic response was that they appreciated the love for the show from millennials who grew up with the show but expressed disdain for numerous memes that were considered to be of poor taste.
  • In a Facebook Live interview, executive producer Carol Greenwald revealed that the season 8 episode "Bleep" has been the most controversial with the most mailed-in feedback from viewers. She stated that they wished they handled the subject matter better seeing that the episode comes off as too raunchy.
• In regards to Planet Sheen (the spin-off to The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius), John A. Davis later admitted that Sheen was a character who only worked in small doses, so giving him his own TV show caused his appeal to wear thin really fast.
  • Seems to be this for Nickelodeon as well, after the show failed to resonate with fans of its predecessor Jimmy Neutron due to the shift in focus from Jimmy over to Sheen in the title role. It fared so poorly in the ratings that Nickelodeon often aired the episodes Out of Order before finally cancelling it altogether.
• Nickelodeon really is not proud of the short-lived Nicktoon The X's, considering that they have removed all evidence that the show existed on Nick's official website. In fact, it remains perhaps the most obscure and hardest to find of the (official) Nicktoons with an almost non-existent fanbase.
  • Nick did a similar thing with the more modern Robot and Monster. They debunked a second season during mid-production, aired the episodes Out of Order, shafted it to Nicktoons, removed every trace of it on their website, and took reruns off the air in 2015, leaving only two episodes unaired. (These episodes being A Better Marftrap and Monster Lie. Apparently, the former was supposed to be the REAL first episode of the series, and was even produced as such) Because it is rarely acknowledged by many people, It's really impossible to find the whole series online, however, Nick was somehow generous enough to put all of Season 1 on DVD (Including the unaired episodes).
  • For some reason, Nickelodeon is deeply ashamed of Harvey Beaks, regardless of it easily being one of their most acclaimed series from the 2010s. According to the show's creator, C.H. Greenblatt, Nickelodeon unfairly expected the show to be an instant success^note Nickelodeon apparently has an unwritten company policy saying that if an animated series does not match the ratings of SpongeBob SquarePants, it's immediately viewed as a failure and screwed to hell and back; this is the reason for the slew of Nicktoons with short runs as of late, and the only reason The Loud House has survived this long; one could say they apply the same unfair expectations to Nick Jr. with PAW Patrol (and previously the Dora the Explorer franchise). The network changed its timeslots like a set of clothes, went months in-between episodes, stopped advertising it after it premiered, barely aired reruns on their main network, cancelled it after two seasons (though it was given a very proper finale), and slowly aired the last 15 episodes on Nicktoons throughout 2017. After finishing its run on December 29, the show was only (and coldly) brought up by Nick occasionally and reruns only aired on Nicktoons during the 5 AM hour. While they were kind enough to put it on Hulu, it seems they won't be releasing it on DVD any time soon.
    • In addition, C.H. Greenblatt did not seem to fully enjoy his third tenure with Nickelodeon. While he enjoyed working at the Animation Studio itself, as he worked with a lot of people who have been "creatively supportive", most of his problems were on Cyma Zarghami and the network executives, who had a bad record when it comes to animated shows. They gave him some really tight deadlines and did some Executive Meddling on his show, before canceling it all together. Greenblatt himself expressed disappointment in Nickelodeon canceling the series and burning the remaining episodes off on Nicktoons, which gets a fraction of the audience that the former has, without even telling him, and finding out on the Nickelodeon Twitter account.
  C.H. Greenblatt: "It’s hard going in to work every day feeling sad, angry and let down."
• Disney does not seem too keen on remembering Shorty McShorts' Shorts, which lasted barely a year and saw both its website and reruns pulled completely when its various pilots failed to captivate potential buyers or the viewers, with only one exception on a completely different network several years later.
• Out of Jimmy's Head is this to Cartoon Network; the network's first real attempt at live-action programming combined with animation for a time reduced the studio to a laughing stock, emphasizing the network's traditional focus on cartoons and the inane premise of the series itself; after being critically ravaged by audiences, Cartoon Network cancelled the series and pulled it and the movie that spawned it, Re-Animated from all the websites that made them available for viewing. They attempted to salvage it in reruns by (controversially) adding a Laugh Track to the episodes, but by that time, the damage had been done. The show was only referenced sparingly after it was cancelled (for the 20th anniversary and in the OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes episode "Crossover Nexus").
  • Obscure anthology series Sunday Pants also appears to be this. Due to some of its shorts containing content deemed too inappropriate for children (notably, references to drinking and words like "hell" and "damn"), Cartoon Network quickly buried the show after a month on the air. Despite promises that it would come back the following year, it never did and outside of Bernard and Monstories being aired during commercial breaks on Boomerang, it was never heard from again. It wasn't even mentioned for the network's 20th anniversary, something even Out of Jimmy's Head was acknowledged by. It took until the aforementioned "Crossover Nexus" special for the show to be officially referenced by CN again (in the form of Periwinkle having a cameo).
• Mike Judge has often expressed his hatred for the earliest Beavis and Butthead episodes, even going as far as cancelling a DVD release, The History of Beavis and Butt-head, which contained most of these episodes. As he put it, you can divide the show into three categories - the really good episodes, the meh episodes, and the really bad ones. He negotiated with Paramount (who distributes shows from MTV and other ViacomCBS-owned networks on Blu-Ray/DVD) to put only the episodes in the former two categories onto DVD, resulting in volumes of the show not sorted by season to the consternation of many fans.
• Brad Bird is not a fan of Family Dog, which was so heavily criticized for its animation and premise that Bird has distanced himself from the series, which lasted a mere ten episodes before it was cancelled. Also he states how it would never work, before said series even aired.
  • Nelvana, one of the animation companies, does not even mention this show on their website. However, this may have come from the fact that Nelvana does not own any rights to the show, as it was a commisioned work (the cartoon's rights are owned by Universal domestically and Warner Bros. internationally). For similar reasons, Nelvana's site does not acknowledge (for example) Ace Ventura: The Animated Series or The Adventures of Chuck & Friends.
• Averted with The Nutshack co-creator Jesse Hernandez, who's gushed about the show's So Bad, It's Good status along with its Memetic Mutation on the internet. Played straight with Myx TV, who have no plans on releasing season 2 on video anytime soon.
• Peanuts also has a few examples:
  • Charles M. Schulz deeply regretted the animated special It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown due to the infamous scene where Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown when he is about to score the winning point during a championship game, for which he is blamed by nearly everybody (most notably Peppermint Patty) even though Lucy did it in plain view. Fans considered this to be too cruel even for Charlie Brown, in what is otherwise a well-received special. Schulz recognized the fan outcry and so subsequent reruns by the networks and home video releases heavily edit the offending scene (mostly by masking P.P.'s lines of her berating Charlie Brown). He also regretted allowing the Little Red-Haired Girl to physically appear and have a name (Heather), as he rather wanted her to remain The Ghost in order to show Charlie Brown's hopelessness in longing for her.
  • Bill Melendez said in one interview that "Flashbeagle" was his least favorite of the Peanuts specials – he did not like the story, the dance craze itself, and how the rotoscoping with Snoopy's dancing was very difficult for him and his crew.
• Animator Pat Ventura is ashamed that he worked on Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night stating it was one of the worst things he worked on and it wasn't worth remembering. Disney, who sued Filmation to stop the film's production, also likely does not have anything nice to say about it either (that movie finished Filmation off).
• The singing voice to Jem, Britta Phillips, does not seem to like being reminded of the series. However, fortunately for fans, this may be becoming a thing of the past, as she was a willing special guest at the panel for JemCon 2015, which is an annual fan convention of the show, which she also attended with her mother.
• Detention appears to have been this for Kids WB. In addition to being extremely short lived, having only 13 episodes and not being a spin off, it was never reran on television except during their short lived Fraturday block. Suffice it to say, it may have well been Kids WB shortest, and least remembered, stand alone cartoon ever made.
• Yeardley Smith is not too keen on We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story, which she only did to break away from the Lisa Simpson image. In general everyone who worked on it had this reaction, especially animator Rodolphe Guenoden, since it was rushed through development to meet a tight deadline and the production was a mess overall, and he felt this was very evident in the final product.
• Ralph Bakshi is ashamed of Hey Good Lookin' and Cool World. The latter was ruined by Executive Meddling and Kim Basinger, who wanted to show it for sick hospital children (the film derailed her A-list status).
• Considering it took Disney 13 years to release Doug's 1st Movie onto DVD and then used the TV edit on the official DVD as opposed to the regular movie, it seems like the studio feels this way towards the movie.
• Donnie Dunagan, or rather, Major Donald Dunagan, USMC, kept the fact that he was the voice of the title character in Bambi as a child a secret through his service during the Vietnam War. His reluctance to associate himself with the film had nothing to do with any hard feelings, but he was afraid that being "Major Bambi" would undermine his authority. Eventually his secret was discovered, but seems to have led to nothing more than a little good-natured ribbing, and later in life Dunagan often spoke warmly about his time with Disney.
• Jeffrey Katzenberg feels shame over Rise of the Guardians, though more over what it did for his company (starting a chain of flops that led to him backing out of the firm) than for the quality of the film itself.
  • Katzenberg holds an even bigger disdain for Father of the Pride, a show he created and which got caught up in complaints from Moral Guardians. After that show was sent to the television pound (starting a chain of events that bankrupted Imagi Studios), Katzenberg and DreamWorks Animation disowned it, and they never dealt with the Big 4 networks for regular series shows again (ABC and NBC still broadcast a few specials here and there).
• Richard Williams was so devastated at what happened to his flagship film The Thief and the Cobbler ^note  He lost control of it after Aladdin, which took elements from it, hit theaters, and the final version took elements back from it, which got it labeled as "A product of animated inbreeding" from The Nostalgia Critic that he refused to acknowledge the film's existence for a long time.
• Lisa Ortiz has admitted that she finds it "disturbing" that people have actually heard of Ratatoing, let alone watched it and reviewed it.
  • Notably averted in the case of Mike Pollock, who received so many questions about whether he regretted being in it that he dedicated a page on his website to explaining how he does not regret any of his past roles, not even Ratatoing, and that he does not appreciate people mocking him for simply doing his job.
• Martin Vidnovic, who voiced The King in the animated version of The King and I, admits it was pretty bad. It was a bigger Old Shame for the Rodgers & Hammerstein estates, who were really displeased with the result of Richard Rich's Disneyfication of their work and prompting them to put out a mandate that no other musical from the estate can be adapted for animation, something that derailed Rich's main animation career.
• Nobody at Pixar is particularly fond of Cars 2, as Disney had it made for merchandising purposes.
• Disney and Pixar have given the Toy Story 2 blooper where Stinky Pete talks to two Barbie dolls about getting them parts in Toy Story 3 this treatment. In 2019, they removed it from current pressings and television airings in light of John Lasseter's firing over sexual misconduct.
• Chris Wedge and William Joyce felt that they needed more time to work on Robots.
  • Chris Wedge is also not really fond of Epic (2013), saying he tried to make an animated action adventure movie but it did not really work out.
• For the longest time, Leonard Nimoy refused to even mention his participation in Transformers: The Movie, to the consternation of fans. His complete disavowal of all things Transformers-related finally cracked when he was convinced to voice Sentinel Prime in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, although said film's director, Michael Bay, is a cousin of Nimoy's wife Susan Bay.
  • Orson Welles wasn't terribly fond of the movie either, having done it for the money. When asked what role he played in the film, he said he was "a toy who does horrible things to other toys."
• Here's what one of the animators who worked on Foodfight! had to say about it on Amazon:
  "I actually worked on this movie for a bit. It was one of my first jobs in the industry and let me tell you, if you think it was a train wreck viewing, you should have seen how terrible it was to work on it. The sad truth is there were plenty of talented people working there. many of those people moved on to major studios in both film, TV and games. The bottom line is the director, Larry Kasanoff is a talent-less, classless scumbag that should be banned from Hollywood until the end of time. All of the inappropriate innuendos are a direct product of his "creative hand". I cannot tell you how many times this moron derailed production with his brainless input. It literally has cost the studio millions of dollars. They eventually stepped in and removed him from the project. Unfortunately, that was a decade and millions of dollars late. I am so ashamed of this movie that I have completely left working there off of my resume. On behalf of the many artists that have had the dubious distinction of working on this dumpster fire, I apologize to all of humanity for our part in this."
  • In addition to the many people who've worked on the film that share the same feelings, Threshold Entertainment Group (the production company) does not seem to mention the film on their website.
• British actors Richard Ayoade and Kayvan Novak are said to be rather uncomfortable talking about the voice work they did for Channel 4's Full English, a short-lived adult cartoon that was supposedly intended to be a British competitor to shows like Family Guy and is widely considered one of the worst cartoons ever made. Channel 4 themselves are said to be quite keen on forgetting it ever happened.
• Animator Bill Plympton has stated The Chipmunk Adventure was one of the worst films he worked on due to its Troubled Production, despite it being a Cult Classic among fans of Alvin and the Chipmunks.
• David Silverman, best known for his work directing and animating on The Simpsons, did not like most of the shows he worked on for Hanna-Barbera and Ruby Spears early in his career, particularly the bizarrely fascinating Mister T cartoon.
  "I pity the fool who watched that show."
• [adult swim] has a number of shows they'd rather forget:
  • Minoriteam and Assy Mcgee both relied on lame, one-note gimmicks (a superhero team of racial stereotypes and a Dirty Cop who is a talking pair of buttocks), were unpopular with viewers and both died after 20 episodes. Minoriteam reached such a reviled status that as a result of the then-ongoing "Black Lives Matter" protests, it was removed from their website in June 2020, along with the equally controversial World Peace.
  • The Drinky Crow Show and Mongo Wrestling Alliance are rarely mentioned positively by the network and rarely shown in reruns. During a "History of Adult Swim" marathon in 2020, they said MWA was probably the second-worst show they'd ever produced.
  • Adult Swim isn't fond of the fourth season of The Boondocks which was commissioned without creator Aaron McGruder at the helm, leading to a ton of Flanderization, out-of-character moments, and outlandish plots that even the fans of the series thought were too stupid for this show. As such, they rarely rerun it, usually going back to the first episode after the season 3 finale "It's Goin' Down" (which was intended to be the Grand Finale anyway).
• William Hanna of Hanna-Barbera wasn't very fond of Yo Yogi! as he put it, "They screwed it up by re-designing him. They made him look like a whore monger. If you have something that works, don't screw it up!".
• Screenwriter Buzz Dixon has written deprecatingly about his involvement with a Sugar Bowl show called Little Clowns of Happytown, which was so hampered by Moral Guardians and Executive Meddling that not only were they not allowed to have any comic violence, they weren't allowed to have any conflict at all. If they wanted a clown to get a pie in the face, for instance, it could not be thrown by another clown; they had to have it set on the ground and let a clown accidentally trip and fall onto it. Buzz actually said that the show "was an abomination in the eyes of God and man" and requested that "we shall speak of it no more." Cue The Mysterious Mr. Enter and the cartoon community discovering the series.
• Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat appears to be this for Sesame Workshop, as they have barely mentioned it since circa 2008 due to rights issues with CineGroupe, who the latter acknowledge the show's existence (and celebrated the fact that a Facebook post by Buzzfeed of the intro reached 14 million people in 10 days), and PBS, who acknowledged its existence for a Throwback Thursday post on their PBS Parents site once.
• The Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue is this to Don Bluth; even though he did not work on the sequel to the original film, he has panned it along with the majority of the direct-to-video sequels based on his works. In the years since its release at least one person to work on the film, Paul Dale, went on Facebook to pan both the animation and the story, and called the film "crap" when recalling his experience with it.
• According to a Reddit comment, when privately asked about the 1999 film Carnivale (whose English dub was believed to be lost at the time), director Deane Taylor (who had served as art director for The Nightmare Before Christmas) has expressed disappointment with the film and implied that he does not mind forgetting it.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • Casey Alexander has stated that, guest-animated numbers aside, "Atlantis SquarePantis" was his least favorite episode out of all the ones he worked on, due to how overly complicated the story became with having to service six character arcs and musical numbers due to Executive Meddling.
  • In hindsight, Dani Michaeli thinks that the toenail scene from "House Fancy" did not age well. He said the scene was initially thought to be fun, but is now in poor taste.
  • In a comment on his blog, executive producer Vincent Waller said that "The Clash of Triton" isn't one of his favorites because a lot of the scenes he found funny ended up getting cut because they made the episode too long.
• MTV prefers not to acknowledge the existence of The Brothers Grunt, due to the horrible reviews and ratings the show had (MTV viewers even started a campaign to get the show canceled). The only people that seem to remember it are fans of creator Danny Antonucci (who also did Lupo The Butcher and Ed, Edd n Eddy).
• Steven Lisberger has apparently disavowed his role in the creation of Animalympics, despite it being a Cult Classic. In the director's commentary on the "special edition" DVD of TRON, Lisberger described TRON as his first animated feature film and seemed reluctant to mention his "previous" animated feature when the subject was brought up.
• Greg Duffell didn't like working on Taz-Mania, feeling it was a ruination of Taz the Tasmanian Devil's character. He also had a dislike for Taz's family, as well as the other side characters. You can see his complaints here.
• It can be assured Bruce W. Smith would like to forget about Da Boom Crew, a show that had been largely considered to be one of the worst cartoons of the 2000s and got cancelled after 13 episodes were made, only 4 of which were aired on television. After the series' failure, Smith's animation studio Jambalaya Studios would end up fizzling away, resulting in him doing work for other projects until his more successful series, The Proud Family, would be ordered for a reboot in 2022. This is especially evident since Smith never brings up the show.
• Due to the controversies surrounding creator Bill Cosby, Nickelodeon has been trying to erase Little Bill from their history. The show was removed from reruns in early 2014 and hasn't been seen since, Nick Jr. never mentions or references the show on social media, and it is currently the only "classic" Nick Jr. show not available to stream on Paramount+. They've even gone as far as removing the show from past schedules.
  • In 2022, Nickelodeon Animation Studio posted a timeline of its original series. Barring miniseries, spin-offs, and DreamWorks shows, Little Bill is the only original show not included, confirming the suspicion that the show has been removed from Nickelodeon canon.
• Walter Lantz expressed regret for the racial stereotypes in Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat, which was so deeply steeped in Values Dissonance that it was considered racist even in the 1940s. Following the controversy that sparked upon its re-release and eventual ban in 1949, Lantz pledged to never insert racial stereotypes into his cartoons again. He also made sure that the cartoon never made its way to television.
• Most at Accolade didn't think fondly of the Bubsy animated series pilot.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil : Tom's voice actor, Rider Strong, wasn't very happy with how his character was handled in the latter half of Season 4, mainly the fact that he broke up with Star with a poor excuse just so she could get together with Marco in the end.

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