YMMV / Famous Studios

• Awesome Art: The studio had the same staff as Fleischer Studios, so they still managed to turn out some splendid animation and attractive background art, even in their later years.
• Archive Panic: 577 theatrical cartoons total, and 177 made-for-TV cartoons as well. To give another idea of how many there were, the DVD Harveytoons collection had to use four double sided discs to include as many as they possibly could—and some of them were even abridged versions of the shorts!
• Growing the Beard: In its waning years, the studio started getting back on its feet by making more anti-formulaic cartoons under the direction of Shamus Culhane. Unfortunately, Culhane quit after this brief tenure, and Ralph Bakshi was brought in as his replacement, only for the studio to close up shop before he could even get around to making more cartoons there.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the early 1960s Modern Madcaps cartoons is named Top Cat. To make it even more amusing, Hanna-Barbera's Top Cat series would debut in 1961, just a year after the shorts release, and Arnold Stang, Top Cat's voice actor, had been a regular actor at Famous Studios cartoons for many years.
• Never Live It Down: The studio has a fairly poor reputation among fans of classic cartoons for a myriad of reasons, mainly its penchant for being super-formulaic even by the standards of Golden Age cartoons and for the downright mean-spirited nature of many of the shorts (particularly the Herman and Katnip shorts). Whenever its brought up, it'll either be for its strong start in the World War II years and decline after that, or its blatant inferiority to its predecessor, Fleischer Studios. Even its fans tend to consider the cartoons guilty pleasures.
• Nightmare Fuel: Chew Chew Baby may be as cartoony in execution as the next short, but this does little to change the fact that the people that the titular man-eater eats, stay dead throughout the cartoon.
• Seasonal Rot: The studio did get off to a pretty good start, but by the start of the 1950s, the studio began to suffer a decline in quality and hit a truly nasty slump starting around 1957 (it didn't help that they stopped making Popeye cartoons that year). They started getting back on their feet around the sixties due to the arrival of Shamus Culhane, but by then it was too little too late.
• Short-Lived, Big Impact: Ralph Bakshi's stint at Famous only lasted four cartoons, but the experience Bakshi got there allowed to hone his skills as a filmmaker and producer. Much of the crew of Fritz the Cat were animators Bakshi met at Famous or who had otherwise been veterans of the studio.
• Spiritual Antithesis: Greg Steven notes in his Nick Knacks video on Cartoon Kablooey that the studio was basically this to UPA. Both were founded within a year of each other and had their origins in studio strikes (Disney in UPA's case, Flesicher Studios in Famous' case). But wheras UPA was an artistically-driven studio eager to push animation in bold new directions, Famous was a hostile corporate takeover of the Fleischer's studio and was designed to make safe and profitable cartoons.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general film historian opinion of this studio floats somewhere around here; not as good as Fleischer Studios, Looney Tunes, the Classic Disney Shorts or the MGM cartoons, but around the same artistic level as Walter Lantz and Screen Gems and superior to Terrytoons.
• Sweetness Aversion: Casper and Little Audrey are the most disdained of Famous' recurring series by critics because of this trope.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: This studio is accused more than any other of trying to ape the Looney Tunes style, only with more violent/mean-spirited gags.
• Values Dissonance: Famous made more usage of racial stereotyping and blackface gags in their cartoons than Fleischer Studios ever did, even as other cartoon studios at the time started toning them down. The World War II Popeye cartoons are also chock-a-block full of malicious Japanese stereotypes.
• Vindicated by History: In recent years, The shorts Famous did in the 1940s have started to be reappraised by critics. Popeye shows like Happy Birthdaze, We're On Our Way to Rio, and Rocket To Mars and Noveltoons like Cilly Goose and Cheese Burglar have been particularly lauded for their outstanding stories, jokes and animation. The newfound availability of Famous' better shorts through Thunderbean Animation's Noveltoons discs and the Warner Archive's Popeye: The 1940's sets have encouraged this.