In general, classic cartoon characters hit Dork Ages when their owner studios tried to make them cuter and "safer" - visually symbolized by the once Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal (or human) gaining a full middle-class wardrobe. Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop are the best examples.
When you see Mickey fully dressed with a hat and long pants, you know he's not going to be any more interesting than your neighbor. Disney historians fully admit the increased emphasis on Donald Duck and Goofy was partly caused by Mickey's iconic fame making him slightly inflexible and too 'sweet' to put funny cartoons or as anyone's foil. Earlier — and thankfully, more recently — he was a mischievous adventurer (Kingdom Hearts, ironically, is fairly close to this depiction). Dork Age Mickey sits at home and gives Pluto orders like a bossy, boring parent.
Another indication of Dork Age Mickey is if he had eyebrows on him. Eyebrows below face bordersnote The lines that separates Mickey's black fur from his white or cream face that normally function as eyebrows.
A New York Times article in 2000 described how boring Mickey was. Disney's overly restrictive guidelines prevent writers from doing much with him. Disney tried to inject some creative juices by having Mickey redrawn by various artists (big fan of Mickey with "M-shield" a la Captain America) but they haven't moved ahead until recently, with Warren Spector's Epic Mickey video game. Said game takes advantage of Video Game CaringandCruelty Potential, where you could either let Mickey remain an everyman, or go back to his original personality of a mischievous and reckless troublemaker. And a little bit of horror. Observe.
Lampshaded in the Disney Vault TV Funhouse sketch ("You're supposed to be funny?"). That line came about from Robert Smigel's puzzlement of Mickey Mouse being such an iconic kids character when most kids can't actually name a defining trait or characteristic for him.
It should be noted that Epic Mickey was widely considered a disappointment—while the game is darker that most Mickey fare, it hardly lives up to the steampunk post-apocalypse depicted in the concept art, which generated huge amounts of hype.
What happened to Betty Boop, who used to be a sexy chanteuse, was that the Moral Guardians forced her to be Bowdlerised. This led to a serious drop-off in the quality and popularity of her shorts, since her character is a sex symbol (yes, even with her big, giant head). When you see Betty dressed like a businesswoman, you are in for a boring cartoon.
Popeye had this happen as well, after the shorts became headed by Famous Studios. Granted, it didn't get too bad until 1950 or so, when Seasonal Rot set in and the writers just didn't know what else to do with Popeye, ending up resorting to Recycled IN SPACE! plots.
Woody Woodpecker fell into this during the 1950s—apparently, Walter Lantz wanted Woody to appeal more to kids, so he slimmed down Woody's design into a pinty, stiff looking "cute" design. On top of that, Woody was completely derailed as a character - whereas earlier he was a selfish heckler who only stood for himself, this Woody was watered down into a bland hero-type character. On top of that, from the mid-1950s onward, Paul J. Smith took the directorial reins and brought the series down even further with sloppy animation, not to mention lousy jokes and timing (surprising, considering his earlier efforts such as "Hot Noon" were among Lantz's best cartoons). It's a wonder the series was able to last through 1972 in theaters.
Looney Tunes suffered in the Sixties as well (you know something has gone terribly wrong when they have Daffy Duck chasing Speedy Gonzales around for some reason) after the original animation unit was shuttered and work was turned over to De Patie Freleng Enterprises. Fortunately, this Dork Age comes with fair warning: if you catch a cartoon that opens with a weird version of their theme song set to trippy graphics spinning around, and the cartoon is not Chuck Jones' Now Hear This (or maybe Norman Normal), you're going to get to see their Dork Age.
"The Larriva Eleven" is the name given to a series of eleven Wile E Coyote And The Road Runner cartoons produced by Rudy Larriva, who had animated for Warner Bros. in the 1940s (but hadn't worked on anything Looney Tunes-related for about 15 years), after he took over the series from Chuck Jones. Larriva's character designs were very Off Model, the loss of Maurice Noble robbed the desert landscapes of all their scale and range, and the less said of William Lava's music, the better. The more complex schemes were replaced with sluggishly-paced crude gaggery, and to accommodate them the Roadrunner was completely derailed into actively fighting back against the Coyote, firing cannons at him and so forth. Watch "The Solid Tin Coyote" for a good look at how far off-base the series got. Better yet, don't (and just so that you know what we're dealing with here, keep in mind that "The Solid Tin Coyote" is pretty much universally regarded as the best of Larriva's efforts in this series).
If you ever see a cartoon with the opening described above, except with a company credit that reads "Warner Bros.-Seven Arts" instead of just "Warner Bros." then you should run for the hills. Because there is absolutely nothing good that will result from the cartoon that you are about to watch.
The second Dork Age for Warner Bros. Animation was when Sander Schwartz was running the studio in 2002 to 2007, also bringing us bull like Whats New Scooby Doo and Mucha Lucha, along with various Justice Leage/action-themed cartoons and some mediocre Looney Tunes shorts credited to Larry Doyle as producer.
Put it this way: maybe you've seen reruns of the Gene Deitch shorts, the Chuck Jones shorts, the 1992 movie, Tom And Jerry Kids, and the occasional short from Filmation's The Tom and Jerry Comedy Show on Cartoon Network or Boomerang? How often (if at all) do you recall the television shorts from the 1970s?
To someone who never saw the 1975–77 shorts (which, yes, does say a lot in and of itself), the Gene Deitch shorts are the Dork Age.
If you see Jerry wearing a red bowtie... run, just run.
Interestingly, CN Asia now airs the 1970s TV shorts every now and then... as well as the 1980 Filmation era shorts (though they no longer run Deitch's shorts). Now that is a Dork Age.
The 1996 Flash Gordon animated series, in which Ming was green and Flash and Dale rode hoverboards.
Then there's the second season of the 1979 Filmation series, also known as The New Animated Aventures of Flash Gordon. The first season is frequently considered to be both the best screen version of the character and the best Filmation cartoon. The second season gave us Gremlin the Dragon.
Someone at Turner Broadcasting must really dislike the 1980s episodes of The Jetsons and Jonny Quest, because Boomerang's rerun rotation of the shows go up to the last episodes of their first seasons, but then goes back to the beginning like nothing happened afterwards. Yet they still show the Jetsons' Christmas Episode every December. Thankfully, though, this contempt for the later years of The Jetsons and Jonny Quest isn't shared by the rest of Time-Warner, because the episodes are being made available in every other place where one can watch the show.
While each new incarnation of the Transformers franchise has its detractors, the Beast Wars sequel Beast Machines is almost universally loathed by the fandom. For one, the writers were told to not actually continue any story threads from Beast Wars because they wanted there to be its own story. They also brought in the idea of Cybertron as an originally organic planet, a state that the Maximals were fighting to return it to (never mind that the dominant race of Cybertron has been robotic for millions of years), horribly uncharacteristic derailment of several beloved characters, and a number of spiritual aspects that were never present in any of the previous series. This was compounded by the fact that Beast Machines supposedly exists in the same continuity as Generation 1.
Beast Machines has gained ground with many fans in recent years. Compared to the dodgy storylines and iffy animation quality of Armada, Energon and Cybertron, the writing and certainly the CGI animation of Beast Machines looks pretty good in comparison.
And then there's the monstrosity that is Kiss Players.
During the late 1970s and early 1980sScooby-Doo went through one. The addition of Scrappy, the removal of the entire gang except for Shaggy (himself no longer a hippie) and with every episode featuring "cousin so and so", well, there's a reason that the original 60s version is the most well known.
Whats New Scooby Doo was a second Dork Age for Scooby-Doo, along with Shaggy And Scooby Doo Get A Clue. (Though What's New is slightly better regarded as it stayed true to the franchise; many just felt it was bland and not scary)
The Flintstones has that show where they get new neighbors—the Frankenstones, who were basically a prehistoric version of The Addams Family or The Munsters—only with an unsympathetic Frankenstein's Monster as a head. Most of the episodes were about Fred having a fight with Mr. Frankenstone. Yes, in the original cartoon some monstrous neighbors were mentioned, but only episodically and never as major characters. It didn't help that the show also featured shorts that were ripping off other shows, so we could watch Captain Caveman imitating Superman (he was even Clark Kenting) with Betty and Wilma as two Lois Lanes, teenage Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm solving Scooby Doo Hoaxes with Dino, as well as Fred and Barney in a Buddy Cop Show, patrolling the streets with a goddamn Shmoo, which was constantly molesting Fred.
The My Little Pony cartoons had a Dork Age that lasted for nearly two decades. It started with the My Little Pony Tales series, and continued with the Lighter and Softer Generation 3 and the Spinoff Babies Generation 3.5. Tales was a short lived Slice of Life series which threw the rest of the continuity out the window and was set in a world where the ponies were essentially humans in horse bodies. Generation 3 lacked essentially everything the original series had (action, villains, a plot, etc) in exchange for a somewhat Slice of Life version of the series that Tastes Like Diabetes. Generation 3.5 was essentially deformed "chibi" versions of the Generation 3 cast as babies, though it didn't even try to make sense in the series continuity. Eventually the series got out of this Dork Age when My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic came along and restarted the franchise, being more like the original show.
My Little Pony Tales and Generation 3 have their fans and defenders, but you're unlikely to find anyone who disagrees that G3.5 was a Dork Age. It was created solely to fill in the gap between the proper end of G3 and the arrival of Friendship is Magic so they wouldn't have a gap without toys or a show marketing them out there, and it shows.
Ultimate Spider-Man is already starting to be considered this to the Spider-Man franchise on the animated plan: this series bears no similarities with the comic of the same name, or, for the matter, with any incarnation of the character. The tone is Denser and Wackier with a lot of comedy slapstick while all drama and dark aspect is removed, Spider-Man is a SHIELD agent learning how to be a superhero with Nick Fury as The Mentor, he is part of a team of annoying sidekick superheroes, and most villains from Spidey's actual Rogues Gallery are dropped in favor of other comic villains. Not at all helped by the fact it replaced The Spectacular Spider Man which was largely considered to be epic, and despite the fact Ultimate had no control over Spectacular's fate, people are prettyupset.
