It might be easy these days with the amount of edgy cartoons that exist now to forget back then, there really wasn't any. Shows like The Simpsons, Ren and Stimpy, Beavis and Butthead, and even Daria I suppose were not really like any other cartoons out there.
They subverted the tropes everyone had taken for granted since the 50's or so that TV was expected to have. They outraged parents and the extreme conservative groups that wielded fairly significant power at the time.
Shortly before that we had 'the Dungeons and Dragons' scares and it was the time of the violent video game and explicit music crackdowns. Those cartoons became targets for those same kinds of people.
Without those shows, we probably wouldn't have the kinds of cartoons we have today.
I would definitely include more than just the two cartoons in the article and MTV as the sole disruptors of cable.
But, the cartoons of that era were definitely disruptive in a way that's hard to appreciate without experiencing.
Some shows even did this explicitly -- Space Ghost, Coast to Coast!, for example, was a remix of a 60s era show into an absurdist late-night talk show, using the same animation assets and everything.
And it spawned a whole genre of similar shows in the 90s/early 2000s that formed most of the original Adult Swim lineup.
>It might be easy these days with the amount of edgy cartoons that exist now to forget back then, there really wasn't any.
You're talking about shows up to twenty years removed from Bakshi cartoons like Fritz the Cat or his eighties Mighty Mouse show. The Simpsons and such definitely popularized the medium, but it didn't create it.
>Shortly before that we had 'the Dungeons and Dragons' scares and it was the time of the violent video game and explicit music crackdowns.
There is always content that is slightly edgier that conservatives freak out over. Some outraged people didn't disrupt cable, cable embraced the cartoons and pushed things further with things like the creation of Adult Swim.
Fritz the cat was a feature film not a TV show. Mighty Mouse was an actual kids show cancelled over a reference to a character supposedly snorting a line of something and Bakshi's reputation.
There was a bit of separation between TV cartoons and feature length ones back then. You're correct, the precedent for adult oriented animation had been set years before, but I wouldn't really compare movies like that, or even the more adult oriented anime shows and films in Japan at the time to that era of western TV cartoons.
As far as western TV cartoons went, prior to those late 80's, early 90's shows, there wasn't really any like them.
>As far as western TV cartoons went, prior to those late 80's, early 90's shows, there wasn't really any like them.
Virtually all those shows creators credit Bakshi as an influence though. Hell, the asshole co-creator of Ren and Stimpy worked with him on Mighty Mouse.
They likely needed cable to be able to successfully move to television, but I don't see how they disrupted cable.
edit they changed the title to "upended animation." While I stil think it's a slight overstatement, that title at least represents what the article is about.
>Hell, the asshole co-creator of Ren and Stimpy worked with him on Mighty Mouse.
But it was him not Bakshi that pushed that adult style onto mainstream television. Don't get me wrong. I really enjoy Bakshi's work but he isn't really the one responsible for bringing edgy cartoons to home television.
>But it was him not Bakshi that pushed that adult style onto mainstream television
We have vastly different memories of Mighty Mouse. Ren and Stimpy definitely took it a few steps further, but it's not like the asshole suddenly started making weird shit after working on Mighty Mouse.
And I've admitted several times that the nineties were more influential for adult cartoons on TV. I just think that has more to do with the growth in cable and the rise of outsourcing animation than any pioneers suddenly wanting to make adult cartoons.
The thing is that these animated shows were doing something that just wasn’t allowed in tv shows at the time but they got away with it because they were cartoons and not real people. At the same time that made it all even more taboo because cartoons were for children.
At that same time the most immoral live action show was married with children, magnitudes less immoral than some of these cartoons. These animated shows really did open the door for making television something that didn’t always have to be family friendly.
Half of that stuff was in syndication after school and the rest was on Nick. Ren & Stimpy was the only one that came close to being “dangerous”. Hell, Veggietales is about The Bible. Simply listing stuff doesn’t make it so.
We have different definitions of edgy. I consider a overtly Christian show about vegetables pretty edgy. In the sense of (a) who would have created that & (b) who would have broadcast that (even among Christian tv channels)?
> I consider a overtly Christian show about vegetables pretty edgy.
When you say "edgy", do you mean "novel/creative"? That would explain the confusion. Definitions 3, 7, and/or 8 at Wiktionary are what we're using: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/edgy You seem to be using definition 2, which is not the common meaning today.
The only shows on that list that are "edgy" by the everyday definition are Ren and Stimpy, I Am Weasel (a spinoff of Cow and Chicken, which was a straight ripoff of Ren and Stimpy's visual and writing style), and sometimes Animaniacs. The rest may have slipped an off-color joke under the radar from time to time, but it wasn't their main thing.
Hang on, are you saying TaleSpin, Magic School Bus, and VeggieTales were edgy and transgressive?
There's a lot of good shows on that list, yes, and they broke plenty of ground in terms of kids' animation quality, but only a few of them were pushing the envelope of "what you can get away with on TV."
Amusing that Captain Planet is on there twice. For what it's worth, Rick and Morty just did a gender-swapped Captain Planet tribute episode a few weeks ago, and they run on AT&T-owned HBO Max.
I don't watch a ton of current kids shows, but the little I've seen still look pretty weird. It's a different weird but that's more just due to general trends.
Plus, like half of those have had/will have reboots.
In the new opening theme they even make a point of showing they've changed, embracing subjects like gender and ethnicity that would have been the butt of jokes at some point in the old show. They recognize these times would not allow certain forms of "humor."
