Boomerang dead?

The downside is that I keep missing the beginnings of shows! Who knows what came before? Only the last act will matter anyway!

Traditional TV will never go away, due to old people and young children. You need something you can play for them and will be self-managing indefinitely. Traditional TV may mutate closer to something like a self-running Netflix service, but TV that plays itself will never go away.

last great decade? Do you mean Entertainment wise?

edited 20th Nov '14 4:11:33 PM by teddy

Every decade is the "last great decade" to someone. Hell, some people still refer to the people around in WWI as The Greatest Generation.

Even further back, there is literally an Archie comic that waxes nostalgic about the 1890s. And this is a really old Archie comic.

Point is, everything looks better in retrospect if you're not looking at it objectively or with a critical eye.

edited 20th Nov '14 6:17:41 PM by Odd1

I thought the World War I generation was the Lost Generation. I usually hear "the Greatest Generation" (which makes me vomit in my mouth a little) applied to the one that fought in World War II.

Obviously, I agree with Odd1 on this one; every generation has its good and bad, but we tend to sweep the bad away in our collective memory.

Looking over things, I note that Boomerang, back when it was a Cartoon Network block, would air stuff at least 20 years old (like some of the later episodes of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? that they aired. This would suggest that it's about time for Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls to make their debuts on the channel next year.

It's more than a little sobering, at times, to see just what would count as nostalgic for those younger than you.

Thread hop.

You can't kill Boomerang.

It'll always come back.

You can break a Boomerang, and then it won't come back.

......

Touché.

Those have been on the channel for a couple of years now.

It's strange that now The Powerpuff Girls are getting a reboot making the Boomerang transition obsolete, But Dexter is still.... Actually, Dexter has done enough and we've had our fill.

Dexter's Laboratory already had its own mediocre reboot.

Really?

When?

Do you mean the Savino-Era episodes? PPG had those too

Yeah. Those. Thought it had been cancelled then brought back?

Oh....for a second there I thought you were talking about Johnny Test which is essentially the Dexter's Laboratory family dynamic reversed and Flanderized.

Although I never quite understood why they made Johnny (who is pretty much male Dee Dee) the main protagonist...

edited 28th Nov '14 4:23:36 AM by Bleddyn

I don't watch Johnny Test and don't care enough about it to discuss it. I was referring to the actual reboot the show Dexters Laboratory had, which was a mixed bag at best. It had some pretty good episodes, but it also had a bunch of outright awful episodes.

Dex's dad dancing to Flashdance-based music will never not be funny.

Eh. It wasn't funny the first time, just a waste of an episode's budget.

edited 28th Nov '14 5:17:58 AM by Odd1

I remember not liking the reboot that much as a kid, but I'll probably like it now..since I haven't watched it in forever lol

The hate for it does seem overboard.

edited 28th Nov '14 9:37:30 AM by teddy

It's eh. A mixed bag.

That's a pretty accurate description.There are some entertaining ones(like the one when Dexter and Mandark's dads face off),but there are ones that are boring or just plain bad(like the one with the random anime villain)

I wonder if Savino ever took the time to study humor before getting into cartoons. I, for one, know I could never write for a cartoon because I have very dry humor.

@59 Ah... well, like I said, it's sobering to me, at age 35, to see just what counts as nostalgic these days. Maybe it's because I had to watch USA Cartoon Express so much for cartoons when I was younger, but I actually still feel it for some of that 70's Hanna-Barbera schlock that I still unironically enjoy, like Hong Kong Phooey or The Herculoids.

@65 Well, to be fair, there was a nice-sized contingent that felt that Dee Dee was the best character in Dexter's Laboratory - she was self-confident, tried to be nice to everyone, and had such a fascinating sense of wonder. Plus, I don't think that she was ever malicious. I could see a good argument, if one was doing a riff on Dexter's Laboratory, of making the Dee Dee analogue the main character.

Now, as anyone who has seen Johnny Test knows, Johnny has very little in common with Dee Dee, particularly when you compare him to how I described her above. But that gets into the whole argument over the show's quality, and that's not exactly the topic at hand.

I wasn't an avid watcher of Dexter's Laboratory myself; I remember not liking the early episodes at all (felt way too formulaic at first), but I saw some of the later ones (like the classic "D & Dee Dee" or that one where they riffed on Speed Racer) and felt it had taken huge leaps forward. That said, I have no idea about various eras of the show; I'm sure someone will be sure to tell me which years/seasons are the best.

Yeah, were there three seasons with Tartakovsky, or two? In either case the first season was the weakest, until the reboot.

There were two seasons with Tartakovsky. The first season is also a bit of a mixed bag at times, but I think it's solid overall. The animation style is weird in lot of those episodes, though, with Dexter and Dee Dee looking just plain ugly at times—maybe Off-Model would be the better term to use there, actually. And Dee Dee in a lot of those earlier episodes can get more irritating than funny, whereas later on she grew into an actually really fun character.

I do have a soft spot for the shorts that were made before it became a full-fledged series, though, particularly the initial pilot:

And now after the brief bit of research I had to do to find that episode again, I just realized, looking at the episodes in Season 1 again...a lot of those are actually some of my favorite episodes of the show (or, if not my favorites, classic episodes regardless). Really, Dexters Laboratory had a pretty fantastic run overall. I'm starting to remember now why it was my favorite show as a kid.