Channel Frederator Blog

Hey, Mike. Just a slight correction. That was that week’s top ten shows for kids, aged 6 to 11, not just limited to Nickelodeon. It just so happens eight of the slots are Nick’s.

Right.. right! Sorry, I missed that. I’ll fix the post to be correct.

IMO:

1. Too many cartoon producers try to be quirky. Which goes back to your comment about too little content that interests kids. Even shows that feature a kid character as the lead - like “My Gym Partner’s A Monkey” - has failed to connect with a decent-sized audience…because none of the sensibilities in that show strike the right chords. When a writer forgets that your average kid has a brain AND a heart, that’s when the crappy writing begins.

2. Too many cartoon writers try to be “edgy” and wink-wink-aren’t-we-clever? Which often translates into cruel humor that damages characters’ appeal and turns viewers off.

3. Too much vulgarity. Snot and farts and naked butts all over the place. Gets a little old, ya know?

4. Noisy, mean and stupid does not necessarily equal funny. Kids figure that out eventually. Which is why Cosmo can’t sell a T-shirt.

5. Awful art and worse animation. Flash can only carry a mediocre talent so far. But nonFlash-animated shows have problems too. Scribbly awfulness like Ed Edd and Eddy and Camp Lazlo makes you envy a blind man. And then there’s the boring sameness. Wow Wow Wubbzy and Ying Yang Yo look almost exactly the same. About the only show where you see solid animation and great drawing is Spongebob. Which is I suppose why he still rules.

“And then there’s the boring sameness. Wow Wow Wubbzy and Ying Yang Yo look almost exactly the same.”
Can it be because both were created by Creator Bob Boyle? Call me kooky, but I think that’s why they “look almost exactly the same.”
Spongebob is also clearly a mild derivitive of both Pee Wee Herman and Ren and Stimpy if both were shaken up, mixed together, and situated at the bottom of the sea, but I digress.

Something else is that in today’s animation climate, the show has to be rock solid from the start. Characters, stories, and settings don’t have any time to evolve. If the show doesn’t do well on it’s first season, it’s canceled. I don’t think the Simpsons could happen in today’s television animation market.

As often as they air Spongebob and FOPs, I barely noticed.

I don’t think the targeted audience is aware of the causes of dwindling animation.
I do know that the people who grew up watching Nick, along with geeks on the internet, miss the cartoons that aired on Nick like the ones you mentioned. But considering how those people are out of the network’s demographic, there’s not much they can do to help.

Oh well, there’s always Nicktoons Network.

Fewmet - In general I agree with most of what you say.
However, I don’t believe that kids don’t connect with these shows.
Unfortunately, although children do have their favourites, they’ll pretty much watch anything we stick in front of them - they really don’t have much choice.
It is the responsibility of creators to produce interesting and challenging content for kids.

Elliot, don’t assume that all children are drones who “will watch whatever we tell them to.” They’re human beings. And I hope to God that they’d have enough sense/free will to turn the channel if they don’t like what they’re watching. (Or better yet, turn the TV off altogether.) If not, well…yikes. That’s a truly frightening thought.

“Too much focus on trends” sounds about right. I can’t speak for kids, but speaking for myself, there isn’t much on right now that has me excited. I’m no less excited about cartoons in general as I was when I was younger, but other than El Tigre, none of the new kids shows grab me the way they did in the 90s. I miss the sensibility of early Cartoon Network so much. Back when Dexter, Powerpuff Girls, Cow & Chicken, and Johnny Bravo and a few others have become shows from their shorts and would air in blocks, often premiering on Friday nights. I loved those friday night. None of them are my favorite show in the world, but all of them were good, solid shows that I’d want to see. They seemed concerned only with being fun and original, and weren’t relatability-tested into the ground.

You know what I’d like? A new cartoon animal (I’m getting sick of humans) with a strong personality that I’d proudly wear on a t-shirt. Anybody know of any?

I know of a few actually…

I think the biggest thing we all forget is that none of us really know what kids want because they don’t know themselves. Being a grownup only separates us even further. Go to a Focus group and it’s pretty obvious that kids are easily swayed so it’s not too easy to create content for kids. I think that all the points posted here are valid but in the end there really is no reason. This is a different age and a very different world and it’s nothing like how it was when we were growing up. Kids are bombarded daily with sex, violence, games, commercials, music and combinations thereof that would have made your head spin as a child. They have attention deficit disorders to the nth degree because there are 1000 channels all vying for their little eyes. Add to that Web content and games? Man! This is your brain on TV! I think that really there are two major factors when thinking about why kids watch live action more than animation. 1.) Quite a few (but not all) cartoons today have no soul. The characters are wooden and formed by committee which kills them. They can’t have life when there is not one voice creating them. The exceptions, IMHO are the ones that are creator driven, Like Sponge Bob and Fairly Odd Parents or I Was a Teenage Robot or Dexter’s Lab or Powerpuff Girls or Fosters or Ren and Stimpy. That’s what gives them soul. A person’s ideas put onto film. 2.) Animation has been streamlined down to nothing more than an assembly line. There is no time to add character and personality to the storyboards and exposure sheets, which are mostly freelanced out as well. A clear cut case of Assembly Line-itis. The shows that stick out and fare best are the ones where the Networks (for the most part)let the creators do what they think works (after all they created the shows didn’t they?) and the ones where the script is only a starting point and the storyboard artist and writer collaborate to make a good film. THAT’S what’s wrong with cartoons today and why kids don’t watch them. Most of them are soulless assembly lined content and it shows.

The comments above are terrific; some really thoughtful commentary. I’d just like to add one more thing: Character is key. If people like a character, then a few weak jokes won’t kill it (unless the joke is too out of character). One of the reasons Spongebob has done so well IMO is because people *love* him. And that’s because he’s loveable. He’s naive, disarmingly optimistic, affectionate, accident-prone, loyal and outgoing (kind of like a porous yellow puppy). He tries to do the right thing and he’d never deliberately hurt anyone. He’s this era’s Mickey Mouse - only he’s a heck of a lot funnier. He’s a great personality tied to a funny concept, brought to his full potential thanks to generally good writing, animation and voice work. Now look at the characters on other toon shows. Many of them are stupid, mean or extremely self-centered - and they’re the “good guys”! No wonder most kids (and adults who still watch cartoons) don’t warm up to them. Kids don’t like jerks any more than adults do!

I agree with almost everything you said, but without some character flaws and negative traits to balance a character out, we’d be in for a boatload of bland!

This is just my opinion, but I would like to add my 2 cents. I am going to agree with a few comments made here and in the original post (post 4117), however, I feel there is no 1 cause for the current trends in the industry, rather, it is a collection of factors simultaneously converging that is causing the current situation. I will discuss one of the more major ones here.

I am going to agree with Floyd Bishop’s comment from post 4117, where he stated that “kids skew upwards in their watching patterns.” This is very true. A 7 year old will gladly watch a cartoon with content aimed at an 11 year old, but the opposite is not true. Perhaps some of the issues animation is facing come from the fact that the age for which animated content is produced has dropped significantly. In other words, when shows like Animaniacs were produced, the humor was written on a multifaceted level. This is a technique we currently see employed in films like Sherk. Essentially, a decent amount of the humor works on multiple levels: one for younger viewers, and one for older viewers. Kids are not oblivious to that, and that sort of writing, one which does not speak down to them, always seems to strike a chord.

And let’s not forget, many of the classics, including the old Warner Bros and Disney toons, were actually meant to run on the big screen before a movie, and therefore were designed to entertain multiple age demographics.

I think one thing that needs to happen is some discernment between “age appropriate” and “intellectual age” in animation. Just because a cartoon is appropriate for a 6 year old to watch, does not mean the content’s intellectual level needs to be that of a 6 year old. There is a big difference between “intelligent humor” and “adult humor,” and I am afraid somewhere along the line that has been forgotten.

If I may be so bold, I will credit the success of shows like SpongeBob and Fairly Odd Parents to the fact that they are among the few animated kids shows left on television that employ this technique. They are shows that parents can enjoy watching with their children, because they can get some level of intellectual stimulation out of the shows. In fact, with FOP, some of the marital humor and banter between Cosmo and Wanda, (which I have heard a few people give the show some flack over) is one of the things that I have heard parents positively commenting on. Essentially, they state that they are surprised that jokes they can enjoy are found in a kid’s shows.