Audience Alienating Era / Western Animation

A No Recent Examples rule applies to this trope. Examples shouldn't be added until five years after the era begins. Please also try to avoid Complaining About Shows You Don't Like.

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• Any sequel to Ben 10 can be considered as either an Audience-Alienating Era, a Contested Sequel, or suffering from Sequelitis by fans (but not all fans):
  • Ben 10: Alien Force: Due to its Darker and Edgier tone, the Retcon involving Gwen's powers coming from aliens rather than magic, Kevin being a good guy and his origins getting retconned from mutant to alien-human hybrid, the Romantic Plot Tumor storyline of Gwen and Kevin, and Ben becoming a jerk in season three.
  • Ben 10: Ultimate Alien: Due to the tone turning too bleak in the latter half of its first season when Ben planned to kill Kevin (when he reverted back to his evil ways after absorbing the Ultimatrix), Vilgax being the Final Boss for a second time, the Romantic Plot Tumor of Ben and Julie, and Ben returning to being a jerk in the second and last season.
  • Ben 10: Omniverse: Due to its Denser and Wackier tone, art style, character redesigns, Gwen and Kevin demoted to recurring characters, Retcons, continuity errors, a Voodoo Shark plot twist that Manny, Helen, and Alan are humans who were genetically enhanced with alien powers as opposed to human-alien hybrids, the Arc Fatigue of the Incurseans story arc, attempts to be more like the original series, Ben being a Superboy-Prime type person when he recreates the entire universe after it was destroyed (implying that everyone from the previous series is dead and that everyone is just an identical copy), a major Plot Hole in which after Ben kills Malware in the past when the latter kills Feedback, which leads to him unable to rescan Feedback's species in the present as it contradicted that his original Omnitrix was destroyed at the end of Alien Force, therefore such a problem would not exist with the newer model, breaking up Ben and Julie in a very forced way (with Ben ultimately ending up with Kai), several cases of Flanderization, and the Seasonal Rot after the second season that the show didn't recover as the later six seasons were not well-received by fans, Although, one universally praised element from fans and detractors were the inclusions of Rook, Ester and Malware.
  • The 2016 reboot is considered to be this, with fans not happy with the reboot being more comedic than the original series, having the episode length cut from 22 minutes to 11, and the fact that it gets flack for similar reasons as Teen Titans Go! and The Powerpuff Girls (2016), though it has gotten better in recent seasons. This has gotten to the point that the sequels have been viewed more positively, though they're still divisive, with Omniverse being the most divisive of the sequels.
• The sexy chanteuse Betty Boop had to be heavily Bowdlerised by Moral Guardians after The Hays Code came into effect in the mid-1930s. This led to a serious drop-off in the quality and popularity of her shorts, since her character is intended to be 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. More specifically, pre-Hays Betty would often go on exciting and surreal adventures, where she was sexy but also had a place in the plot and was an active character. Post-Hays, her shorts can be summarized as "Betty sings, Betty has a problem, Grampy comes to fix it."
• Both of the Columbia Cartoons studios underwent their own declines.
  • The Screen Gems studio began to drop in quality around 1942, when Frank Tashlin left the studio following an argument with Columbia executives. He was initially replaced by Dave Fleischer, who was fired; Columbia then repeatedly hired producers who had even less staying power. A combination of nasty mismanagement and a lack of confident creative staff, which led the studio's output to largely be branded as diet-Looney Tunes by historians, eventually reached a point that they shuttered in 1946, to be replaced by UPA.
  • The quality of UPA's cartoons is generally agreed to have declined from around 1953 onwards. They still had many decent, even great cartoons later in the decade, but the combination of losing many of the studio's founding staff (including John Hubley himself) to The Hollywood Blacklist, other studios gradually luring away the best of their remaining animators and increasing dependance on stock characters like Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoingBoing, took their toll.
• It's safe to say that DC Comics' animation unit has been experiencing this for their TV stuff for CN when Young Justice (2010) and Green Lantern: The Animated Series got cancelled by Cartoon Network, which marked the downfall of the DC Nation block. While Beware the Batman got a good reception from critics and fans, it was Screwed by the Network and eventually aired its remaining episodes on [adult swim]. It's widely agreed that Teen Titans Go! is responsible for this happening in addition to CN's overexposure of the show and to the point that Justice League Action was largely ignored by CN. That being said, the unit has regained some goodwill when in 2016, it was confirmed that Young Justice would be Un-Canceled for a new season titled Outsiders, which was warmly received by fans and critics when it debuted in January 2019 as well as Harley Quinn a few months later, putting an end to the decline.
• Fans of Dora the Explorer think that it went downhill when the Explorer Stars were introduced in Season 3 (or when they were removed after Season 4).
• The Fairly OddParents! has been suffering this since its revival in 2008, with the show starting to recycle plots from previous seasons, many fan-favorite characters getting sidelined (if not disappearing altogether), the remaining characters suffering from Flanderization, excessive over-focus on Mr. Turner and Mr. Crocker for the sake of comedy (with the latter essentially replacing Vicky as the Big Bad in these seasons), and Retcons and continuity errors becoming more abundant. There was also the release of the three poorly received live-action films, the premise of which fans felt ruined the ending of and completely invalidates the message of "Channel Chasers". While fans are split on where exactly the show's audience-alienating era began, seasons 9 and 10, which gave us Sparky and Chloe, are widely agreed to be the low point of the series. Nickelodeon's poor treatment of the show also didn't help, as it got moved to their less accessible secondary channel Nicktoons halfway through season 10, then later changed their primary animation technique from frame-by-frame digital ink and paint to Adobe Animate due to time constraints - which ended up being so cheap and tween-heavy that it served as the final nail in the coffin. Though the main show was ultimately cancelled in 2017, there was eventually a live-action Sequel Series released on Paramount+ to overwhelmingly negative reactions. It only lasted a single season and was removed from streaming less than a year later.
• Flash Gordon in animation:
  • The second season of the 1979 Filmation Flash Gordon animated series, also known as The New Animated Adventures 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.
  • The 1996 Flash Gordon animated series, in which Ming was green (though admittedly that was a change previously made for the 1980s Defenders of the Earth cartoon). and Flash and Dale rode hoverboards.

• Gravity Falls:
  • Alex Hirsch actually ended the show after just two seasons specifically to avoid this, fearing that the show would decline in quality if it ran on for too long and wanting to end it on his own terms.
    Hirsch: There are so many shows that go on endlessly until they lose their original spark, or mysteries that are cancelled before they ever get a chance to payoff. But I wanted Gravity Falls to have a mystery that had a real answer, an adventure that had a real climax, and an ending that had a real conclusion for the characters I care so much about.
  • An in-universe example occurs in the episode "Dungeons, Dungeons, & More Dungeons", where Dipper mentions how the creators of the titular Dungeons & Dragons expy tried to make it "cooler" in The '90s, giving Evil Sorceror Probabilitor pastel-colored streetwear and a bit of rapping in the commercial the audience is shown, as well as renaming the game "Diggity-Dungeons And All That". If Dipper and Stanford’s reactions are to be believed, that era of the game isn’t fondly remembered.
• Someone at Turner Broadcasting must really dislike the 1980s episodes of The Jetsons and Jonny Quest, because Boomerang's rerun rotation of the shows used to go up to the last episodes of their first seasons, then back to the beginning like nothing happened afterwards. Yet they still showed 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.
• Looney Tunes:
  • The first example actually came quite early on, between around 1933 and 1935. After directors Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising stormed out and took the studio's first star Bosko — a fairly dull character by modern-day standards, but one who still has a certain appeal — with them, their replacements created a new lead character called Buddy, who had even less personality than Bosko and starred in some of the most utterly bland and insipid cartoons ever made. His first replacement, Beans the Cat, was a little better-received, but not really much of an improvement (he had a bit of a rebellious streak early on, but this eventually faded). It wasn't until the arrival of Tex Avery, and Porky Pig being turned into their headline star, that things really started looking up.
  • A lesser one hit during World War II, due to Avery quitting after a fall-out with the studio management, Chuck Jones taking a few years to find his feet as a director, many of the studio's top staff being drafted into the military, and a good chunk of their output in this period being racist propaganda cartoons. Fortunately, this era does have one big saving grace in that Bob Clampett was on top of his game and producing arguably the best work of his career, with Friz Freleng's output also being generally quite solid (if not quite in the same league as his post-war cartoons).
  • Ironically, Porky Pig actually managed to avert this. Though he was pretty decisively upstaged by Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny and never regained the star power he had in the 1930s, he was repurposed as a sidekick to Daffy, Sylvester and others and continued to appear in very funny cartoons (i.e. Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, Robin Hood Daffy) until the end of his career. In fact, he actually managed to make one more appearance in the DePatie-Freleng era, something Bugs didn't manage to do.
  • The more major Audience-Alienating Era set in during the 1960s after the original animation unit was shuttered and work was turned over to De Patie Freleng Enterprises. You know something has Gone Horribly Wrong when Daffy Duck is chasing Speedy Gonzales around for some reason. Fortunately, this Audience-Alienating Era comes with fair warning: if you catch a cartoon that features the familiar characters but the opening sequence is a bunch of trippy shapes in a black background rather than the familiar rings (keep in mind this opening was originally made for Chuck Jones' Now Hear This and other experimental one-shots prior to Termite Terrace’s shutdown), you're going to get to see their Audience-Alienating Era.
  • "The Larriva Eleven" is the name given to a series of eleven Coyote & 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 over twenty years), after he took over the series from Chuck Jones. Larriva's character designs were very Off-Model, the loss of artist Maurice Noble robbed the desert landscapes of all their scale and range, and the less said of William Lava's music (a Tough Act to Follow from Stalling and Franklyn’s efforts, to say the least), the better. The complex schemes of the Jones shorts were replaced with sluggishly-paced crude gaggery, and to accommodate them the Road Runner was completely derailed into actively fighting back against the Coyote, firing cannons at him and so forth. Watch "The Solid Tin Coyote", keeping in mind that it is almost universally regarded as the best of Larriva's efforts in this series, for a good look at how far off-base the series got — or better yet, don't.
  • 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.", with an even stranger version of the opening theme and a weird-looking Warner Brothers corporate logo (as seen here), here's our advice: turn your device off and run. If you watch them, it'll be a cartoon of very poor quality (almost like a Filmation cartoon but with more movement), or in the case of Korean-redrawn black-and-white Porky shorts, a good black-and-white cartoon inadequately reanimated in color. The exceptions are Norman Normal (1968), which can be found on the sixth Golden Collection DVD (and was the first Seven Arts-era cartoon to even be released on any form of home media) and, to a lesser extent, Rabbit Stew and Rabbits, Too!, which was formerly accessible through Max before every post-1951 short was removed.
  • In 2003, Warner Bros. Animation produced several new Looney Tunes cartoons intended for theatrical release. Because the current crew had no experience with the characters, the cartoons had such problems as over-the-top violence, Flanderization of existing characters, weak animation, weak plots, characters like Daffy and Porky coming across as Unintentionally Sympathetic, characters' voices being sped-up too much, amateurish jokes (including bits that would've never been approved for the classic shorts), and more. Jeff Bennett's performances as Daffy, Sylvester and Foghorn are among the only good things about the shorts. Bob Bergen, the current voice of Porky, doesn't think too highly of them himself and admitted that he was planning on quitting the project until he found out that he'd been fired. There were intended to be more shorts, but after the higher-ups saw the six shorts that had been completed and were appalled by them, they cancelled the others, and the ones that were completed wound up never being released theatrically after Looney Tunes: Back in Action failed miserably. They never even aired on Cartoon Network or Boomerang, only finally appearing on American television nearly two decades later on MeTV (and then Boomerang began running some of them as of New Year's Eve 2023).
  • In general, the Turn of the Millennium was awful for the franchise in several ways. In addition to the aforementioned failure of the theatrical shorts and the Back in Action movie, there was Baby Looney Tunes, which was panned as a generic Edutainment Show trying to capitalize on a dying trend (though people have warmed up to the series in the years since), and there was Loonatics Unleashed, in which the descendants of the Looney Tunes characters are Animesque superheroes in the far-future akin to Kids' WB!'s non-Pokémon biggest hits, Teen Titans (2003) and Static Shock, though with a less clear direction on what they were doing, given the radical Tone Shifts from previous incarnations of the Looney Tunes franchise. It didn't help that during this time, Warner Bros. Animation largely shifted gears to mostly producing realistic action cartoons (like Loonatics is an example of). While Duck Dodgers was received more positively, Cartoon Network cancelled and banished it to Boomerang (a network that isn't available on many cable providers) before it could even conclude its run.

M-Z

• Marvel Animation has been suffering from this from 2012 onwards, following the premiere of Ultimate Spider-Man (see below). A year later, The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes was cancelled to make way for Avengers Assemble, which has garnered flack for similar reasons as Ultimate, in addition to Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. and Guardians of the Galaxy (2015) soon after. With Ultimate ending and being replaced by Marvel's Spider-Man in addition to the better-received Big Hero 6: The Series (which is instead by Disney and airs on Disney Channel), as well as the end of Agents of SMASH, it remains to be seen when the audience-alienating era will end, given that the Guardians of the Galaxy cartoon and Marvel's Spider-Man caused some major continuity problems in addition to making the cartoons to be more like the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
• Mickey Mouse most notoriously went through an Audience-Alienating Era after World War II. By then, much of Mickey's personality was lost because his on-screen persona had been sanitized beyond workability, and it stayed lost until the original run of his theatrical cartoons rather predictably ended in early 1953. Notably, Donald Duck and Goofy had become more popular than Mickey, and the shorts that were billed as Mickey Mouse cartoons between 1946 and 1953 mostly focused on his dog Pluto instead.
• My Little Pony:
  • The earlier cartoons had an Audience-Alienating Era that lasted for nearly two decades (1992-2009). It started with the divisive My Little Pony Tales series, and continued with the Lighter and Softer Generation 3 and Generation 3.5 (including the Newborn Cuties shorts), which is considered to be the worst part of it. Generation 2 didn't even get a show. It finally ended with Generation 4 and the rise of bronies.
  • For My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • The initial dip was the reaction to the departure of Lauren Faust following the first season, though this was brief and the second season was widely regarded as a good torch-carrier by the end.
    • The second and most prominent was during the third season, which was shorter than the rest and didn't feel as well-written. Various fandom theories identify the decision to make main character Twilight Sparkle an alicorn princess at the end or the introduction of the My Little Pony: Equestria Girls franchise as the main culprits. The show managed to redeem itself with a stronger (and lengthier) fourth season.
    • Finally, the sixth season has been targeted as another weak point due to an almost complete change in writing staff^note Fans speculated that most of the show's acclaimed writers either left the show or were working on the 2017 movie at the time, a preponderance of episodes that were divisive at best, and the presence of new cast member Starlight Glimmer, the central antagonist of the previous season and argued to be a Spotlight-Stealing Squad. The seventh season allayed those concerns with some highly praised episodes like "Parental Glideance", "A Royal Problem", and "The Perfect Pear", and is generally agreed to have returned to form. But then came Seasons 8 and 9, where the general consensus as a whole started to turn against the show over its more egregiously questionable plot developments.
• Popeye had this happen 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 extremely formulaic Recycled In Space plots, remakes of older shorts, and Clip Show episodes.
• The Powerpuff Girls:
  • The original show fell into one after the release of The Powerpuff Girls Movie in 2002. Along with the movie bombing both critically and financially at the box office^note Cartoon Network has since not made any theatrical releases since then... until 2018, series creator Craig McCracken left the show to work on Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. As such, Seasons 5 and 6 suffered Seasonal Rot for many reasons: multiple characters were Flanderized^note the Mayor, in particular, went from just a Scatterbrained Senior who was ditzy but oftentimes helpful into a full-blown Manchild, and the show went from a lighthearted action show to a cheap gag comedy with more emphasis on Toilet Humor and more Slice of Life plots. Even though these two seasons aren't considered bad, they're So Okay, It's Average at best, and the show was eventually cancelled in 2005 due to a decline in ratings. Thankfully, nearly four years after the show ended, the 10th anniversary special "The Powerpuff Girls Rule!!!" premiered in 2009 and was received rather warmly from fans, helped by the fact that Craig McCracken returned to direct the special. And aside from another special in 2014, the series would remain dormant for eight years, with the fans safe to say that the dark days of the franchise are long behind them...
  • ...And then came the 2016 reboot. Not only did this not have any involvement from McCracken^note Cartoon Network actually tried to contact him to come back, but his contract with Disney Television Animation (he was busy working on Wander over Yonder at this time) prevented this., but this show suffered even more problems than the original show. For one, the show follows in the footsteps of fellow Cartoon Network reboots Teen Titans Go! and Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! by being Denser and Wackier, with barely any violence to be found; and if the girls ever do hit someone, a Hit Flash will hide the impact, which is a major gripe with fans who loved the original for balancing out its comedy with action. original actors for the girls were replaced due to being "too old" (Tara Strong was, in particular, upset by this, as Bubbles was one of her favorite roles), which wasn't received well by fans due to the girls losing the distinctness in their voices that portrayed their personalities^note Natalie Palamides as Buttercup has been criticized for making the already tomboyish Buttercup sound too deep and masculine to fit the character. Additionally, the Flanderization came in even harder, with the main characters' more negative traits being played up^note Blossom becomes an Obsessively Organized stick-in-the-mud who freaks out over the tiniest of filth near her, Bubbles became Cute and Psycho, Buttercup became more of a Jerkass, the Professor became a Bumbling Dad despite being a brilliant scientist, and Mojo Jojo underwent heavy heavy Badass and Villain Decay, demoting him to a Harmless Villain who's treated as a nuisance rather than a real threat. The new art style was also criticized for being too reminiscent of modern day cartoons (i.e. Adventure Time and Steven Universe), since the designs of the new characters clash with the characters of the original show. Several fan-favorite characters (specifically most of the villains) were also Demoted to Extra or even kicked out entirely to make way for much less memorable villains and annoying or intolerable side characters; Ms. Bellum's removal, in particular, was a major blow to most fans for being intentional on the creators' part^note They thought she wasn't representative of the message they were trying to tell despite the fact that aside from being a Ms. Fanservice, she was a very intelligent and strong woman who kept the Mayor's antics in check. And to make matters worse, not only was the Narrator omitted, but the gross-out and toilet humor was ramped up significantly, as well as an influx of meme references in futile attempts at staying relevant with audiences^note "Painbow" has not only been panned for its infamous twerking scene, but also for its multiple meme references. Safe to say, no-one was happy with the show, and it was promptly panned by both critics and fans alike, running for only three seasons before getting cancelled in 2019. Things only got worse in 2020 when it was announced that The CW would be making a live-action reboot, with the girls as adults in their 20s, which was reviled by fans upon it's announcement. Thankfully, the second decline seems to have ended when it was announced in May 2023 when it was announced that the reboot, titled "Powerpuff", was cancelled, as well as another announcement that another animated reboot of the series was in development. Fans were particularly excited for it since it was announced that Craig McCracken would be returning to direct.
• The Real Ghostbusters, following extensive Executive Meddling which included making Janine "less slutty", making all of the characters far less sarcastic and more "wholesome", and centering the entire show on Slimer. Phelous associates this change with the period where Dave Coulier took over the role of Venkman.
• Many Regular Show fans believe that the series entered one of these in Season 5 when writers began to give more focus to a Love Triangle between Mordecai, Margaret, and CJ that took up large portions of Seasons 5 and 6. Things were toned down after the TV movie, and as of Season 7 the show got back on track with the love triangle subplot being minimized if not completely absent.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show:
  • Due to John Kricfalusi's poor relationship with his co-workers and his failure to premiere episodes on time, the original show fell into one after Kricfalusi was fired from Nickelodeon after Season 2. While his replacement, Bob Camp, made an effort to preserve the witty and gross-out humor that defined the show since its inception, it was clear that it was losing its edge by the final season, resulting in its cancellation in 1995.
  • But seven years later, Kricfalusi was brought back to make an adult version of the show known as Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon", a re-imagining of the titular characters so horrible that fans and critics burned it to the ground just as it started. The show suffered from even more gross-out, a heavy heaping of shock humor, Overly Long Gags which take up most of the episodes (to the point where one of the episodes is 40 minutes long), and Flanderization of the main duo (Ren, in particular, became a heartless psychopath in contrast to his original hot-headed jerk from the original show), resulting in its cancellation after only three episodes (the other six were released on DVD due to failure in episode deliver), and the franchise has been stuck in dormancy every since.
• Schoolhouse Rock!: The amount of people who even remember the short-lived Computer Rock series (four episodes between 1982 and 1984, one of which is not available to watch on home video or streaming) featuring Scooter Computer and Mr. Chips is miniscule compared to the rest of the series. The amount of people who enjoy these songs even less so, since they can come off as a poorly-conceived and even more poorly-aged attempt to stay relevant as personal computers started becoming more common.
• Scooby-Doo:
  • The late 1970s and early '80s. Between the addition of Scrappy-Doo, the removal of the entire gang except for Shaggy (himself no longer a hippie), and every episode featuring "cousin so and so", there's a reason that the original 1969-70 version is the most well-known. Ironically, at the time the Scrappy era was actually credited with pulling the franchise out of its doldrums, as the "Scooby-Doo" Hoax was getting stale and the change in format was a successful attempt to revive the show. (This six-part essay by Mark Evanier goes into detail.) It was only later that fans turned against Scrappy and regarded him as a symbol of everything wrong with that period of the show.
  • Several consider What's New, Scooby-Doo? and especially Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get A Clue! to be an Audience-Alienating Era as well. The former, while well-received for returning the franchise to its roots and changing some of the personalities, was criticized for leaning in too hard to the original formula, as well as its self-awareness of the formula being ran into the ground and many attempts at being "hip" and "current", while the latter was dropped by fans for removing the entire gang again and abandoning the traditional mystery formula in favor of becoming a spy thriller, with superpowers and an annoying robot butler. It doesn't help that they came out of Warner Bros. Animation's second audience-alienating era of the 2000s (their first was in the 1960s).
• The Simpsons:
  • Many fans agree that the first Audience-Alienating Era spanned from Seasons 9 to 12, a four-season period led by showrunner Mike Scully. Although Seasons 9 and 10 were mostly well-received, they still featured several episodes that never became popular with fans. Seasons 11 and 12, on the other hand, are infamous for being two of the worst in the show's history. The humor became far darker, cruder, and more self-parodying in these two seasons, with episodes that were considered overly wacky and cartoonish and featured an overabundance of guest stars. This resulted in many fans deciding that the show had Jumped the Shark and refused to continue watching, and the "golden age" of the show's pop-culture dominance ending with The '90s. After Scully's tenure as showrunner ended and he was replaced by Al Jean, one of the show's original writers, the quality of the show improved and the first Audience-Alienating Era ended. From Season 13 to The Simpsons Movie, many fans who hadn't yet stopped watching noted that the writing and humor became more consistently enjoyable, with the good episodes outnumbering the bad ones again. Also, the promise of a theatrical film in 2007 allowed older, golden-age fans to become interested in the show again, giving writers good reason to try extra-hard to create solid new episodes.
  • However, up to and after The Movie's DVD release (Season 19 onwards), the second Audience-Alienating Era of the show began. This was because the hype of the first theatrical Simpsons film had been lost, giving viewers little reason to continue watching the show. It was here, even more than during Seasons 9-12, that the popular stereotype emerged in mainstream culture that the show went downhill with Season 9 and never recovered, such did this era, combined with the prior one, stain the image of the show's late-period run. It wasn't until Season 31 that the show managed to recover from its downfall after complaints from fans and critics.
  • An In-Universe example in "Itchy and Scratchy and Marge"; when Maggie watches The Itchy & Scratchy Show, she starts copying its violence, injuring Homer as a result. When Marge finds out, she forms a protest group called SNUH^note standing for Springfieldians for Non-violence, Understanding and Helping to protest the show for being a bad influence on children, eventually persuading the creators of I&S to go in a Lighter and Softer direction, removing all of the slapstick violence that Itchy and Scratchy were known for and making the duo friends. This causes its child audience to stop watching the show and play outside. When Marge has no objections to the statue of Michelangelo's David visiting the Springfield Museum despite the rest of SNUH protesting its male frontal nudity, The Itchy and Scratchy Show returns to its normal violent nature and its child audience starts watching the show again.
  • Happened again in-universe with ''The Itchy, Scratchy & Poochie Show's, where a "cool" cartoon dog voiced by Homer is added to the show to boost ratings. The episode ends up being entirely devoted to shilling Poochie, abandoning the violence the fans were hoping for in favour of a Totally Radical rap number. Poochie was sent back to his home planet in the next episode.^note Poochie died on the way back to his home planet.
• South Park: Season 20 is often seen by fans as a low point for the series due to a shift towards Story Arcs rather than self-contained episodes. The main issue was the plot surrounding the 2016 presidential election, which was planned with a Hillary Rodham Clinton victory in mind. Due to Donald Trump winning the presidency instead, the arc from that point on had to be entirely rewritten, leading to rushes and Aborted Arcs that couldn't fit in the updated story arc. Since then, the series has abandoned a completely serialized approach (the season finale being deemed "The End Of Serialization As We Know It"), and subsequent seasons, while still often having some underlying plots, have returned to a looser state of continuity with episodes better able to stand alone.
• Ultimate Spider-Man is this to the Spider-Man franchise on the animated plane, bearing no similarities to the comic of the same name or, for the matter, any other incarnation of the character. The tone is Denser and Wackier with a lot of comedy slapstick while all drama and dark aspects are removed, Spider-Man is a SHIELD agent and part of a team of annoying sidekick superheroes learning how to be a superhero with Nick Fury as The Mentor, and most villains from Spidey's actual Rogues Gallery are dropped in favor of other comic villains. What's more, it replaced The Spectacular Spider-Man, which was largely considered to be epic, and despite the fact that Ultimate had no control over Spectacular's fate, fans were quite upset.
• SpongeBob SquarePants fell into one of these after the first movie's release in 2004. After the creator Stephen Hillenburg left, fans began to notice that episodes were becoming either bland and unfunny or violent and mean-spirited. Characters also became flanderized to unbelievably high levels, and when they weren't acting like parodies of themselves, they were being tortured miserably by the world around them. Alongside the overabundance of over-hyped "specials" (most of which were ordinary 11-minute shorts that were nonetheless plugged as must-see TV events by the network), it could easily coincide with Nickelodeon's audience-alienating era. While Season 4 is generally still viewed as good and reception to season 5 has (mostly) gotten better over time, seasons 6 and 7 are usually reviled among the fanbase for these reasons. Season 8 was a slight improvement and season 9 had a lot of episodes that were really liked by the SpongeBob fanbase, but the Audience-Alienating Era had officially ended in the eyes of many with the second SpongeBob movie, Sponge out of Water, when Stephen Hillenburg returned to the helm of the series in general. However, while the post-second movie episodes are generally well-received, they still have their detractors due to their perceived weaker plots and over-reliance on exaggerated, cartoonish expressions for humor.
• Steven Universe fans tend to give this label to the post-Summer of Steven era, where the show's Broken Base got out of control. The Schedule Slip went from bad to borderline intolerable (with a gap of seven months between episodes at one point), not helped by Cartoon Network's constant leaking habits. It made the already slower-paced and somewhat lower-staked fourth season and early fifth season feel borderline glacial, especially when multiple "Stevenbomb" special events turned out to be dedicated largely to smaller-scale stories. The Myth Stall certainly didn't help, either, nor did a number of episodes that read as contrary to the show's messages (and, unfortunately, the changing political landscape). The pendulum seems to have swung back in the show's favor as of the "Heart of the Crystal Gems" special, though.
• Thomas & Friends has been generally regarded to have seen at least two of these over its long run:
  • The first Audience-Alienating Era is considered to have lasted from Seasons 8 through 16, which saw the first seven seasons' sense of realism in regards to trains and how they work begin to dry up with trains either doing jobs they weren't built to do or defying physics, blatant Merchandise-Driven undertones (such as a near constant stream of one-shot characters made seemingly for the sole reason of promoting a new toy), fan-favorite characters making scarce appearances if not disappearing altogether, Thomas and other major characters undergoing Flanderization, and plot-related ridiculousness aplenty. Most is this is blamed on the showrunner for these several seasons, Sharon Miller, not understanding the series very well, and, needless to say, when she stepped down as showrunner, her successor Andrew Brenner addressed many of the issues that Seasons 8 through 16 had, and the show was brought back down to characterizations, physics, and storylines that made more of an effort to feel more like the first seven seasons. The fanbase rejoiced for a while...
  • ...And then came "Big World, Big Adventures!". The series underwent a retool into a faster-paced and Denser and Wackier direction that was envisioned to make the show better compete with other shows like PAW Patrol. In season 22 alone, major mainstays Henry and Edward were unceremoniously shunted off to make room for new cast members. The creators also partnered with the United Nations to promote gender and racial inclusiveness, which included adding two new train characters who replaced Henry and Edward, Nia (an engine from Kenya) and Rebecca, as well as other One-Scene Wonder characters like a pair of gay crewmen in one episode.^note This infamously led to the National Rifle Association's news channel including a news segment where Thomas and his friends are wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods for some reason. While introducing further diversity into the series wasn't bad idea in of itself, the way the show went about it came off to the fanbase as clumsy and even borderline offensive in some cases (particularly with Nia, whose only defining trait for the longest time beyond her being female was her being originally from Kenya), plus Henry and Edward were both sorely missed. Thomas now speaks directly to the viewers at points, something that had never happened in the series up until now and was seen to unnecessarily introduce Fake Interactivity into the show ala Dora the Explorer. Not only that, but the narrator, an element that had been part of the series since the very first episode in 1984, was axed in favor of the aforementioned Fake Interactivity (though traditional narration remains in spin-off material). Not helping was comments made by the season's new director, Dianna Basso, criticizing fans for not liking the changes and telling them to watch a train documentary if they wanted realistic train situations like the old seasons, and one of the season's first episodes being believed by some to portray Gordon as a strawman of these critics. The 23rd and 24th seasons took the show into an even Denser and Wackier style, filled to the brim with stuff like the giant robots, cars that turn 180 degrees, futuristic jet engines, and flying cars. Needless to say, any goodwill the fanbase had with the show disappeared faster than Gordon can deliver his express on a good day, and a large chunk of the fanbase now believes the franchise as a whole to be past the point of no return, and that it could only return to form if the fans took over. The show got cancelled because of the retool failing to meet expectations and was replaced by a Denser and Wackier reboot titled All Engines Go!
• Tom and Jerry:
  • The Tom and Jerry Show via Hanna-Barbera's television studio in The '70s. In other words, whenever Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera didn't directly make them. Basically, if you see Jerry wearing a red bowtie, you're going to see the duo as best friends. Bad, to say the least.
  • The Movie intensified the audience-alienating era even further, being such a Human-Focused Adaptation that the iconic duo are, at best, side characters and do nothing to really advance the plot. It would have been a Franchise Killer if it wasn't for the mildly successful Tom & Jerry Kids. The franchise wouldn't return to the small screen until the release of the Direct to Video film Tom and Jerry: The Magic Ring. While it wasn't a critical darling upon release, it sold well and became a Cult Classic among Tom and Jerry fans, and it managed to launch a DTV film franchise starring the duo. The next T&J series, Tom and Jerry Tales, was warmly received by fans. Several adaptations have followed since then, with more mixed reception, but only time will tell if the audience-alienating era can truly come to an end.
• Every season of Total Drama after the first one is contested, but 3 stand out in nigh-universal negative reception:
  • The second season, Action, while having gained defenders over the years, is still seen as a low point by over half the fan base. Complaints include heavy derailments of most of the contestants that participate, with Trent and Courtney being pointed to as the worst cases, not having every contestant from the previous season participate, (with Noah, Tyler, and Cody especially being decried as wasted potential), and having a very divisive final 2, especially Beth, who is generally agreed to be the most boring Gen 1 cast member, and whose spot is in the finale is near universally agreed to have instead gone to Lindsay or Harold.
  • All-Stars, the first half of the fifth season, is near universally agreed to be the black sheep of the franchise. Reasons include what are seen as the worst derailments in the show's history, with Courtney (again), Duncan, Gwen, and Sierra being named the worst of the lot. Other reasons include many characters getting eliminated in idiotic circumstances, (such as Heather hiding the invincibility statue rather than keeping it, or Duncan blowing up Chris' Mansion and his subsequent arrest), horrible sendoffs for beloved characters, and Mal being generally agreed to be the worst of the Total Drama villains, not to mention his offensive defeat, (which entailed pressing a button, which even by Total Drama standards is seen as too much by fans, and offended people who actually have MPD or similar disorders).
  • The second half of season 5, Pahkitew Island, while having slightly more defenders than All-Stars, is still seen as a very bad season by most fans. The Gen 3 cast being generally agreed to be too gimmicky even by Total Drama standards, Sugar, Amy, and especially Dave being seen as some of the worst characters ever in Total Drama history, Scarlett and Sugar's embarrassingly easy defeats, and Sammy's lack of character development and early elimination are seen as the reasons as to why this season was a low point
• 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 Beast Machines 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. Following the very tepid response of Unicron Trilogy, though, Beast Machines has been Vindicated by History somewhat; though it's still divisive at best, it's considered to work Better on DVD as a single narrative than as an episodic series.
• Very few fans of VeggieTales have much love for the VeggieTales in the House era of the show for a multitude of reasons. One of the first reasons were the change in character designs; the folks at Big Idea felt that the characters' designs now looked antiquated due to being based on how they looked all the way back in 1993, and decided to revamp them. However, the new designs they chose received a severely mixed reception, especially from fans who found the characters' original designs too iconic to change. Then In The House (and its sequel series In The City) properly premiered to a chilly reception. The show was criticized for feeling so much more wacky and hyperactive than the original show to the point that it was seen as detrimental to the show, older characters undergoing Flanderization (especially Larry the Cucumber, who went from the "cool but clumsy co-host" to a childish idiot) while the new characters were unlikable and/or annoying, and in general feeling like the charm that made the original series so beloved was no longer there. It was thought that the poor reception to In The House/City would kill the franchise outright until the franchise won back the crowd with a second reboot in the form of The VeggieTales Show, which brought the series back to something (both in tone and aesthetic) resembling the original show.
• Warner Bros. Animation has been said to be stuck in one since the 2000s, particularly with the end of the Steven Spielberg Presents line of cartoons and the demise of their "Feature Animation" theatrical film division.^note While Warner Bros. Feature Animation has since been succeeded by Warner Animation Group (WAG), WAG has noticeably been designated as a standalone department separate from Warner Bros. Animation. Aside from original cartoons being shoved to the side in favor of more adaptations of existing cash cows, the studio seems to have no real idea of how to handle WB's vault of animated properties, with their handling of Looney Tunes, Scooby-Doo, and Tom and Jerry criticized for either being trotted out in polarizing new directions or being stale rehashes of the original shows/shorts. WBA has also garnered notoriety for being a factory with an unending stream of annual Direct to Video low-quality "Original Movie" films for their properties not seen since the era of DTV Disney Cheapquels, often shoehorning their characters into crossovers with either the WWE or other unrelated properties WB owns (like The Wizard of Oz, Jonny Quest, and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in the case of Tom and Jerry). While their DC animated films and shows are considerably more acclaimed, they have been repeatedly thrown under the bus following Cartoon Network's Network Decay and its own Audience-Alienating Era. Moreover, if this lengthy account by one of the former creators for Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! is anything to go by, studio management is set to full ineptitude, with executives blamed for the show's behind-the-scenes Troubled Production.
• Winx Club fell into one in the 2010s, when Viacom acquired the Rainbow studio and the franchise became a Nickelodeon property. The fifth and sixth seasons, co-produced with Nickelodeon Animation Studio, suffered greatly from character flanderization, poor writing aimed at a younger audience, and loads of plot-related retcons. Rainbow would go on to produce Season 7 solo, which was chided by fans for its childish writing and notoriously long Butterflix transformation sequences. Season 8, which premiered in 2019, would see the show retooled for a preschool demographic, and was criticized just as much for featuring return of a villain defeated in season 3 and giving another villain a backstory. This would be then followed by Fate: The Winx Saga, a Live-Action Adaptation that was slammed by fans for, among others, turning a largely light-hearted series into a Darker and Edgier teen drama. It was cancelled by Netflix after two seasons, putting the franchise on ice until creator Iginio Straffi confirmed that the original series would receive a Continuity Reboot.
• 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 pointy, 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. On top of that, from the mid-1950s onward (when Woody's eyes became black rather than green - another tell-tale sign, by the way), Paul J. Smith took the directorial reins and brought the series down even further with sloppy animation, lousy jokes, and bad timing (surprising, considering his earlier efforts such as "Hot Noon (or 12 o'Clock for Sure)" were among Lantz's best cartoons). It's a wonder the series was able to last through 1972 in theaters.

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