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  • Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers was a very off beat show when it first appeared in 1986 with its blend of space opera, western and samurai motifs and an atmosphere that felt closer to a show from the early '90s rather than the mid '80s, what with all the Nightmare Fuel. Today it probably wouldn't look nearly as unique to a more cynical and less sensitive audience.
  • In 1985, Adventures of the Gummi Bears was praised for its animation and writing, which were superior to other shows that were on the air at the time. Nowadays, with shows like Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, Gravity Falls, and The Owl House, it's hard for modern viewers to see why the show was so revolutionary for animation.
  • Although Blue's Clues wasn't the first preschool show to use Fake Interactivity (that honor goes to Winky Dink), it certainly popularized it. While the show itself is still popular, to the point where it got a reboot in 2019, with many other preschool shows like Bear in the Big Blue House, Dora the Explorer, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, and Bubble Guppies trying to copy the show's interactive format, Blue's Clues doesn't seem quite as original as it did back in '96.
  • When Bugs Bunny first said, "What's up, Doc?" in the 1940 short, A Wild Hare, it was a shock in ways modern audiences simply can't imagine or appreciate. In 1940, audiences saw the hunter (Elmer Fudd, of course), heard the hunter say he was hunting wabbits (er, rabbits), and then they saw the rabbit. They were expecting that rabbit to scream, run, pick a fight, play dead, do anything except strike up a casual conversation with the guy trying to kill him. So, when Bugs did that, he brought the house down - a response that led to it becoming his Catchphrase. Nowadays, not only does nobody find, "What's up, Doc?" funny, most people don't even realize it was ever supposed to be funny in the first place. It's just that thing Bugs always says in nearly every cartoon he's in.
    • That particular setup is a Shout-Out to no less than Clark Gable (maybe the greatest male Hollywood star at the time) in It Happened One Night, in which the iconic actor appears in a scene casually talking while eating a carrot. While it goes unnoticed for modern viewers, it must have started a big and loud laugh from the audience back then. The "Doc" part also would've reminded them of It Happened One Night, since calling people "Doc" was the Verbal Tic of one of its more memorable supporting characters.
    • According to the book Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, Tex Avery (the guy who directed the short!), after having re-watched the short sometime in the 1970s, stated he didn't understand why the short was so popular or why audiences found the cartoon so hilarious. He even said that he didn't find a single moment of the cartoon funny, and that the pacing is quite slow and boring.
  • Codename: Kids Next Door and Xiaolin Showdown were the first mainstream Western animated comedies to undergo Cerebus Syndrome and heavily experiment with a mix of serialized storytelling alongside more episodic fare, predating shows like Adventure Time and Gravity Falls by several years. Any new viewers going back to watch these early 2000s cartoons would have trouble understanding why these shows' approach to worldbuilding, season-long story arcs, and regular use of Chekhov's Gun was so special at the time. These days, such cartoons have become more common. Back then, they were the only ones doing it.
  • Daria is the quintessential self-aware high-school program that broke from all established conventions and deeply satirized American culture and the teenage world view, at a time "teen shows" were generally limited to light and comedic fare like Saved by the Bell and Welcome Freshmen. The tropes and archetypes have shown up in just about everything aimed at or about teenagers since and both the light and comedic, and the dark and snarky tropes have been deconstructed, exaggerated, played straight and pretty much run into the ground since the initial run of the show in the late 1990s. It's hard, if not impossible, for people to appreciate just how much this show impacted an entire generation.
  • Disney animation from the 1930s and 1940s: Think of this: many animation techniques have all been pioneered and perfected by the Walt Disney Company: synchronizing animation with sound, color animation, animated features, making characters appear as if they are actual personalities, dramatic atmosphere, overcoming technical difficulties (streaming rivers, ocean water, rain, light effects, shadows, fire,...), detailed backgrounds, having large groups of characters appear in the same scene, avoiding continuity errors, storyboarding scenes,... And all of it was done by hand! Yet nowadays most people take it all for granted, failing to see how groundbreaking all these innovations were at the time and still are.
    • Mickey Mouse: The world's most iconic cartoon character of all time is still popular ever since his creation in 1928, yet most people wouldn't exactly call him their favorite Disney character at all. Ever since the second half of the 1930s Mickey changed into a bland character who is more an extra in his own films and lets Donald Duck or Goofy steal the show. Many people nowadays wonder how on Earth this character ever became such a universal success? In reality, much of the early 1930s Mickey cartoons and comic strips show Mickey engaging in heroic adventures and use his strength and wits to overcome problems and villains, which is far more entertaining than what he would eventually become. And Mickey's success effectively proved that animated cartoons could be an artform and business at the same time. Without that mouse most of today's cartoons wouldn't exist.
    • "Steamboat Willie": For a modern day viewer it is certainly not Mickey's best cartoon and one might wonder how on Earth this ever got such a popularity that it practically launched the Walt Disney Company into the empire it still is today? Even the novelty that it was the first cartoon with pitch perfect sound synchronization looks rather unimpressive today. For instance, there is no speech, only music and extremely primitive sound effects. But at the time there was literally nothing like it! (It helps that Steamboat Willie is still very funny more than 80 years later, if perhaps only on a Cringe Comedy level now.)
    • Playful Pluto: A 1934 Mickey Mouse cartoon which is famous for a scene where Pluto gets stuck on a piece of flypaper. At the time this moment was groundbreaking in terms of character animation, because for the first time a character seemed to be thinking for himself, making the suspension of disbelief completely disappear. People who look at this scene nowadays will probably not be that impressed by it.
    • "The Tortoise and the Hare": The scenes where the hare runs at Super-Speed were very impressive in 1935 and influenced many other cartoons that came afterwards, especially Looney Tunes. Yet, nowadays it actually doesn't look that notably quick.
    • "The Three Little Pigs": When looking back, this classic Disney short is quaint. It's a straightforward adaptation of the story with good animation and a catchy song. Yet in 1933, this was effectively the Toy Story of its time; Chuck Jones commented that the characters looked similar, but acted totally differently, which was a huge step forward at the time.
  • Donkey Kong Country was groundbreaking in one respect — not for being among the first wave of 3D-animated show, but rather, it was the first full-length, regular CG TV series to be animated entirely using Motion Capturenote . While now widely used in blockbuster films and video games, Donkey Kong Country's use of motion capture was unprecedented enough at the time that an Emmy nomination for the show was rejected on the grounds motion capture could not be considered animation. Nowadays though, the show looks hardly impressive, and modern audiences are more likely to creep out or laugh at the animation's frequent glitches, stilted movement, and goofy facial expressions.
  • Doug premiered in 1991, long before most Slice of Life animated series were created. Nowadays, everything in Doug looks rather cliche, though that's mainly due to the nature of the genre meaning that many shows of this type are stuck using similar plots.
  • Felix the Cat: Back in 1919 and the 1920s Felix was the first cartoon character to become universally popular. There were several reasons for this. It was much more smoothly animated and took actual advantage from the fact that it is a cartoon by having visual puns and physically impossible gags, something earlier cartoons didn't do. Nowadays, however, with the advantage of animation in the wake of Disney modern viewers can find the silent Felix cartoons quite underwhelming, as there are no other characters besides Felix and most of the action is not as wild or funny as modern cartoons.
  • The Flintstones has been hit pretty hard by this trope. Let alone being the first true animated sitcom, The Flintstones was the first animated program to feature a predominantly human cast and episodes spanning an entire 30 minutes. Up until that point, cartoons were usually brief seven or eight minute shorts featuring funny animals (with a few exceptions, such as Betty Boop, Popeye, and Mr. Magoo) either played in theaters before a movie or pieced together for television broadcasts. Hard though it may be to believe, episodic cartoons in general (let alone shows like The Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy) would have never existed if not for this classic series about a "modern stone age family." But to modern viewers The Flintstones looks more like your average corny 1960s TV sitcom, only with a lot of Anachronism Stew, lame rock and stone puns and animals used as modern day appliances, not to mention the obvious laugh track.
  • Hanna-Barbera and their creations, big time. When they made it big in the late 1950s and 1960s, the idea of animation — a painstaking, laborious form of entertainment — being produced on a television schedule and budget was considered a hopeless task at best, but their cost-effective, widely appealing shows became revolutionary for such. But as more sophisticated production and creator-driven content took over in the late 1980s and 1990s, many in the modern age just can't grasp how Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera became such big names in the world of animation.
  • Inspector Gadget was one of the first shows that signaled the end of The Dark Age of Animation in part because it was one of the first cartoons produced for first-run syndication instead of network television. This not only enabled a higher animation quality than most of its contemporaries, but the absence of network censors also meant fewer restrictions than what cartoons airing on Saturday Morning had to deal with (Gadget, Penny and Brain were often put in peril, which would have been unthinkable on a Saturday Morning cartoon). As the cartoons that came after it were given even larger budgets and fewer restrictions, it may be hard for modern viewers to appreciate how much of a step up the show was.
  • The relative tameness of old cartoons is lovingly parodied on The Simpsons with "That Happy Cat", an early Max Fleischer–style "Itchy and Scratchy" cartoon, in which all Scratchy does is walk along a street. Even the 1920s and 1930s, Mickey could be subject to this after the rise of Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry. It was also parodied in Animaniacs, in an Origins Episode, where the three protagonists' history was established. Supposedly, they were first inserted in a cartoon with a character named "Buddy" to liven it up, after the producer claimed Buddy was "a cure for insomnia" (Buddy was in fact, a real Warner Bros. character who was phased out because his cartoons were boring).
  • The Legend of Korra was the first major Western kids cartoon to have its main character be LGBT, with Korra turning out to be bisexual and the show ending with her and Asami holding hands at the end of the Grand Finale, as they go on a vacation in the Spirit World together. While not very explicit, requiring Word of Gay to confirming their intent due to being a bit too ambiguous to some, it was the most the showrunners could actually do at the time. Either way, it was a big leap forward at the time, and predated the much more explicit queer representation that would follow in children's programming over the next decade in shows such as Steven Universe, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Blue's Clues & You!, and The Owl House.
  • Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures suffers from this badly nowadays. It was a revolutionary show and concept for its day, and essentially served as a training ground for future animation pros today, and for bringing back cartoon animation in the vein of classic cartoons to the mainstream in TV. However, today, due to the success of all the shows created in its wake, especially The Ren & Stimpy Show, most modern viewers might not find it revolutionary. Not helping is that the show had many production woes and animation and art mistakes (as attested by former staff, including John Kricfalusi).
  • My Little Pony
    • My Little Pony Tales had a considerable impact on the Slice of Life genre. These days, however, the series appears to be cliched and rather dated, even more so ever since My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic premiered.
    • Speaking of which, Friendship Is Magic eventually became this to The New '10s cartoons, despite being one of the flagship shows of its era. Even a quarter-way into its decade-spanning run, newcomers (regardless of their opinion on the show overall) were baffled at why this show EXPLODED onto the scene in 2010 and was seen as fresh and innovative, but that's because the innovations it made were since surpassed and/or so subtle only those who have been closely following TV cartoons at the time would notice:
      • 1. Its approach to feminism and diversity. Prior to this show, the only way a show for girls would escape the Girl-Show Ghetto was to appeal to boys as much as possible, with an edgy, action focused tone and centered around Tomboy Action Girls. But FIM pioneered what can be called "pink-positive feminism", by doubling down on the Lisa Frank-esque pastel palette and giving its main characters a diverse group of personalities that range from gruff to gentle and everything in between. But nowadays, we have shows like Steven Universe, which combines the aforementioned Pink Positive emphasis on personality diversity with more actual diversity, with an emphasis on differing races, sexual and even gender identities, that make FIM's innovations seem downright quaint in comparison; especially considering its first idea of "racial diversity" is a zebra Witch Doctor that spoke in rhyme. (That last point is questionable, though, as the three pony types were originally intended as an allegory for different races living together in harmony.)
      • 2. Its sweet-hearted tone. In the decade preceding FIM's premiere, in the wake of movies like Shrek and shows like Invader Zim, Western Animation was overwhelmingly made up of Sadist Shows with Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonists getting into Zany Schemes and getting Grounded Forever with Parental Bonuses and Toilet Humour in between. This is because there was a general feeling that the only way to make a non-action kids' show feel "mature" was to make it as cynical and "edgy" as possible; anything else was little more than preschool fodder. FIM proved that an emphasis on love and friendship, with characters that overwhelmingly, unironically love and support each other, could be legitimately heartwarming and deep; thereby pioneering what is now known as "hopepunk" and/or "noblebright" in cartoons well before shows like the aforementioned Steven Universe. Nowadays, though the "cynical kids' cartoon" lives on through shows like Teen Titans Go! and The Amazing World of Gumball, cartoons showing deep friendships and loving families have very much become the norm, even in the previously almost-completely nihilistic world of Animated Shock Comedies, to the point where again, FIM seems downright quaint.
  • The Pjs existed at the time where stop-motion animation was not common in the television landscape, outside of holiday specials, short-form series, as well as the occasional Saturday morning cartoon or cable television program. It truly was unlike any other animated series of its era, to the point where Amid Amidi of Animation World Magazine sang his praises on its animation after its premiere and art director Nelson Lowry won a Primetime Emmy Award in 2000. Most viewers watching the series today will most likely not appreciate how impressive (for the time) its animation was, with the advent of more mainstream series such as Robot Chicken (which would reference The PJs in a segment parodiying fictional series finales).
  • ReBoot was the very first fully CGI television show that came out in the early nineties and was a pretty big success at the time. In this day and age, shows with CGI are completely common, and most people would consider ReBoot pretty tame in terms of computer accomplishments, although it is still hailed today as one of the best, if not the best, CGI show of all time, with its biggest competitor for the title being another Mainframe series: Beast Wars. One thing that didn't help was that a year after it premiered Toy Story came out, with a movie-level budget and production time frame. Thus many people were dismissing ReBoot as a cheap, inferior product as part of Tough Act to Follow.
  • The Ren & Stimpy Show: Unprecedented and freakish when it debuted, it practically invented the "Grossout Show" paradigm. The gratuitous amounts of snot, Toilet Humour and Family-Unfriendly Violence were something completely new and unknown to the audience. Nowadays, Ren and Stimpy wouldn't shock or disgust many people (unless we're talking about the "Adult Party" version), with many cartoons that use similar tropes. However, the DVD boxes still sport parental guidance labels on them, and Common Sense Media rates it as unsuitable for viewers below 15. Honestly, how many kids' cartoons these days show characters pulling out their nerve endings with a pair of tweezers?
  • Robot Chicken is an interesting example in that it's become this trope due to an entirely different medium. When it debuted back in 2005, its unique style of rapid-fire, witty humor and clever parodies of beloved pop culture icons simply couldn't be found in any other stop-motion animated show. The closest it resembled are the cutaway gags in Family Guy, which is an animated cartoon. To an extent, that's still true; to this day, nothing like it exists on television. However, it's spawned countless imitators on the Web, a good number of which manage to stand out even in comparison to the show they imitate (see asdfmovie, The Lazer Collection, and Sonic Shorts for a few examples), so for someone who started on one of those series and was then introduced to Robot Chicken later, it likely wouldn't come off as anything special.
  • Even Rocko's Modern Life may have suffered from this:
    • Back when it first premiered, the adult jokes were extremely impressive, and shocked many people. Lots of kids' cartoons nowadays, however, do the same thing, and so Rocko may not seem that impressive to some people who are used to watching Adventure Time or Regular Show, the latter of which got "pissed" past S&P.
    • The show also became influential over the "main trio" set-up, establishing definite personalities for each character: the serious/abrasive one (also the nominal leader/voice of reason), the neurotic/dorky one and the silly/fun-loving one. Many animated shows since then have followed this pattern, some subverting it by having either the "serious" or "neurotic" one becoming a foil to the other two.
  • Rocky and Bullwinkle is generally considered by many to have truly popularised Medium Awareness in an animated series. Surprisingly for a cartoon made during The Dark Age of Animation, it popularised or even pioneered various ideas including the Interactive Narrator, Who Writes This Crap?!, and pretty much all of No Fourth Wall. These ultimately made the show very influential on many series during The Renaissance Age of Animation, but at a cost it led to multiple other shows to run on the same kind of awareness. Nowadays, where this is now the norm for modern comedic cartoons (most notably The Amazing World of Gumball, which turned it almost into an art form), it's very hard for modern day viewers to understand why Rocky and Bullwinkle was so influential.
  • The Simpsons certainly fell under this trope as time went on:
    • The first two seasons look really awkward to anyone who was introduced to it at a later date, but it's hard to overstate how revolutionary the show was at the time, and how quickly it became a phenomenon.
    • This show as a whole is very much a case of this trope by this point. During the show's golden age of the early to mid 90's, the show was extremely original, and not only because it was an animated program intended for adults. Its particular style of satirical, subversive humor made it stand out not only as a television cartoon, but as a comedy. To younger people who have spent their adolescent years watching shows like South Park and Family Guy, whose brand of humor is very much derived from The Simpsons, it is probably quite hard to appreciate just how groundbreaking the yellow skinned family and their show were back in their heyday.
    • Understanding how controversial it was back then is also hard to do nowadays. The first season seems pretty tame, yet there were groups devoted to banning this show and its merchandise. Bart in particular was seen as a very bad example to children for being a mischievous troublemaker. Yet, compared to later more "problem child" cartoon characters who are unambiguously evil like Cartman or Stewie nowadays he almost comes across as adorable. Bart's most devious behaviour in the first season was sawing off the head of Jebediah Springfield's statue in an attempt to impress some delinquents, an action he immediately regretted.note 
    • The numerous pop culture (primarily film) references in The Simpsons, which did it directly, instead of making veiled allusions or caricatures. Soon Disney movies like Aladdin, DreamWorks films like Shrek and Shark Tale and every adult animated series, from South Park to Family Guy have been including references to popular culture ever since. In fact, Family Guy itself with its cutaway gags with references to popular films — even avoiding Small Reference Pools (not afraid to reference sometimes obscure authors or films) was one reason the show actually got noticed in the day. Nowadays, it's seen as "stale".
    • Itchy and Scratchy's violent cartoons were originally intended as a parody of traditional cartoon violence like in Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes, which was often very painful, but never bloody or fatal. So Itchy & Scratchy's gruesome battles surprised and shocked viewers because of its violence being too extreme for mainstream animation. Nowadays, thanks to controversial and often gory shows like South Park, Family Guy, Happy Tree Friends, and [adult swim] shows such as Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Robot Chicken, and Superjail!, the violence in Itchy and Scratchy doesn't seem that noticeable. Also, the disappearance of almost all pre-Hanna-Barbera animation on television means that the original reference target and thus the joke is lost on very younger generations.
    • The concept of the trope itself is brought up in the first "Treehouse of Horror" episode. Lisa reads Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven to Bart as an example of a truly scary story. Bart is naturally unimpressed and wonders why anyone would find a poem scary. Lisa theorizes that people in the mid-19th century were just easier to scare, having not seen any of the modern day's gore-fests.
      Bart: Oh yeah! It's like watching Friday the 13th: Part 1. Pretty tame by today's standards.
    • The Simpsons was revolutionary as a Sitcom and for comedy programs in general. As just one example, being animated meant The Simpsons weren't restricted to sets and Studio Audiences and gave them the freedom to introduce huge numbers of characters, not limited by actors and budget. It may not seem like much, but audience expectations changed as a result. If it weren't for The Simpsons, we probably wouldn't have things like Arrested Development, or, if we did, they would look very different.
    • The Simpsons also paved the way for continuity in an animated series. The episode "A Milhouse Divided" was subversive in that not only did Milhouse's parents, who got divorced mid-episode, not get back together by the end of the episode, later episodes depicted them living apart. (In fact even before this, Lisa's conversion to vegetarianism was a notable permanent character change.) Before then, all animated series, and most live-action sitcoms, had no continuity and relied on the Snap Back if an episode didn't end the way it started. This was even brought up in the DVD commentary. Nowadays, many popular cartoons have strong continuity; its sister series, Futurama in particular, so much so that The Simpsons is often labeled with Status Quo Is God, as its own continuity is quite mild. "A Milhouse Divided" feels pretty tame by comparison; even the episode itself lampshades that Luanne and Kirk are pretty minor characters and therefore their divorce had very little impact on the show as a whole (compared to Homer and Marge, which suffer yet another marriage crisis in the episode but promptly get back together).
    • Matt Groening wanted The Simpsons to have a unique feel compared to the cartoons around the time (namely Disney and Hanna-Barbera). So he decided that the show was to have cartoon characters obeying real life physics (meaning: no squash and plump, no wacky sounds while characters do things or exaggerated facial expressions). Nowadays, most cartoons with an all-human cast are similarly restrained. Indeed, these days it would be considered strange to see "rubbery" humanoid characters in most cartoons, even most children's cartoons.
    • The Simpsons is also often acknowledged as having been a Genre-Killer for the entire genre of "functional family sitcom", a genre that completely dominated the airwaves in the late 80s and early 90s, and that many early episodes directly satirized. Homer in particular was a satire of the Standard '50s Father, an archetype that was still going strong, and, along with Al Bundy, he basically dunked it straight in the Dead Horse Trope pile overnight. Nowadays, family sitcoms are nowhere near as overwhelming, and wholly unironic family sitcoms are borderline nonexistent; it's expected that they be at least a little dysfunctional or cynical. Homer's own archetype, the Bumbling Dad, has gone from a sudden and surprising attack on the role of the father and American values to the standard sitcom protagonist, and often knocked for its frequently irritating nature and sexist implications.
  • South Park can apply this trope to itself. The Denser and Wackier early seasons seem shallow and unsatisfying compared to the slicker, more robust, dramatic and sophisticated episodes that followed, but back when it debuted its unique brand of surrealism, sociopathic satire and "less is more" animation were quite captivating to witness.
    • Also, many of the jokes and issues that seemed downright shocking in the first couple of seasons now seem pretty tame and commonplace. A perfect example of this is the Season 1 episode "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride." Today, the episode's premise (Stan's dog being gay and Stan needing to accept it) seems like pretty standard TV-14 cartoon fare. However, in 1997, this was about as edgy and socially conscious as cartoon plots got.
    • And back then, practically every episode was considered "the most obscene thing on television", earning the series the wrath of many a Moral Guardian. Nowadays, the show is mostly left alone by Moral Guardians (in an ironic twist, even some conservative Christian leaders admit to being fans!) and only makes the headlines over a depiction of something offensive to a specific group (ex. "Trapped in the Closet" and "200/201").
    • A good example of the show invoking this onto itself is with the character of Eric Cartman. In the first four seasons, he was easily the most manipulative and foul-mouthed of the main characters but still a relatively harmless Bratty Half-Pint. He even had moments of genuine concern and/or empathy from time to time (such as in "Cartman's Mom Is A Dirty Slut"). Compared to the conniving sociopath he would become in Season 5 ("Scott Tenorman Must Die" being the big turning point for his character), the Cartman of the first few seasons seems almost adorable now.
    • An in-universe example occurs in "The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs". The boys are assigned to read The Catcher in the Rye, and are excited because of the controversy it caused... but become disappointed with it and write the eponymous book as what they think is controversial in response.
    • As Todd in the Shadows pointed out, even some of the show's early attempts at socio-political satire have aged poorly over time. In the late 1990's/early 2000's, the show's use of contrarianism to make a point (and provide laughs) was pretty radical. Episodes like "Gnomes", "Rainforest Schmainforest" and "Cartman's Silly Hate Crime 2000" were unique in how they lampooned and took a somewhat contrary stance on how issues like Corporate Takeovers, Environmentalism and Racism were usually depicted in television and film. Today, thanks to the rise in things like social media and alternative news outlets like Breitbart, the socio-political contrarianism of the show's third and fourth seasons doesn't seem so shocking or unique anymore.
    • And the show's crude, minimalist paper cut-out style was fascinating to watch in animation, as there wasn't much like it at the time. Nowadays it's hard to find adult animation that doesn't use a deliberately crude, simplistic art style.
  • Space Ghost Coast to Coast pioneered the style of later [adult swim] cartoons: low budget; extreme Limited Animation with only stock poses and animations for characters; silly, borderline nonsensical conversations; and a dash of random humor (added in increasingly large doses as the series progressed). It was groundbreaking when it originally came out in 1994, but today it seems tame compared to later Adult Swim shows such as its More Popular Spin Off, Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
  • Xavier: Renegade Angel, an Adult Swim cartoon running in the late 2000's, utilizes Source Filmmaker-esque animation style and ironic humor so far ahead of its time that many of the jokes have found their way into the mainstream "meme" culture now, and will probably still continue to for some time to come.
  • Tex Avery created many jokes and situations in his works at Warner Bros. and MGM that were once surprising and hilariously funny, and still are, but have been imitated and plagiarized so much by other cartoon studios that these jokes can make some modern audiences yawn because they are so predictable and overdone. Examples are the Eye Pop, the Overly-Long Tongue, the Wild Take, the endless chases, characters using sticks of dynamite or dropping anvils on each other, characters walking on thin air before realizing that there's nothing beneath them whereupon they fall down, the Painted Tunnel, Real Train joke,...
  • Back in The '50s, the cartoons from the UPA cartoon studio (especially Mr. Magoo) were actually regarded as being very cutting-edge by having extremely sophisticated plots and animation at the time (to the point that a Magoo HiFi album was released in 1957). But nowdays, these storylines are the norm, as well as their then-groundbreaking stylized animation.
  • VeggieTales was groundbreaking in a lot of ways that are lost. While Christian media is routinely made fun of by internet critics, VeggieTales gets somewhat of a pass (apart from the stuff made after the production studio was sold off) because of how groundbreaking it was - not just for Christian media:
    • It was one of the first examples of an All-CGI Cartoon... no, not just for Christian productions, it was one of the first CG cartoons period. The first three episodes predated Toy Story - and the first episode predated ReBootnote . These days, they look incredibly wonky, but it's hard to appreciate just how different this was. Especially since the first couple of episodes were done by only a handful of animators.
    • It was one of the few religion-based programs that had actual popularity outside of its Christian demographic. It contained some legitimately good slapstick and just the right amount of weird to keep kids' attention in the 90s... and enough jokes for parents that didn't rely on sex or toilet humour. Opinions about Seasonal Rot aside, a modern viewer would be surprised at how closely in line its style of comedy (which includes a good dose of referential gags and observational jokes) fell in line with beloved secular programming of the era.
    • It also had silly songs that were legitimately good, and still have people humming them today - to the point where they had entire albums released (and they weren't just sold in the Christian Rock section). They also emulated song genres without coming off as cheesy attempts to be relevant like Christian Rock is often criticized as being. Some of their songs, especially during the series' height in the late 90s and early 2000s were well-meaning parodies of songs popular around the time. Unfortunately, this has been lost in the decades following VeggieTales - a modern viewer will probably just not get the subtle jokes, since many tropes in music videos and genres are played straight for laughs.

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