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Drawing Lots and Lots of Little Pictures- A Cartoon Thread

SpoonyBard

Threat Rhyme
(He/Him)
Finally saw the last season of Amphibia (while waiting for any of the second season of Owl House, what the hell Canadian Disney+???) and I really, really dug it. This series nearly didn't grab me at first but eventually the thought 'oh, it's an RPG!' clicked and then I really could appreciate it. I will happily put this on the list of 'cartoons I really wish I could send back in time to young me', because while I liked it as an adult I would have friggin loved this as a kid.
 

SpoonyBard

Threat Rhyme
(He/Him)
As for other cartoons, I just finished 'Dead Ends: Paranormal Park' on Netflix, and it was cute. It's apparently based on a graphic novel, which is itself based on a Cartoon Hangover Youtube short, but I don't think you need to be familiar with either. The characters only barely resemble their original Youtube selves and the story and setting are entirely different. The story is closer to the graphic novel version.

It stars a trans man, Barney, which is itself not super common and doesn't shy away from his troubles at home (at issue: his parents not sticking up for him in front of his, let's say, old fashioned grandmother), and Norma who struggles with a number of anxieties, and is pretty clearly on the autism spectrum but the show never comes out and says it.

Oh and it also stars a possessed talking pug and a demon named Courtney and has a lot of various creatures that can best be described as a mishmash of designs from whenever Adventure Time let itself get weird. So I kinda dug it. There's an episode with a fear demon which revealed a lot about Norma that really spoke to me, and a pretty entertaining musical episode towards the end that felt very Steven Universe.

If I had one gripe, it was how quickly Barney's parents went from just not getting it to totally getting it and supporting him, I guess they had an epiphany offscreen between episodes.

So far there's no confirmation of a second season. I hope there is but, y'know. Netflix.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
Don't know if X-Men '97 going to be good but I like the choice to keep it old school but giving Storm a mohawk-ish cut.

xmen-tas-97-header.jpg
 

R.R. Bigman

Coolest Guy
Season 2 of Primal started last week. It continues to be both amazing, and largely ignored online due to not having the aspects Online Cartoon Fans look for in a series.
 

jpfriction

(He, Him)
I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it. Got too many things in the hopper. Still getting caught up on Tuca and Bertie’s improbable new season and it’s remarkably accurate and chilling depiction of what it’s like to walk in on an alcoholic just after a bender.

That uh, that touched a nerve.
 

lincolnic

can stop, will stop
(he/him)
I loved the first season of Primal, just haven't had a chance to start watching the new season yet. Looking forward to it!
 

R.R. Bigman

Coolest Guy
I did not expect any of those things to happen on tonight’s Primal.

”You were doing so well for a while” got me pretty good.
 

BEAT

LOUDSKULL
(DUDE/BRO)
The most recent episode did so much legwork to completely reorient the show; it's bananas. Fang and Spear do exactly the thing you've wanted them to do this whole time, and you hate them for it.
The Red Mist is fucking incredible.

Like.

All the Vikings had to do to be spared was say "just fucking go away." but they couldn't. Because they were slaver sons of bitches who view humans as property. So they pushed a pair of wild animals who kill every single day to survive into a corner.

A pair of wild animals who were both stronger, faster and more dangerous than they could ever hope to be.

There was only one possible outcome from that choice.
 
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BEAT

LOUDSKULL
(DUDE/BRO)
I did not expect any of those things to happen on tonight’s Primal.

”You were doing so well for a while” got me pretty good.

Tonight's Primal was Not what I was expecting.

For a long moment I was like "oh god they're not gonna reveal that the crazy dude THINKS he's spear and that the whole series has been a hallucination by a mental patient, are they?"

But they didn't! And that let me breathe a sigh of relief and enjoy the episode for what it was.
 

BEAT

LOUDSKULL
(DUDE/BRO)
Oh yeah that was great

Apparently a lot of people didn't like this one, but fuck em I thought it ruled
 

Sprite

(He/Him/His)
The full animatic of the canceled Tartakovsky Popeye leaked, and I watched it. The dialogue and characterization is pretty bog-standard stuff, about on the level of Hotel Transylvania, but the animation clearly would've been transcendent and it's a tragedy we'll never get to see it. Olive especially would've been fun to watch. I love her design so much, really makes me want more weird-looking female cartoon characters.

Tom Kenny does a great job as Popeye, even if this version of the character is just kind of a generic kids movie protagonist. None of the malapropisms and very little of the wordplay and mumbles that make old Popeye great. Though I guess if you're going to be following a character for 80 minutes you should be able to understand what they say. The movie also has a supernatural explanation for his spinach powers, rather than just being delightful propaganda for eating your greens. Weird.

Olive fares a lot better, and the movie manages to have its cake and eat it too by showing her grow from the cartoon shorts damsel into the comic strip adventurer. She's the best part of the film by far, and I'm just so sad I won't get to see her rubber hose arms flailing everywhere. Aw well.
 

FelixSH

(He/Him)
God, what disgusting behaviour. Even aside from the fact, that we lose out on great shows (I really like Close Enough), what really makes me angry is this assholish disregard of their artists. Sure, who cares if they worked overtime (probably without pay), or generally just tried their hardest to create something? Doesn't matter, just throw it away. Sure, why would you treat you emloyees (or freelancers, whatever it is) with any kind of respect?

At least show the stuff that is already done. What the hell is even the problem there? What idiotic metric am I not seeing, that makes it necessary to only have the very carefullestest of chosen shows be on your streaming service? (With all the spite and sarcasm here, I'm actually curious about this, what kind of metric is used here? Is it just the idea to do away with all the bad animation, so they can look more grown-up, or what?)

Fucking assholes.
 

Sprite

(He/Him/His)
The loss of Infinity Train is devastating. They'd better release Book 3 on DVD, that's one show I want access to indefinitely.
 

lincolnic

can stop, will stop
(he/him)
Even aside from the fact, that we lose out on great shows (I really like Close Enough), what really makes me angry is this assholish disregard of their artists. Sure, who cares if they worked overtime (probably without pay), or generally just tried their hardest to create something? Doesn't matter, just throw it away. Sure, why would you treat you emloyees (or freelancers, whatever it is) with any kind of respect?
This. Animation has been one of TV's biggest saviors during the pandemic, especially for people in the industry who couldn't return to physical production sets, and this is the thanks it gets?
 

ArugulaZ

Fearful asymmetry
I gotta be honest, I don't understand the purpose of trying to scrub these shows from memory. They're not just removing Mao Mao and Close Enough from HBO Max... they're disavowing all knowledge of their very existence. They're no longer referenced on Cartoon Network's YouTube pages or any of the network's promotional materials. What's the endgame here? You're giving your viewers less content to watch, and I can't imagine that being useful to either Warner Bros Discovery or their customers.

Evidently David Zaslov has been known to brag that he knows what viewers want, but is that really true? Over the years I've seen Discovery channels move away from their mission statements with weaselly new slogans ("History is made every day." Translation: We'll show any damn thing we want and you're just going to have to sit through it!) and beat viewers over the head with marathons of cheap reality shows. Guess what? Nobody wants to see large, hairy men build aquariums, yet that's the kind of crap Discovery has been forcing down their viewers' throats for years.

And now we're getting a senseless purge of cartoons from Cartoon Network. Does anyone remember what happened thirteen years ago when Cartoon Network tried to deviate from its mission statement with cheap live action shows? People hated it, and CN was in a tailspin they only managed to pull themselves out of with the success of Adventure Time. That's a series which inspired and is very much in the same vein as the shows Zaslov is so eager to purge from existence.

You'd think the company that gave us the History Channel would be less inclined to repeat the history of Cartoon Network's past failures, yet here we are. I'm already seeing Zaslov get compared to the arrogant, stubbornly stupid Jamie Kellner, who turned the WB network into a smoking crater twenty years ago, and I have a hard time disputing the comparison.
 

Exposition Owl

more posts about buildings and food
(he/him/his)
At least show the stuff that is already done. What the hell is even the problem there? What idiotic metric am I not seeing, that makes it necessary to only have the very carefullestest of chosen shows be on your streaming service? (With all the spite and sarcasm here, I'm actually curious about this, what kind of metric is used here? Is it just the idea to do away with all the bad animation, so they can look more grown-up, or what?)

The article off-handedly says something about “the pursuit of the biggest tax break.” Is there something about U.S. tax policy that would incentivize this?
 
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