Look at all of you, bringing back fond childhood memories!
Your take on The Man With The Golden Gun (my personal favourite Bond film, albeit largely for personal reasons) should be interesting. That's another one which has virtually nothing in common with its source book so you can do pretty much whatever you want with it. The OTL film was clearly influenced by the Yom Kippur War oil shock at the time, with the macguffin being a revolutionary solar energy cell that would solve the energy crisis (and also allow Scaramanga to somehow power a giant laser thing to destroy Bond's plane because shut up).
Let's take the Bond discussion to PM; I'm now sensing an opportunity to take advantage of your enthusiasm and expertise on the subject for my own nefarious purposes
A turtle wielding a sword ? That'll never catch on
Ah, the Turtles. The first big kiddie pop-culture craze I can remember (vaguely; Pogs and Power Rangers stick much clearer in my memory, having come about when I had reached school age). I know that they were a pretty big deal across the pond, though under the censored name of Teenage Mutant
Hero Turtles (it always amuses me that "ninja" was censored but "
mutant" was not). This ridiculous title censorship is hardly limited to the UK, of course. In Canada, the popular 1990s Transformers series was known as
Beasties instead of
Beast Wars because the word "war" was not permitted in a children's program (never mind that a Canadian
studio animated the show). Having watched the program in my youth, I still can't help but chant "
Beasties!" whenever I see it. (Alas, the Canadian opening is not on YouTube, even though the Canadian version of the openings to both the original
Dragon Ball and
Dragon Ball Z are. Come on, my fellow Millennials, get on that!)
NCW8 said:
As a matter of interest, is there any Hanna-Barbera cartoon that you like ? Maybe the Flintstones ?
And now for more early '90s recollections. I remember that, when I was very small, they were pushing
The Flintstones quite hard on young audiences (celebrating its 30th and 35th anniversaries - in 1990 and 1995, respectively - and in the latter case
interviewing children
talking about the show, IIRC). I blame Ted Turner, simply because I can, and because he is positively kooky. That said, when I was a kid, sure I liked
The Flintstones, but I was too young to know better (more on that later). I liked
The Jetsons too; it had been revived in the late 1980s for a syndication run, culminating in the 1990 film starring
Tiffany, of all people, as Judy Jetson (and yes, she
did sing), and featuring the legendary Mel Blanc's last-ever performance (he died partway through production). In fact, of all Hanna-Barbera productions, I probably like it the most; it's just so delightfully Zeerustic that it's hard to resist. It also has, for my money, the best theme song in the Hanna-Barbera catalogue.
Let's hear it again, one more time!
And yes, I know about the Runaway Guys version. No, that has not diminished my appreciation of the original version one iota.
Many Hanna-Barbera shows, though, I disliked from the outset, even as a kid.
Yogi Bear and
Scooby-Doo in particular. I've also gone on for some length about
Wacky Races in the past; so I'll spare everyone a rehash of
that rant. (If you're really interested, you can find my additional thoughts on Hanna-Barbera
all the way back on
Page Four).
It took long enough... I wish I'd bought every copy of the Turtles &
Grendel I could get my hands on when they came out. (My local couldn't give them away.
) Just a year or two later, I could have made a killing.
Fortunately, it's only my job to report on why fads became so popular
after the fact. I'm nowhere near the prognosticator that I am the pop culture historian, believe me.
I do find it curious how Hanna-Barbera seems to have quite the hatedom nowadays. Their cartoons were insanely popular in the 1960s here and remain memetically quoted by people of a certain age.
I blame limited animation (which has accrued a positively
toxic reputation over the last two decades), and over-reliance on the same stock characters, many of whom are either incredibly boring or profoundly annoying. While, at the same time, utterly lacking in the cleverness of say, classic Looney Tunes, or the sincerity of early Disney, or the iconoclasm of Bakshi and his ilk, or the willingness to take chances of
any of these. A lot of these faults also apply to Filmation, the
other major animation studio of the 1970s; but at least
they're dead and buried now, whereas the Hanna-Barbera stable lives on, for better or (mostly) for worse. Also, at least Filmation
did take occasional risks, like the animated
Star Trek series IOTL. If you look at the
other cartoons
that studio was making in the early 1970s, it's night and day.
You're almost certainly drastically understating just how popular The Flinstones, The Jetsons, and Scooby Doo were (and are).
You know what's frightening?
Scooby-Doo has been in virtually
continuous production (in one incarnation or another) since its inception in 1969 - that's over
forty years straight. Now I've never cared for that show in
any of its versions, but it obviously speaks to a lot of people. Even
The Simpsons might not make it to 25, but
they did!
Andrew T said:
And it isn't as though
the alternatives were all that well animated, either. (Although for my money you just can't beat lyrics like: "Is he strong? Listen, bud. He's got radioactive blood!")
I'm a man who is willing to forgive
many things for a great theme song, and that of course is one of the greatest
of all time, so I obviously can't hate the 1960s
Spider-Man cartoon. I've been informed that it's actually a relatively faithful adaptation, which is impressive considering that it came out barely
five years after the first issue.
Yeah, at the time we never had a problem with the animation. (I am of that generation that grew up in the 80s and was thus slightly confused by the fact that children's TV used to routinely put on cartoons made in every era from the 1930s to the present on all in the same block in a random order...)
Exactly. To go back to what I was saying earlier, I honestly think that kids
just don't notice animation quality.
I certainly didn't. For an example, I remembered
Felix the Cat: the Movie as a lavish, well-animated film from when I had seen it in my childhood; but
catching up on YouTube a while back, I couldn't believe how wrong I was. (The
art direction was good, but the
animation is just terrible - note also the gratuitous CGI introduction). The dramatic improvement in animation quality for cartoons in the 1980s (stateside, that is - you can speak to whether or not this was also true with British-funded productions) is largely the result of outsourcing production to foreign markets (including, most notably, Japan) - labour was cheaper
and they did better work. Those American studios that
did survive (and there weren't many) couldn't cut corners anymore.
