I'm not saying that a kid's cartoon is high art, but the example shown has streets more craft and discipline than any blighted conundrum show of today that takes 48 episodes just to establish the characters and you're lucky if the plot progresses an inch before cancellation.
Bear in mind that in the '60s superhero cartoon series there was almost never an origin story, so each character had to be defined in every episode within 20 seconds.
I'd like to see J J Abrams try that one.
5 comments:
Older cartoons are always better.
If a diagram of the average quality of everything in the world through time could be made, I'd bet it would resemble the function
f(x)= 1/x.
It always gets worse and never better, but still it never reaches the zero.
There's no need to disturb the mathematical singularity theory... entropy is more than enough to demonstrate that everything in the universe is worsening and not improving, like my eleven years old car... And the second law of thermodynamics already says that someday we'll be at room temperature... besides, all these considerations do no change the fact that Birdman sucks.
Too pessimistic, both of you. Yes, entropy assures us that, in the long run, the universe is going to pot. But humans have these things called Life, and the Creative Impulse! Even when something so catastrophic as to be called dark ages happens---collapse of order, civilization, literacy---subsequent generations still work up the energy to claw their way back from the rubble. It's what we humans do; we swim upstream.
As for cartoons, I would direct you all to Futurama, and to a lesser extent, South Park.
Actually, my target was prime time television, not animation, which tends to be much better written even today.
As for entropy; remember that thermodynamics isn't just a good idea, it's the law.
In the end, entropy wins.
Ragnarok would surely come. But each day it didn't was a victory for the Aesir. Those old northern pagans did a few questionable things in their time (what with the killing and the robbing and the being played by Kirk Douglas and Ernest Borgnine), but I think they got this thing right.
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