Why there's almost zero children cartoons nowadays starring adults or old people? In the 80s or early 90s a lot of the popular cartoons had almost exclusively adult characters and sometimes a kid nobody liked: - Inspector Gadget - Sherlock Hound - He-Man - She-Ra - Thundercats - TMNT - The Gnomes - Smurfs - GI Joe - Real Ghostbusters & Ghost Busters - Transformers - Albert Barillé shows ("Il était une fois" Series) - COPS - Lucky Lucke - Droids - MASK - ALF - Willy Fogg & Dartacan (Japanese-European)
I watch recent TV cartoons nowadyas and almost all of them are about children with superpowers or boring high school characters trying to act cool ("cool", "maaaan"...)
This is good post and I wish I could answer your question.
Isaac Jones
Old people in general have been having less of a presence in hollywood/entertainment recently. For some practical, and some hogwash reasons, we can't make movies like Cocoon (1985) anymore. Old people are higher maintenance and less marketable.
Aaron Fisher
>recent TV cartoons nowadyas and almost all of them are about children with superpowers or boring high school characters trying to act cool
Because cartoon creators now grew up with anime which mostly deals with kid/teen characters
Luis Mitchell
Oh God, that series´ finale I still remember thanks user, for reminding me all those fun times I dunno, maybe because being adult is not that cool anymore? not trying to derrail the thread, but what were your favorite 80-90´s cartoons?
Elijah Myers
tmnt were teens though...not adults
Josiah Roberts
Some channels actually have a requirement about having kid characters only
Robert Wood
Adult characters still happen in most cartoons. Old people on the other hand are almost gone as main characters. I theorize that it's because the general perception about old people nowadays is not of them as wise elders who do responsible things to teach the new generation, but more as grumpy, naggy and puritan ugly manchildren with wrinkles who are to blame for wars, political decisions, and religious strangleholds upon the youth. The mistakes and conflicts between the old people is a conflict that gets passed down to the new generation. It's a generational conflict. What is old and worked back then doesn't work that well anymore today. Because it doesn't work that well, it must be bad. What is bad must be discarded. Old people are becoming a drain on the economy, because too many of them are still alive. Because there's too many old people, there's not that one valuable witness of time, but many angry old voices. Because we now write down everything and document it more properly, we now know and find out that all the things that are making our lives bad is a result of the irresponsible things that the older people did through their greed. And because more old people live longer than ever, that means that we can see more of them as parasites. It's not really fair, of course, since most old people aren't really to blame. They didn't know it better when they did the things that would have consequences today. But it's easy to forget that. And it's always easier to blame someone.
A lot of it was where they didn't know what would sell. Now and days we have it fine tune that the more relatable something is, the more it will get a viewer base. See: Harry Potter and Twilight.
Ryan Taylor
Myf favorite shows are pretty much the typical of child the era: He-Man, Inspector Gadget, Gnomes, Willy Fogg, TMNT, etc. I remember TV back then also showed a lot of classic Disney and Looney Tunes cartoons, and a lot of them even were the black & white ones! Amazing to think about it. Also TV channles showed more strange eastern Europe and soviet cartoons too. This things have disappeared from tvs after the 90s ended (at least in Spain).
I foget to add I watched some anime back then: Ranma, Muscleman (Kinnikuman), Dr. Slump... I loved Dragon Ball, and it was one of the rare exceptions in the 80s of a very successful cartoon starring a kid.
That's true. You rarely see in entertainment today the figure of the wise old man, or the importance of old people in general for the younger generations.
I'll watch it, thanks.
David Campbell
spain? not Sup Forums related but do you remember juego de la oca? was popular back in the day here in Mexico also, I watched a daffy duck anti nazi cartoon once, the one with the 2 eagles and a trenchfight those were simpler times my favorite? among those you said, adding punky brewster, brave starr, muppet babies and GoBots
David Mitchell
Yep, Juego de la Oca was an spanish show. Weird one too. I don't remember nazi cartoons, but there was a lot of Black & white ones, with characters shooting guns, chewing tobacco, and drinking alcohol. There was censorship back then, but TV stations had a more relaxed attitude about a lot of things. In the middle 90s the whole situtation was starting to change, though.
Talking about old people, I remember something good about that age, and it was that TV channels mixed classic cartoons with new ones, so you could watch He-man, Thundercats or Transformers, but also you got the opportunity to watch the Flinstones, the Jetsons, Looney Tunes, Johnny Quest, Top Cat, etc, so I ended up watching a few of the cartoons that my parents used to watch when they were little. That created a whole generation who shared and understood a lot of things with their parents, thanks of the mix of old and new pop culture.
Charles Stewart
>he thinks Hollywood wasn't always youth-oriented as all fuck since the beginning
Kayden Price
I think he meant a movie like John Wayne's finale--The Shootist. That's a movie that wouldn't get made today.
Adam Hughes
I would say that youth oriented movies have always been pretty much the norm than the exception in Hollywood. Yes sometimes a film like The Shootist gets made, but it's not all that common.
Colton Ross
juego de la oca was a fusion between mario party and takeshi´s castle, but IRL whats not to love about it? and yes, same happened to me, I watched old and "new" toons with my dad I loved how on old cartoons there was always a morale, a lesson to be taught He man and brave starr, mostly
Luke Jones
The basis behind most forms of entertainment is "Would I waifu/have sex with that person/character?" or "Would I want to be that person/character?" Nobody wants to be old and nobody wants to have sex with old people, so...
Brody Perry
They exist but they're low-budget made for TV affairs like that last movie Ernest Borgnine did where he plays a nursing home resident.
Isaiah Sanchez
>juego de la oca I remember watching it for the ladies in skimpy outfits, spain and argies should be grateful they can always watch tiddies on open tv
Joseph Watson
Hated how the gnomes died at the end.
Isaiah Gomez
they died with their beloved one on their side...plus that othe gnome every good thing comes to an end, user and that was the show´s last teaching it was bittersweet
Jayden Ramirez
Reminds me of the Simpsons where Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein would talk about how they found old people interesting and that Grandpa and Mr. Burns were some of their favorite characters.
Aaron Sanchez
It's an American thing--all the way back in the 19th century, European writers would comment on America's obsession with youthfulness and lack of reverence for their elders.
Ryder Price
>anime which mostly deals with kid/teen characters not in the time those people were kids. And don't use "anime" when your toonami fed experience is only shounen and shoujo stuff
Leo Wright
That video takes too fucking long to say "because TV viewership is declining so networks prefer comedy cartoons that can be watched out-of-order, and cartoon action franchises have become live-action CGI... action franchises like Transformers and Thor and shit."
Regardless of whether or not the current generation blames the past generation for the problems they caused (I think generally most don't), the reason less older people are showing up as main characters in cartoons nowadays doesn't stem from ignorance. Simply put, the illusion of the majority of old folk being wise elders has been shattered in modern culture. When you take that away, they're just characters like anyone else, but they less attractive, and full of less potential for what they can do with the remainder of their life. They can do generally all the same stuff kid characters can do, they're just less proficient and less likely to be chosen.
It's not about hatred, the wise elder stereotype is just much less popular because of history.
Carter Young
>full of less potential how? Adults do whatever they want, and can actually move things up. kids have to go to bed when mom and dad says so. A adult with magic powers have a way greater scope of action than those look-alike kids shows that always deal with the same bully shit
Cooper Morris
You have a really good point, so I'll just clarify what I meant. Elders have lived most of their lives already. They likely have reached their peak or are almost there by the time they come into the show. With kids, they have the entire rest of their life ahead of them. They could develop in several different ways and we get to follow that development.
Older characters are great, I wish they were used more. But they simply aren't as an attractive of a choice for networks anymore.
Christian Cox
Dirty Grandpa made 10x its budget back at the box office, so hey, what do I know?
Tyler Wood
That was just a generic stoner fratboy comedy that happened to feature a 72 year old manchild having sex with women decades younger than himself. It was still basically a "young" movie. I mean a movie like The Shootist that deals with getting old and accepting your mortality is pretty rare because most people don't want to deal with something that heavy.
The equivalent would be if John Wayne's last movie had instead shown himself doing Farrah Fawcett and...I guess there weren't really stoner fratboy comedies yet in the 70s.
Luis Price
>The equivalent would be if John Wayne's last movie had instead shown himself doing Farrah Fawcett and...I guess there weren't really stoner fratboy comedies yet in the 70s. The 70s equivalent would be Mae West's finale Sextette, made when she was 85 and a famously terrible movie. Her hearing and eyesight were going so she had a hard time moving around the set or following directions from the director.
Jaxon Gonzalez
MLP is largely about adults, aside from the Cutie Mark Crusader episodes.....but yeah you're kind of right, I wanted to come in this thread and call you a moron but you're pretty much right
I mean, you can take most of the Marvel shows I guess even though nobody likes those, though Spider-Man is a little kid in the current one....Dan Vs. was also a show about adults.
Juan Martin
A lot of people think old people and authority figures are lame. Yeah, adults existed in popular cartoons in the 80s or 90s, but to get kids to watch, a lot of them have to sabotage the adults characters just to make kids seem more useful. Like writers have to come up with a situation where the adult fucks up so that the kid character can come in and save the day just to appeal to their target demographic. I think modern cartoons see the futility of such a thing, so they just give the kid the superpower so he can they can be useful instead of being fucktards who ruin everything like in real life.
Joshua Sanders
Honestly it seems to be that for almost 20 years now there has been a pretty massive shift in fiction and narrative art towards identification and self-insersion and an undermining of the idea of universality. It really all comes down to the postmodern idea of denying the validity of the concept of a "narrative" meaning that only experience can be of any value as anything else is a mere construction and thus holds not significant value. That's why only something that speaks to the specificity of one's experience should be considered rather than an appeal to the universal elements of the human experience. That's why if you want to speak to children, you have to do it through young characters because their experience has more in common than that of an old fictional character. This goes for any classification you can think of. MAybe I'm just rambling but it's really something I've seen growing with the presence of american media increasing.
Brandon Martin
Children don't want to be spoken to. I think a lot of what's happening in media and schools are just a bunch of adults forcing their ideas onto kids. Like they see some kid minding their own business and having fun, then get all bent out of shape when a kid acts like a fucking kid instead of doing standardized tests.
Christopher Powell
Adults are still featured a lot. Old people, not so much anymore.
Leo Parker
>Old people, not so much anymore It seems like it was mostly a 90s thing usually involving a grandpa character who was a stereotype WWII vet.
Jayden Perez
They turned into fucking trees and abandoned the Fox.
William Scott
Yeah, WW2 was something that people could still be proud of for having fought in it as a normal soldier. With modern wars, one will just be accused of fighting for obvious corporate interests, destabilizing countries, angering allies who will have to suffer the consequences of harboring refugees, warmongering and escalating things, and not succeeding at finishing the war at all.
Perhaps it's simply the death of innocence. Back then, you could believe in Good vs. Evil in real life. Back then, once a war, the big war, the great world war two ended, a soldier then helped rebuild a country and became a friend.
Today, a soldier is just a murderer, and the war still hasn't ended, and everyone just becomes more and more cynic. Corporations spring forth that have an actual keen interest that the war keeps going on (but not escalating too much), so that more war items can be sold. People are becoming disillusioned, or stop giving a shit about the soldiers.
James White
Gravity Falls and Adventure Time subverted this by having integral characters like Ice King, Grunkle Stan and others be elderly people and they still reasoned with the audience but the leads are still young lads so it’s not that noticeable, I think.
Nolan Hall
stop being a selfish prick, user they knew their time was up at least they went peacefully
Jose Lee
I mean George RR Martin said it right; The Nazis were as close as you could get to fantasy villains, right down to the abuse of metal and skulls and murder farms.
The problem is that people have to have empathy and social maturity to deal with one another nowadays, which ain't in very large supply even in the best of times. You get people who haven't moved past middle school or high school when it comes to behavior, even if they have PhDs. And then you have people who never got challenged, so when they finally do fail, they crash and burn and develop a fear of trying, or a fear of caring, which results in a feedback loop and then you get people who just want to bring each other down fighting people who just want to bring each other down.
It's why half of Sup Forums is permanently salty, why so much shit gets half-assed in terms of art and animation, and why you have everyone on Sup Forums shitposting instead of bothering to learn art and one upping the Tumblr twats they hate so much.
I'm taking 17 credits of classes on top of full time work and rideshare, the very least they could do is a bit of property damage, the lazy fucks.
who went to live with his vixen mate and be with another gnome family?
Aiden Wright
I wish I was half as busy as you, honestly.
Noah Butler
I remember when this first started happening in the 90s. One thing I read said that kids felt they could relate more to kid superheroes than adult superheroes.
I thought that was stupid bullshit as a kid becoming a teen. We always pretended to be adult heros when playing as kids. The idea of pretending to be another kid or admiring a kid hero was fucking retarded.
Yet it caught on, and really seems to still be popular. I mean it works in cases like pokemon, digimon, and medabots, but not stuff like fighting demons or wars or great evils.
Ryan Butler
THIS
I usually hated the kid characters in cartoons, I idolized the adults because I wanted to be like them. This also applied to live-action series like MacGyver, Sergeant Rick Hunter, Michael Knight, and so many other 80's TV heroes.
>I mean it works in cases like pokemon, digimon, and medabots, Having a cool companion that you buddy up with is why those kid series work. It's like having a badass version of Lassie.
Colton Green
It was a different time.
Back when movies first came out, they retold stories in animated format. As such, you ended up with a wide range of people because that's what the old tales were about. By the 80s and so on, you had a lot of cartoons with adult (mid-20s at least) people because they were written by adults, acting as a role model towards kids. Now, you have a lot of cartoons where the kid is intended to self-insert, so they tend to star kids.
To be fair, kids back in the 80s were always annoying shits. They were constant whiners who got in the way of everything. But look at something like Mysterious Cities of Gold, and you could see a kid imagining themselves going on an adventure while watching that. (And, to be fair, we did have Goonies for much the same thing.)
Blake Perez
Kids like kid characters in stuff like SOL or when it's more about the supporting cast or the world surrounding them. Pokemon is a great exemple. You don't give a shit about Ash, you're in to see the pokemons. When it comes to adventure stories in particular it feels quite forced and fuck I remember thinking that even when I was really young. If you made Indiana Jones a kid, it would be ridiculous because the world would have to bend itself arround him to never put him in any significant danger. He was cool because he was an adult who could do all the dangerous things. That's the idea.
Elijah Thomas
>To be fair, kids back in the 80s were always annoying shits. They were constant whiners who got in the way of everything. QFT
The only kid characters I liked in 80's cartoons was in Dennis the Menace or A Pup Named Scooby Doo. Or if you count non-humans, Huey, Dewey, and Louie from DuckTales.
Parker Reed
>A Pup Named Scooby Doo >Or if you count non-humans >or Is there something about Scooby Doo that I'm not familiar with?
Noah Peterson
I second this. OP is right and it would be neat to dig into.
Juan Fisher
My take has always been that with most of the major 80s cartoons having commercial/toy tie-ins, eventually they needed to create new characters and thus be able to sell more toys and in general this trend propagated.
But certain things happened:
>He-Man, Transformers and GI-Joe all have "successor" moments. He-Man finds out he has a sister isn't quite the same, and She-Ra WAS popular, but the idea of replacing the status quo characters with a younger generation (to sell toys) did not go over as well as one would have thought and the big three franchises stagnated.
Meanwhile....
>Muppet Babies makes ALL the money. Hanna Barbera/WB retaliates with Flintstone Kids, setting off a terrible chain that lasts into the 2000s of kiddifying older properties. Scooby Doo is the only one where this moderately works out well but damned if they kept trying.
>Tiny Toons is *the* successor to Looney tunes right as the 90s start.
>Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles themselves are teenagers (in theory) and were a MAJOR breakout hit and the last great toy-tie in wave of the 80s into the 90s.
...And then came Nickelodeon.... All of its programming focused on kids and Nick dominated ratings even if they weren't selling toys. By this point the example had been made; even with a few flops here and there, kids programming had to feature kids to be successful. Unless it dealt with Disney projects and or Super heroes-- and even then there were always exceptions (Jubilee in X-Men, Robin getting more and more attention in B:TAS and Spider-Man is...kind of a teenager/college age guy, whereas there were always kid characters in Disney tunes...) the entertainment that continued to stay successful featured children, or at most teenagers as the protagonists.
Cooper Davis
Well there was a Scooby Doo cartoon when they were kids but it was a sack of shit.
Nicholas Wright
Its simple, back in the good days, cartoons were meant to inspire you and show you how awesome you could grow up to be if you really tried...
Present day cartoons try to focus on how awesome you could be if you avoided growing up all together and tried to not have any responsibility.
David the Gnome, Mr. Wizard, Mr. Rogers, and all the other awesome older people that helped shape the future.
Alexander Roberts
Ditto and my childhood friends too. Even in the earlier internet forums many kids didn't like those characters. Kids hated Chris in Sonic X and many Transformers fans are getting annoyed by kids side-characters they were only screen stealing the main cast.
>Yet it caught on, and really seems to still be popular. They should attually get it since the SMS era. They Ignored them or the executives are still reading very outdated pedagog books like always.
John Butler
Courage the dog was late 90s and did not have a single kid.
Luis Rivera
I'm taking 45-60 milligrams of Dexedrine XR a day and getting 2 hours of sleep because I have to get up at 3:30 AM in the morning because Cybersecurity classes at my community college are all 6-10, and working at a coffee shop next to 7 schools means that I get swamped by waves of students, parents, and teachers by half past five in the morning.
If it weren't for the benefits and crew, I'd quit after 3 weeks. Thankfully, everyone who works here gets free coffee and food, plus management doesn't care how much we shit talk our customers over the headset as long as we keep the lines moving. Hell, my supervisors join in on the insults for the most part.
Remember kids, getting pissy at a barista for running out of hazelnut syrup just makes them laugh at you behind your back. I've been working there for two years, and let me tell you, there's nothing better than when an old person or whiny church mom starts to tantrum and threatens us with bad reviews or the BBB or other stupid shit. I'm the main employee helping clear $7500 in sales daily, you geriatric thot, do you honestly think I have qualms about burning your fake church tips in front of you?
My personal favorite incident was when this one asshole drove a barista to tears while our ASM was there; she found his car and put chum mixed with doe piss down his A/C intake while he was on vacation.
