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[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
When I was a youngling, enough things that were old were new again that I had a steady diet of cartoons to fill many of my days. Looney Tunes were the primary kind of cartoon in the house, because they were cheap to run on Saturdays (and we had a couple of tapes that contained a selection of Merrie Melodies.) Mixed in with that, and cartoons like the Flintstones and the Smurfs, though, were other offerings, like Don Adams doing a cyborg version of Maxwell Smart in Inspector Gadget (although it would be a much longer time before I was introduced to Agent 86, and thus understood where Gadget came from,) Jaleel White doing Sonic the Hedgehog (a somewhat marked contrast with the sitcom character Steve Urkel,) an animated version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (whose theme and cadence of theme have had all kinds of words set to, especially in Tumblr memes,) and, eventually, an animation renaissance that Disney movies were certainly a part of, but not the only component of. Animaniacs and Tiny Toon Adventures, Freakazoid!, The Tick, The Amazing Screw-On Head, X-Men '96, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?, an afternoon Spider-Man cartoon, and the occasional inclusion in the rotation with things that didn't look anything much like the cartoons of weekday afternoon and Saturday morning. Mind you, there's a high probability they'd been altered from their originals. Sailor Moon showed up occasionally, but the most consistent Saturday joiner was Yoroiden Samurai Troopers, repurposed as Ronin Warriors. Not consistently enough for me to get a feel for what the actual plotlines were, or the characters, but they were there enough that I can remember bits and pieces of it. (I should probably watch the original at some point, honestly, or at least see how much it was chopped up and repurposed for the U.S. market.)
( And the name-dropping continues, but so do the hits )
Animation is, thankfully, back in as one of the legitimate forms of art for all kinds of audiences. Some of it is still intended for kids, some of it is intended for families to watch together (Bluey, I think, is one that falls into this category), some of it is for kids to laugh at the slapstick and adults to laugh at the innuendo, some of it is for people to revel in grossness and foul language and crude jokes. Some of it is for people to make jokes that require a musical background to understand, classical or otherwise. It can be informative, fun, silly, serious, gory, erotic, fantastical, basically anything that can be told as a story in a visual medium. The wide variety of stories tellable and approaches that work in animation gives it staying power. What it needs the most now, like many other creative pursuits, is paying people properly for their work, rather than using the threat that there are hundreds of other people who would take that job as a way of keeping wages depressed and hours very long.
At this point, most everyone with access to television or cinema has probably seen at least one episode of an animated series, or an animated movie. That says a lot about the versatility of the medium.
When I was a youngling, enough things that were old were new again that I had a steady diet of cartoons to fill many of my days. Looney Tunes were the primary kind of cartoon in the house, because they were cheap to run on Saturdays (and we had a couple of tapes that contained a selection of Merrie Melodies.) Mixed in with that, and cartoons like the Flintstones and the Smurfs, though, were other offerings, like Don Adams doing a cyborg version of Maxwell Smart in Inspector Gadget (although it would be a much longer time before I was introduced to Agent 86, and thus understood where Gadget came from,) Jaleel White doing Sonic the Hedgehog (a somewhat marked contrast with the sitcom character Steve Urkel,) an animated version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (whose theme and cadence of theme have had all kinds of words set to, especially in Tumblr memes,) and, eventually, an animation renaissance that Disney movies were certainly a part of, but not the only component of. Animaniacs and Tiny Toon Adventures, Freakazoid!, The Tick, The Amazing Screw-On Head, X-Men '96, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?, an afternoon Spider-Man cartoon, and the occasional inclusion in the rotation with things that didn't look anything much like the cartoons of weekday afternoon and Saturday morning. Mind you, there's a high probability they'd been altered from their originals. Sailor Moon showed up occasionally, but the most consistent Saturday joiner was Yoroiden Samurai Troopers, repurposed as Ronin Warriors. Not consistently enough for me to get a feel for what the actual plotlines were, or the characters, but they were there enough that I can remember bits and pieces of it. (I should probably watch the original at some point, honestly, or at least see how much it was chopped up and repurposed for the U.S. market.)
( And the name-dropping continues, but so do the hits )
Animation is, thankfully, back in as one of the legitimate forms of art for all kinds of audiences. Some of it is still intended for kids, some of it is intended for families to watch together (Bluey, I think, is one that falls into this category), some of it is for kids to laugh at the slapstick and adults to laugh at the innuendo, some of it is for people to revel in grossness and foul language and crude jokes. Some of it is for people to make jokes that require a musical background to understand, classical or otherwise. It can be informative, fun, silly, serious, gory, erotic, fantastical, basically anything that can be told as a story in a visual medium. The wide variety of stories tellable and approaches that work in animation gives it staying power. What it needs the most now, like many other creative pursuits, is paying people properly for their work, rather than using the threat that there are hundreds of other people who would take that job as a way of keeping wages depressed and hours very long.
At this point, most everyone with access to television or cinema has probably seen at least one episode of an animated series, or an animated movie. That says a lot about the versatility of the medium.
