The John Kricfalusi Appreciation thread

It was Harlan Ellison, who joked about making a Disney porno.

Practically every animation studio, I think, lets the animators draw whatever they wish, on the grounds that no kid is ever going to see it.

Why revive this thread again? I found this interview.

http://www.benjaminarcand.com/spumco/html/view01.html

I think it's interesting to find Kricfalusi's likes and dislikes in non-animated culture (except he doesn't mention Frank Zappa). Note that he praises The Powerpuff Girls for its color styling and states that Cow And Chicken is "drawn beautifully." Both were created by fans of Ren And Stimpy so I can safely say it was inevitable...

John has said that about both PPG and C&C on his blog, so it doesn't surprise me lol.

Now, you see, I don't read his blog, so I wouldn't know that...

Some things I just do not do.

Well, he didn't make an article devoted to praising the two shows. It was like a paragraph about them in different articles. So it wouldn't be too easy to find.

I also follow his tweeter

I repeat: I don't read his blog, I would not know it.

Looking at John K.'s likes mentioned in the interview above you get the sense that not only does he think animation fell to shit around 1970 but so did the rest of culture...

Well, he was born in 1955 (same year as my dad...huh), and most people's tastes tend to get solidified by the time they're out of their 20s. So the '70s would be his natural cutoff date.

pretty much this. John's probably bound to enjoy more entertainment before the 70s. It's not a bad thing or anything. I like a lot of things that are pre 70s too. So do many people I know irl.

edited 30th Nov '14 12:51:20 AM by teddy

Which leads me to my thought...

Is the idea that mainstream animation dropped in quality in the 70s actually based in fact or based on the opinions of the baby boomers who went to work in the cartoon industry and outgrew cartoons a long time ago?

edited 30th Nov '14 6:07:34 AM by Aldo930

The latter.

Animation, like everything else, has its up and downs, so yeah, there have been periods of overall frank decline, but also periods of real renaissance ever since. It's not a black and white thing.

This happens a lot more than you would think.

Personally, I feel there really isn't such a thing as an honest-to-God drop in quality followed by a renaissance. There's always something interesting going on.

During the 70s, when Saturday morning was dominated by Scooby Doo clones (most of which weren't really that bad anyway), we had Ralph Bakshi and Sally Cruikshank doing animation for adults. If we included Japan nobody would see it as a drop in quality.

edited 30th Nov '14 6:38:15 AM by Aldo930

Ralph Baskhi was good, but the majority of American tv cartoons were copies each other, had lazy animation, bland colors, and were boring. If you compare them to the cartoons from a decade and so ago, it was very underwhelming.

my opinion of course.

edited 30th Nov '14 10:18:53 AM by teddy

Hence why I said 'periods of overall frank decline'.

I still wouldn't say "overall."

It's my opinion that the really, truly awful crap never gets remembered at all. Take the 80s. Oh, sure, we all know about stuff like He-Man and The Smurfs, and we can talk about how they weren't very good, but you never hear people talk about the badness of shows like The Little Clowns of Happytown...

edited 30th Nov '14 7:42:30 AM by Aldo930

A testament on how low animation could get in the 70s and 80s.

Again, the reason we think of stuff like this as the lowest of the low is that that's what we remember. (Some of it doesn't even look that bad anyway.)

You can look on Wikipedia for the Saturday morning schedules of every year since 1960 and find several awful, bottom-of-the-barrel toons that have been forgotten and never received a rerun except, maybe, somewhere in Central Africa or Southeast Asia.

That, to me, is probably the measure of a toon's awfulness; not only does it have no fans and barely lasted a season, it has never aired since its release anywhere in the world!

edited 30th Nov '14 8:00:43 AM by Aldo930

In case anyone hasn't seen, he's a much better quality (and slightly more complete) version of the "Cans Without Labels" teaser:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cZA8Y9oYws

edited 13th Jul '15 12:56:17 PM by Psi001

Not being remembered probably speaks more to their mediocrity then their out and out awfulness. Not to mention there could be a number reasons why something is forgotten that go beyond quality or popularity.

As for John K's taste, I guess it wouldn't surprise me if it was just him being "old and set in his ways" kind of thing. Though I don't see the 70s as being all that remarkable animation wise, at least on the domestic television side. Movies and foreign offerings are almost always a different story.

There are a lot of pretty mediocre shows that have been seen after they first aired. If a show never appears after it first aired except on TV stations in a fairly obscure foreign country, then you can probably judge its quality by that alone - and that'd be "crappy."

Are we being culturally centric and judging countries on their obscurity now?

John just made an update about Cans without labels through Kickstarter, he said there are 6 scenes left to finish. I guess some of the work he's gotten(e.g the adult swim ads and the recently announced Simpsons couch gag for Treehouse of horror) have gotten in the way from him finishing up the cartoon.

Yeah, rememeber that for something like 40 years or so, ABC, CBS, and NBC each had around 4 hours of programming on Saturday mornings that they usually filled with something animated. That's not counting stuff that was in syndication on weekday afternoons. There's a LOT of stuff that was entirely forgettable and has been, justly, forgotten.

I do think that's largely what fuels a lot of people's golden recollections of the movies/television of the past. For every film of the "Golden Age of Hollywood" that is remembered fondly, there's lots of crap that few remember at all (like the first two adaptations of The Maltese Falcon before the Bogart one).

I really like the music video he did for Weird Al's Close, but No Cigar. It's wonderfully demented.

That one's good, kinda; it's one of the few things post-original Ren And Stimpy he did that's entertaining, the other being his Jetsons shorts.