Bad cartoons, really big bucks
By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, July 23, 2009 - 6 Comments
Hollywood is transforming those awful 1980s children’s shows into box office gold
Badly animated ’80s cartoons are taking over Hollywood. G.I. Joe: The Rise of COBRA, opening Aug. 7, is the latest movie to have its roots in a cartoon that kept children occupied on Saturday mornings and weekdays after school. We’ve had the two Transformers movies (which owe more to the ’80s cartoons than the toys), and studios are developing films based on The Smurfs, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and even Hong-Kong Phooey, about a kung-fu-fighting dog. These shows reused animation over and over, and censors forbade them to show any violence. But they have a bigger audience than cartoons that were good.
It seems like the more poorly animated an old cartoon it is, the better it sells. Warner Brothers ended its series of Looney Tunes DVDs, but announced plans to market more episodes of Saturday morning cartoons like The Herculoids and The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan. It’s become common for fans and writers of such shows to refer to them as classics, arguing that they deserve to rank with prestigious, well-produced animation. On Shout! Factory’s DVD of the G.I. Joe cartoon, head writer Ron Friedman tells us that the good guys’ fight against poorly voiced baddies from COBRA is symbolic of “the Greek ideal of democracy.” Cartoon history is being rewritten before our eyes, with G.I. Joe and He-Man as the classics and Bugs Bunny or Disney cartoons as forgotten rarities. Continue…
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Hanna-Barbera, Unstoppable Killing Machine
By Jaime Weinman - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 6:34 PM - 4 Comments
With the announcement that Family Guy and Futurama producer David Goodman will write a feature film based on Hong Kong Phooey, the question naturally arises: what’s Hanna-Barbera got on the entertainment industry? (It can’t be compromising photos; there aren’t any that TMZ hasn’t already gotten hold of.) Most cartoon franchises, including the good ones, have trouble staying viable in today’s market, but H-B product seems unstoppable. And the worse their product is, the better it does: their somewhat well-regarded early TV work hasn’t sold great on DVD and hasn’t had a lot of interest from the movie industry, but Scooby-Doo and its ripoffs are doing great.
A historical tip for those who want to know which cartoons to avoid: most cartoons directed by Charles A. Nichols (also billed as C. August Nichols to lull us into a false sense of security) are hard to sit through. At Disney in the ’40s and ’50s, he was in charge of directing the series of cartoons featuring Pluto without Mickey, and even granting that it’s hard to make a good cartoon with the only character who’s more boring than Mickey, his cartoons are some of the dullest ever produced by that studio. Then he became Hanna-Barbera’s chief director in the ’70s, possibly the worst era for TV cartoons, and when H-B threatened to improve slightly, he moved over to Ruby-Spears (started by two of H-B’s employees) to direct the “Rambo” cartoon and “Alvin and the Chipmunks.” Oh, and he was a director on Robonic Stooges. An impressively long career, but not a great filmography.
Update: In comments, SeanStok brings up the matter of Grape Ape. Yep, Nichols’ name is on that too.
Update 2: But in fairness I should add that Nichols did the animation of the Coachman in Pinocchio, the most evil Disney villain ever and the only one who gets away with all Continue…
