previous page
TOC
A Lot Can Happen in 35 Years! A look back at three and a half decades of TV’s rebels, goofballs and smart-ass kids. By Ray Richmond
I
t was impossible to see it coming at the time, but right about the moment this magazine was being launched 35 years ago, a creative explosion in television animation was just starting to bubble up from the magma. Sure, the landscape was still populated by things like Little Clowns of Happytown, Hello Kitty’s Furry Tale Theater and Beverly Hills Teens. But in September of ’87, CBS gave kids (and adults) a preview of the outrageous quality boom to come when it rolled out Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures on Saturday mornings. Co-produced by Ralph Bakshi of Fritz the Cat fame and featuring genius rabble-rouser John Kricfalusi as its director, this Mighty Mouse introduced a wildly imaginative world of cartoon rodents while resurrecting old-time Terrytoons characters and satirizing movies as well as other cartoons. Watching it felt like dying and traveling to toon heaven.
The Groening Era But something else was also going on that seemed far less consequential back then. The Tracey Ullman Show was a new sketch comedy series on the fledgling Fox network that served up crudely drawn weekly animated shorts featuring a family with yellow skin and significant attitude. The future of primetime animation would arrive soon enough when The Simpsons got its own spot on the Fox schedule, debuting with a Christmas episode in December 1989. This was a great big giant deal at the time, the kind of roll of the dice that broadcast networks weren’t in the habit of doing. To be sure, there had been successful primetime cartoons before, namely the masterful The Adventures of Rocky
and Bullwinkle and Friends (1959-64 on ABC and NBC) and of course The Flintstones (1960-66 on ABC). But nothing prepared TV for the earthquake that The Simpsons triggered as such a massive and, as the decades piled up, historic hit. (As I write these words, the show has broadcast an astounding 725 episodes.) As The Simpsons sprouted into a societal and even international phenomenon, competitors leaped into the fray to capture more of this cartoon lightning in a bottle with short-lived early 1990s primetime efforts like Capitol Critters (ABC) and Fish Police and Family Dog (CBS). The networks clearly misread what The Simpsons’ success meant. It wasn’t the animation per se that was connecting with audiences, but the monumentally clever writing and fully-realized characters. The fact they weren’t actual people was decidedly less relevant. The Simpsons ushered in a new era, to be sure. But at first, it didn’t happen with traditional broadcasters; it came initially on cable, specifically at Nickelodeon, MTV and USA Network.
Aliens, Rebels and Anklebiters In August of 1991, Nick introduced Rugrats from Arlene Klasky, Gabor Csupo and Paul Germain in tandem with creator Kricfalusi’s The Ren & Stimpy Show. Both were extraordinarily inventive for radically different reasons, with Rugrats depicting life from the point of view of its toddler stars and R & S featuring a sociopathic Chihuahua and a dimwitted cat. Both were breakouts, though Ren & Stimpy found itself bathed in controversy due to its consistent flouting of rules and good taste. MTV, meanwhile, whipped up some magic of
its own with the futuristic, acid trippy Aeon Flux — birthed in 1991 by creator Peter Chung out of the network’s Liquid Television experiment — and Mike Judge’s teen slacker-glorifying Beavis and Butt-Head (1993-97). Then in 1994, Duckman (created and developed by Everett Peck) pecked its way onto the USA Network schedule, sticking there until ’97. It featured the voice of Jason Alexander portraying a sarcastic, embittered, womanizing private detective/family man/duck, and it was hugely underappreciated (much like the character the show depicted). Not to be outdone, Cartoon Network soon made its presence felt with its original content, first in ’94 with Mike Lazzo’s hilarious adult animated comedy Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which repurposed a standard-issue Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning superhero character into something far more ingenious as a surreal talk show spoof. It was the fact that creators and networks discovered there was a grown-up audience clamoring for animation that so changed the game. Mind you, it wasn’t that young people were being shortchanged. They were also being served shows like the Fox Kids pair Batman: The Animated Series from Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski (1992-95) and hyperkinetically wacky social satire Animaniacs (1993) from creator Tom Ruegger and exec producer Steven Spielberg, which ran for five seasons. By the mid-1990s, television was officially the place where animated content was taking wing and soaring into the stratosphere. Seemingly, all the rules that had shackled cartoons were being tossed aside and replaced with an edict to let
www.animationmagazine.net 72
TOC
jun|jul 22
previous page
