myth about cartoons

[Cartman]

I'm just curious on how the myth that cartoons were only for kids got started. :confused:

[Joe Tully]

During the 70s and 80s, made for TV cartoons were incredibly bad (sorry Garrett). Hann-Barbera did some really bad work in the 70s, introduced Scrappy Doo, and did the terrible Yogi's Ark and other character cross-over stuff. The superhero stuff that came out was designed to have morals to every episode and was really not intelligent enough for adults, unlike modern stuff like BTAS.

[lislebartman]

I'm with you, Cartman. It is indeed a myth that cartoons were only meant for kids.

I'd like to think of the vast library of cartoons produced by Warners, MGM, Famous, etc., as animated films, not just cartoons. A lot of time, energy and expense were put into producing these films, and that millions around the world are still enjoying these films says something about them as a whole -- they were meant to be enjoyed by everyone!:cool:

[Matt Yorston]

Hear, hear! I could not agree with this post more.

For a while, I too wondered just WHY cartoons were always considered "for kids only". Then it hit me... they aren't. The only reason people think cartoons are for kids are because of those awful animated shows done by Filmation and such studios during the 1960's through the 1980's. Now those cartoons are definitely just for kids as that was, by that time, their intended audience.

Such is not the case with those great cartoons from Warners, MGM, UPA, Lantz, and even Disney. They have more than their fair share of adult humor. Examples: Catstello's line about giving Babbitt "the bird" from "A Tale of Two Kitties", the closing line, "If You'll Buy a Stamp or Bond, We'll Skin that Skunk Across the Pond" from "Blitz Wolf", the gag about people always forgetting to let the cat out at night from "The Cat That Hated People" (that one required a bit of thought on my behalf), and, of course, Porky's closing (and, sadly, now edited) line from "Drip-a-Long Daffy", "Lucky for him, it is a one horse town". Adults can see these cartoons as well as kids and they'll laugh too. People who see those classic films as simply "childrens' fodder" never fail to irritate me.

[alstin]

I don't get that "one horse town" bit. What does it mean?:confused:

[Jack]

It's a reference to horse crap. Daffy is lucky that it is a one horse town since he only has to clean up after one horse.

Jack:D

[dendawg]

Cartman said:
I'm just curious on how the myth that cartoons were only for kids got started :confused:

According to "That's All Folks!" by Steve Schneider, Walt Disney himself is to blame for starting and perpetuating this little mis-perception.

[Gossamer]

Walter Lantz stated in more than one instance that when his shorts were first on elevision, network Standards and Practices made him cut anything they deemed unsuitable for children. All his cartoons that showed racial stereotypes were frowned upon and any violence was edited out. This was back in the 1950s. It's not new by any means. Walt Disney also targeted children when his material hit television.

September 11, 2001

"Any man's death diminishes me in that I am a part of mankind. So ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

John Donne

[Cartman]

Originally posted by Matt Yorston

and, of course, Porky's closing (and, sadly, now edited) line from "Drip-a-Long Daffy", "Lucky for him, it is a one horse town". Adults can see these cartoons as well as kids and they'll laugh too. People who see those classic films as simply "childrens' fodder" never fail to irritate me.

Why was that scene in Drip a-Long Daffy edited out anyway?

[PorkyandDaffy]

Who knows why CN edits some of these things anyway.

[Matt Yorston]

I'm guessing the "Dripalong Daffy" scene was edited because CN execs just don't feel jokes about horse manure (albeit a pretty veiled one) are tasteful anymore. Sigh! :rolleyes:

[Emmanuel Cruz]

Read this quote said by Mike Hirsh, cofounder and former (or still) president of Nelvana. This quote is about feature animated films, and how they were in a bad shape in the 80's:

If you make a great movie, you can break through. But it's got to be great. Rock and Rule was a mistake. We thought we could keep the children's audience while broadening it to include teens and young adults-but we lost the kids and that was a mistake. The classical animation market is a child audience.

-Emmanuel :bosko:

[Jason Furness]

See, the problem is, many people seem to think anything greatly enjoyed by children was created exclusively for children. And we all know the Big Fat Unwritten Commandment of Adulthood (BFUCoA):

"Thou shalt not partake in the joys of Childhood. Ever."

The "true" adult knows children are inferior to himself. He must avoid, at all costs, experiencing anything that might bring great joy to the kiddies. All that is enjoyed in great abundanced by children (Nickelodeon, comic books, sugary cereals, anything "silly", candy, toys...) has been tainted with the mark of inferiority. Instead, the "true" adult finds his joy in things that either repel the young 'uns (CNN, John Grisham novels, bran, anything "boring") or bring children great danger (liquor, chainsaws).

The whole "cartoons is kids' stuff" aditude has probably with us as long as animated cartoons have existed, but to a lesser extent in the days before TV cartoons. Back then, there were no "kids shows". Most films were created to be at least somewhat suitable for children, yet entertaining enough for adults. Those "kiddie matinees" were made up of the same cartoons their parents watched along with the feature at night.

Children get great joy from viewing animated cartoons - almost as much as we do. ;) So, if you've been paying attention you know what that means. And the fact that most theatrical cartoons were short, simple and silly didn't help. Live action films didn't get that stigmatized. They had more variety: long, complicated dramas, slapstick comedies, serials, horror, fantasy, documentaries, and so on... but cartoons weren't so lucky. Animated features take much longer to make, so there have always been less of them. And the earliest cartoon series were little more than moving comic strips, and were treated as such for the next 60 years: little vignettes that tell a joke or three and take very little of your time. Plus, it's hard to tell a really complicated story in only 7 minutes.

How did cartoons transform from "General Audiences" to "Kids Only"? Hmm.. well, I figure Disney was largely responsible for that. His cartoons were full of cute, happy characters, vivd fantasy worldsand happy endings. That was all fine 'n' dandy till everybody else copied him, turning almost ALL cartoons into cute character-filled fantasy lands with happy endings for a while. It never completely wore off. After Warner's got everyone else copying them instead, Disney was still a big name and continued to be the undisputed king of animated features for the next 50 years. And nearly all their movies were happy musicals set in - that's right - fantasy worlds. I think you all know how everyone else's features turned out because of that...

But t'werent all Disney's fault. By the 1920's Paul Terry decided to concentrate on getting laughs out of children "beacuse their laughter [was] so infectious" that adults would find it harder to notice a lousy gag. Famous Studios seemed to pick up this philosophy years later. By the 1950's, their entire output was marketed to children.

Then TV came. Now there were actual children's shows. The first TV cartoon, "Crusader Rabbit", was one of them. And, like the Disney years, everybody else just copied this idea. Plus, when the theatricals became available for TV viewing, they were shown mostly on kids' shows just like the made-for-TV product. The result: all cartoons on television were kids' shows until "The Flintstones" appeared in 1960.

When I read articles about the Flintstones' beginnings, they often mention how the show made cartoons "acceptable" for adults again. Seems like our "favorite" myth had been increasing in power by that time. With most TV cartoons aimed at kids and theatricals dropping in quality and innovation, it's no wonder. Fortunately, the copycat nature of the entertainment industry created a trend of prime-time cartoons, each trying to win some of that "Flintsones" success. And with the longer, half-hour format, cartoons with more complicated plots, like "Johnny Quest", became possible. Things were lookin' up, until the invention of:

the Saturday Morning Cartoon.

In 1966, the networks attempted to recreate the by now defunct Saturday Kiddie Matinees on television with all-new children's cartoons. Unfortunately, the network execs seemed to think that all kids had the combined intelligence of a dehydrated boulder, so these cartoons were severely dumbed down. Even worse, these same execs, who had the creativity of the aforementioned Dehydrated Boulders, were creating some of these shows :eek: The results: 20-some years of the WORST cartoons known to man. Adults who had grown up with Bugs, Donald, Droopy, Popeye and Magoo must have found little, if any, entertainment value in these dumbed-down "static, talky horrors" and avoided Saturday Morning like the Plague (times three).

To make things even more bleak, assuming that's possible, prime-time animation was in no position to help. Everything but "The Flintsones" was short-lived. Once Fred left the ABC Friday-night lineup, the prime-time cartoon series was no more. And as for Looney Tunes on TV, once Bugs' show got cancelled, the networks treated him like any other kids show and dropped him into the Saturday Morning wasteland - a place few of his grown-up fans cared to visit. Theatrical cartoons, which would become extinct within a few years, were somewhat more entertaining than their TV counterparts, but not by much. They were destined to wind up on TV in the only place networks would welcome them: children's time slots.

Cartoons haven't been viewed the same way since.

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Whoo, that was long! When I publish this as a book, Y'ALL BETTER BUY IT!!

[Cartman]

That's sad :(

[song cycle]

One, I think animation has more than recovered from being considered straight 'kiddy fare'. I think some animated features now are going out of there way to appeal to adults now more than before. Take Shrek, there were hardly any children in the audience when I saw this in the theatre and I doubt they even enjoyed it as much as the adults there. Even Disney is starting to release more PG rated films, almost every adult I know was surprised how much they laughed at 'The Emperor's New Groove'. Couple this with 'The Simpsons', 'South Park', 'Adult Swim' and 'King of the Hill' etc. and I'd say cartoons are more and more being marketed towards mature audiences. In that way its possible Western audiences will eventually look at animation the way the Japanese do now, they have animation in virtually every kind of conceivable genre, including soap operas and news shows!

Secondly I hardly think its fair to blame Disney for the perception that cartoons are just for kids. I don't see 'kidvids' when I see his pre ww2 animated features; nor do I think anyone is being talked down to in these movies, which may explain why so many academics like the American Film Institute rate the early Disney films on their top movies of all time list.

[J Lee]

Disney was actually a victim of his own success and of the times when he targeted his cartoons towards kids. Remember, his first Mickey Mouse cartoons was a very agressive and impulsive character. But because of his success calls came out to "tone down" Mickey because he wasn't a good role model for kids -- the same situation 20th Century Fox faced 60 years later with Bart Simpson once that show became a big hit on TV. The difference was the times; Rupert Murdoch could afford to brush off the criticism and let Matt Groening, James Brooks and the rest do what they liked because the people protesting didn't have anywhere near the clout those back in 1931 did over the studios (who were struggling in the Depression anyway and already had groups protesting excessive sex and violence in films, which led to the creation of the Hayes office).

So Walt was tamed, and after seeing that it was safe to take the path towards a gentle fantasy-themed world, stayed the heck away from any rough stuff for the rest of his career (other than the two Jacks -- Kinney and Hannah -- sneaking some into their 1940s-50s shorts).

As fas as TV goes, old theatrical animation was cheap to get, cheap to show and filled time during the day in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when many stations, especially the independents, didn't have anything to run on weekday mornings and afternoons. Once Hanna-Barbera showed that new animation could be made to fill those holes at a price the stations could afford, low-budget animation aimed at kids became the standard.

For a while, the writers and artists were able to at least come up with fresh enough story lines to overcome the limited animation, and if you go back and look at some of the stuff they put in the 1959-65 made-for-TV stuff, there are still a few adult gags snuck in, since most of the people working on them had wortked on the theatrical shorts. But by the mid-60s, the creativity was gone and the network execs, with no creative ideas whatsoever, were getting more and more into that side of the business.

And they found that with their target audience -- 12 and under -- they could get away with lifeless animation and repetitive, dull plots because kids are less demanding than teens or adults, and as Leonard Maltin said, "Kids crave repetition." So you take something that's a hot pop culture item of the moment (pop music, monsters, nighttime TV sitcom casts), transfer it to Saturday morning, order 9-13 episodes and rerun 'em four to five times in one year and the kids will still watch. It's only when they start getting older and look back at the stuff that they say "Hey, this is crap!" but by then there's a new generation of kids to sucker.

Now that baby boomers and Gen X kids who watched those cartoons have grown up and realize what kind of junk they were, some of the cartoons have gotten better as far as stories go, while John K's handling of the original "Ren and Stimpy" series over at Nickelodeon proved to execs that, by God, you can use jokes about body gas, fluids and solids in your cartoons and get away with it (not that this was his reason for doing "Ren and Stimpy" -- John K wanted to update the Clampett/Scribner style, but the execs at Nick, and then at CN, only learned that fart jokes can raise Neilsen ratings).

So the cartoons today are in general more "adult" than what was on 25-35 years ago, but it's not the "adult" that the Warners artists and writers were doing from the late 30s through the early 60s, its "adult" in the way that gross-out stuff that used to be off limits in kids cartoons is now allowed.

[Jason Furness]

Hey - another really long post! This thread is great to read.

[Lucky Bob]

Originally posted by song cycle
Even Disney is starting to release more PG rated films, almost every adult I know was surprised how much they laughed at 'The Emperor's New Groove'.

The "Groove" wasn't PG, though.

[Cartman]

Originally posted by J Lee
Disney was actually a victim of his own success and of the times when he targeted his cartoons towards kids.

Actually, Disney, himself, stated that he did not make any of his films (whether live action, animated, feature, or short) primarily for children.


I do not make films primarily for children. I make them for the child in all of us, whether he be six or sixty.

[J Lee]

But success bred scrunity -- the more popular Mickey got, the more he had to be a "role model' or come under the scrutiny of the same people who would target the Fleischer Studios over their Betty Boop cartoons a few years later. Walt certainly wasn't in any financial position to argue the point in 1931, any more than Max and Dave were a few years later when the Hays Office dropped the hammer on them (and on Paramount's Mae West) over their characters' actions.

The success of the Popeye series after that -- less risque than Betty's 1931-34 shorts, but more adult than what Disney was doing by then -- showed there was still a desire in the theater-going public for cartoons that didn't just want to make people go "ooh-ahh" and get all squishy inside, but wanted to make them laugh (and in the case of the Popeyes, cheer a villan getting pummled by the hero). As the Flesicher studio became more Disneyfied in the later 30s, Avery and the rest of the directors at Warners filled the hole for cartoons that appealed to older audiences, something Disney's short subjects weren't doing by the end of the decade, no matter what Walt said.

[Matthew Hunter]

I think the main reason is that kids LIKE them. Perhaps it started with someone taking notice that kids were becoming a key audience. Now, where they got it wrong was in making cartoons for kids that were childish...like 'preachy' cartoons or stuff that had no artistic or enjoyable merit except to keep a kid's attention for a short time. (think "Care Bears".) Maybe that's why so many modern adults hate cartoons or still think of them as kid stuff...because the ones they were exposed to were edited to be that way or made to be that way...it's sad.

Oh, and "Dripalong Daffy" was a mistake (Jerry Beck had the information on his site once, it was a Warner Bros. crime, not CN) and apparently so was "Scaredy cat"...I asked Laurie Goldberg casually not long ago about the latter, and as far as she knew they got it that way (hope I'm allowed to repeat that.)
-Matthew
(gee, I ought to hit the old sack...I'm up WAY too late this evening.)

[Cartman]

One thing that is interesting is that I read on a site that said that the animators didn't make their cartoons for kids nor did they make them for adults. They made them primarily for themselves.