Development Heaven / Western Animation

• During The '80s, most cartoons were 30-minute toy ads, and it was virtually unthinkable to go about it otherwise. Robert Mandell deliberately misfiled the memo and blew out as many stops as he could afford. Broadway actors as his voice talent, a truckload of Del Ray sci-fi authors as writers, Toyko Movie Shinsa doing the animation, arena rock bands for the soundtrack, some of the earliest attempts to weld CGI and cel animation...and throwing the lot into a Space Western that looks like the bastard offspring of a time-traveling Firefly and the Star Wars Expanded Universe. The end result is a one-season wonder called Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers.

• For Alma's Way, the animators from Pipeline Studios actually visited the Bronx to get a feel for the setting they would recreate in cartoon form. The end result is a very detailed, accurate setting with icons like the Number 6 train. In regards to Eddie, who has cerebral palsy, the series' medical advisers actually wrote up a two-page medical chart for him.

• For Avatar: The Last Airbender, the creators flew all over the world to find inspiration and art references for architecture and landscaping, studied martial arts in order to create realistic combat sequences, and hired someone with a PhD so that all the Classical Chinese ideographs seen in the series would be accurate. They also hired consultants for these things.
  • The background posters that Sokka walked past one episode were seen for less than ten seconds, yet they still included a realistic poster for a theatre company (foreshadowing for another episode) and a poster for a town meeting about air quality (referencing the industrialized Fire Nation) and all the gambling being done on the streets. All in archaic Chinese.
  • Constellations that are seen in the sky of "The Waterbending Master" are the same as those seen a season later on a star map in "The Desert". You'd need to be Neil deGrasse Tyson (or a very detail-oriented fan) to notice.

• Every shot of The Boondocks has detail unheard of even for anime. Thus, only 4 seasons have been produced in 9 years.

• Batman: The Brave and the Bold demonstrates the same attention to detail as the DCAU producers, writers, and animators. Every single episode is jam-packed with references big and small to the DCU's history either in the form of characters who vanished after the Silver Age (or in at least one case, only appeared in a single issue!) or storylines or even panels. An episode featuring the first full appearance of Superman is chock full of these, referencing everything from Superdickery to the Christopher Reeve films to Superman: The Animated Series to Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. It's this clear love of the character and the DCU that has made a show that could have been a disaster into a show that is widely adored by comic fans.

• The DC Animated Universe team has always had high expectations of themselves, but they really outdid themselves in Justice League Unlimited. They animated nearly every single hero and villain in the DC Universe, most of whom are not well known and very few of whom even have lines. But the lengths they did to are even better illustrated in the episode "The Savage Time", where for no reason whatsoever, they have very accurately drawn Tiger Tanks. How many people watching the show are even going to notice the tanks? How many can even tell that they actually did the research? They can, and apparently, that's all that mattered.
  • It wasn't just the Tigers in "The Savage Time"; though the detail's not great, the soldiers Jon Stewart is with are carrying appropriate weapons (M1 Garand, Thompson SMG, M1918 BAR), and Savage's car in the movie is similarly under-detailed, but unmistakably a closed-top Mercedes-Benz 700k. The German soldiers carry MP40s at one point. The fire rate for weapons are off, certainly, and no one reloads, but Rule of Cool factors into that. Plus, they put some effort into it; I mean, how many people pay attention to a freaking staff car?
  • To emphasize how edgy and dark Batman: The Animated Series is, the animators painted on black paper instead of white paper. The result? A truly atmospheric show that threatened to put the Animation Age Ghetto in the naughty corner.

• In the Futurama episode "The Prisoner of Benda", one of the writers actually made use of their math degree to create and prove a brand new mathematical theorem just for sake of the episode's body-swapping plot.

• The team of Gargoyles went to insane lengths to make the show as realistic as possible. Greg Weisman keeps up an ongoing blog to close up every possible plot hole (and every question, if it does not ask for spoilers, will be answered), and has done so for 15 years now. The foreign language is accurate, the historical people are accurate, the magic is consistent, the gargoyles have (by the standards of Hollywood) a believable biology rather than just being magic, and every single character is complex to unbelievable levels.

• Hanna-Barbera was still able to make beautifully drawn cartoons despite a low budget, thanks to Ed Benedict's brilliant character designs and colorful backgrounds.

• Jonny Quest. One of the animators working on "Shadow of the Condor" was a World War I airplane buff, and the Fokker Dr.1 and Spad are gorgeously drawn.

• The artists who worked on Mighty Orbots, produced in the 1980s, actually studied classical and Japanese animation in order to be the best they could be. Notable mainly because of the Animation Age Ghetto. When you could get away with stuff like Pac-Man, GoBots, or The Care Bears, studying classic film for inspiration is, well, a little weird.

• Musical numbers in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic contain elaborate instrumentation and rhymes, as well as a handful of Genius Bonuses that only make sense to one well-versed in musical terminology. For instance, how many eight-year-olds are going to recognize the Foreshadowing at the end of "This Day Aria"?

• While Phineas and Ferb may not have astounding animation or horribly intricate detail, if you compare it to, say, the average Disney Channel sitcom, you'll see a massive difference in effort. Phineas and Ferb is built on Once an Episode, yet almost every piece of that has been averted or subverted. Phineas and Ferb makes obscure socio-cultural references in full knowledge that their primary demographic won't grasp them.
  • And, going further than the intricate net of Catch Phrases, Continuity Nods, Running Gags and such, we get the music. If you look at the lyrics, you see a beautiful mesh of rhyme schemes, alliteration, internal rhymes, tasteful repetition, and probably half the list of literary devices your high-school English teacher taught you. There are artists/bands whose lyrics aren't this well thought out.
• In addition to doing his Gold Digger animation singlehandedly, series author Fred Perry also does a number of sketches and shorts using licensed music such as "Stacy's Mom", "You Are a Pirate", and the intro to Guardian Heroes. He actually got the rights to use it officially.

• Ready Jet Go! kept being bounced between different studios around the world, ranging anywhere from India to China. As a result, the animation can look different from episode to episode. Most notably, the Hot and Sour episodes have relatively poor lighting and shading, yet even they managed to put a lot of detail and expression in the character models. For example, the stitching pattern on Mindy's hat. The design and music of the show give it a nice retro '50s-60s feel, plus the many vintage pop culture references for parents. How many Gen Z kids would recognize a reference to David Bowie, for instance?

• The creators of ReBoot had a lot of risk involved with their project. They predated the Toy Story Pixar CGI revolution by a full year. It was an untested medium and the equipment to do it was not cheap. On top of that all the voice-acting, writing, directing and music was done in the same studio, instead of being farmed out to different companies like most shows. The results were a really tight story with great voice acting and animation that was groundbreaking.

• The Simpsons:
  • For "Black Widower", the staff wanted an episode involving a "mystery", so executive producer Sam Simon approached Thomas Chastain, head of the organization Mystery Writers of America, to help construct the mystery.
  • The end credits of "Mother Simpson" consist of Homer wistfully looking at the night sky after saying goodbye to his mother again. The crew successfully fought the network to not have any commercials play over it.
  • David Silverman personally animated the hallucination sequences for "El Viaje Misterioso De Nuestro Jomer" as he was worried the overseas animators would not provide the specific, highly surreal look that he wanted. It paid off as the results are considered the episode's Signature Scene.

• Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The amount of work put into this series really shows how much the crew cared about it, even just observing from the surface. But when you start noticing and then paying attention to such trivial things like posters on the walls of clone barracks or clubs, the elaborate details on spaceships, bugs crawling around on branches, garbage thrown away on the lower streets of Coruscant, and dozens of other tiny-little background details the creators have sneaked in - despite the fact that most viewers probably wouldn't register any of it on the first time viewing - it becomes mind-blowing! Then consider that all of this is made in CGI, with a relatively low-budget when the series was only starting. And when their budget and technological assets increased as the series progressed, they did even more with it.
  • Going even further, they had assets to use from Lucasfilm's archives. For instance, during the production of Season 3 episode "Wookiee Hunt", the crew had a meeting with Peter Mayhew to make sure they got Chewbacca's appearance (while working within the art style), characterization and body language accurately.

• There's a reason why classic-era Thomas & Friends has such a huge following. It and The Railway Series drew inspiration from real-life railway incidents (an engine being lost in South America was the basis for Duke's backstory, for instance). The sets and backdrops are intricate masterpieces that almost look lifelike. Mike O'Donnell and Junior Campbell went above and beyond to give every single character their own Leitmotif.

• The same can be said for The Venture Bros., though the detail isn't nearly the same. What also deserves mentioning is that while most shows have a significant staff of writers, every episode but one was written by creator Jackson Publick and/or Doc Hammer.
  • Another example from The Venture Bros.; Publick and Hammer, during the long hiatus between seasons one and two had worked out exactly how to open the show, seeing as Both Hank and Dean were dead. A montage, set to the song "Everybody's Free" by Aquagen and Rozalla. The problem was, to license it would cost a seventh of the budget—not for that episode, the entire second season. To which the creators said "Worth It."

• Although it is easy (and not unusual) to simply dismiss any Transformers product as Merchandise-Driven, some works, such as Transformers: Animated or Beast Wars, are well-liked for their appreciation of the mythos and written with the Periphery Demographic in mind.
  • Transformers has so many incentives to suck—it's Merchandise-Driven, for small children, and about robots that transform into cars. But sometimes, just sometimes, it's funny and engaging and a bit meaningful, and there's no other reason than that the creators, against all odds, care about what they do. Sometimes.

• Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum reportedly has a budget of a measly $3,000, but to say the artists and animators went the extra mile is an understatement. Thanks to Chris Eliopoulos' brilliant character designs and the stunning, detailed backgrounds, it manages to be a very artsy series. Special mention goes to the Fred Rogers episode, in which the Mister Rogers' Neighborhood TV set is accurate down to the most minor detail.

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