Dork Age/Western Animation


 * Seasons 3 and 4 of Dexter's Lab.
 * Season 7 of Family Guy, at least according to TV Tropes. Luckily every season afterwards was able to step away from (and even poke fun at) the nadir of quality that was "Not All Dogs Go To Heaven".
 * See The Dark Age of Animation for information on the Dork Age of animation as a whole. This was when animation first moved from the movie theaters to the television, and Animation Age Ghetto was born.
 * Disney version of Doug.
 * In general, classic cartoon characters hit Dork Ages when their owner studios tried to make them cuter and "safer" - visually symbolized by the once Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal (or human) gaining a full middle-class wardrobe. Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop are the best examples.
 * When you see Mickey fully dressed with a hat and long pants, you know he's not going to be any more interesting than your neighbor. Disney historians fully admit the increased emphasis on Donald Duck and Goofy was partly caused by Mickey's iconic fame making him slightly inflexible and too 'sweet' to put funny cartoons or as anyone's foil. Earlier -- and thankfully, more recently -- he was a mischievous adventurer (Kingdom Hearts, ironically, is fairly close to this depiction). Dork Age Mickey sits at home and gives Pluto orders like a bossy, boring parent.
 * In 1995, they released a new Mickey theatrical cartoon, Runaway Brain, where Mickey was seen for the first time in years as a flawed (lazy, forgetful, running head first into things), but kickass hero. The dark themes of the cartoon horrified parents and Moral Guardians though, particularly a monstrous Mickey Mouse, and Disney's been trying to bury it ever since. Some of the qualities of this Mickey stuck around for House of Mouse, but generally all that's taken a step back to make way for... Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
 * Disney has never tried to deny Runaway Brain's existence. The short got nominated for an Academy Award, and was even proudly included on Mickey Mouse in Living Color Vol. 2.
 * A New York Times article in 2000 described how boring Mickey was. Disney's overly restrictive guidelines prevent writers from doing much with him. Disney tried to inject some creative juices by having Mickey redrawn by various artists (big fan of Mickey with "M-shield" a la Captain America (comics)) but they haven't moved ahead until recently, with Warren Spector's Epic Mickey video game. Said game takes advantage of Video Game Caring Potential and Cruelty Potential, where you could either let Mickey remain an everyman, or go back to his original personality of a mischievous and reckless troublemaker. And a little bit of Nightmare Fuel. Observe.
 * Lampshaded in the Disney Vault TV Funhouse sketch ("You're supposed to be funny?"). That line came about from Robert Smigel's puzzlement of Mickey Mouse being such an iconic kids character when most kids can't actually name a defining trait or characteristic for him.
 * What happened to Betty Boop, who used to be a sexy chanteuse, was that the Moral Guardians forced her to be Bowdlerised. This led to a serious drop-off in the quality and popularity of her shorts, since her character is a sex symbol (yes, even with her big, giant head). When you see Betty dressed like a businesswoman, you are in for a boring cartoon.
 * Popeye had this happen as well, after the shorts became headed by Famous Studios. Granted, it didn't get too bad until 1950 or so, when Seasonal Rot set in and the writers just didn't know what else to do with Popeye, ending up resorting to Recycled in Space plots.
 * Woody Woodpecker fell into this during the 1950s--apparently, Walter Lantz wanted Woody to appeal more to kids, so he slimmed down Woody's design into a pinty, stiff looking "cute" design. On top of that, Woody was completely derailed as a character - whereas earlier he was a selfish heckler who only stood for himself, this Woody was watered down into a bland hero-type character. On top of that, from the mid-1950s onward, Paul J. Smith took the directorial reins and brought the series down even further with sloppy animation, not to mention lousy jokes and timing (surprising, considering his earlier efforts such as "Hot Noon" were among Lantz's best cartoons). It's a wonder the series was able to last through 1972 in theaters.
 * Looney Tunes suffered in the Sixties as well (you know something has gone terribly wrong when they have Daffy Duck chasing Speedy Gonzales around for some reason) after the original animation unit was shuttered and work was turned over to DePatie-Freleng Enterprises. Fortunately, this Dork Age comes with fair warning: if you catch a cartoon that opens with a weird version of their theme song set to trippy graphics spinning around, and the cartoon is not Chuck Jones' Now Hear This (or maybe]] Norman Normal), you're going to get to see their Dork Age.
 * What about the Wile E Coyote and Road Runner cartoons of that time? Rudy Larriva, who had animated for Warner Bros in the 1940s (but hadn't worked on anything Looney Tunes-related for about 15 years), took over the series from Chuck Jones. Larriva's character designs were very Off-Model, the loss of Maurice Noble robbed the desert landscapes of all their scale and range, and the less said of William Lava's music, the better. The more complex schemes were replaced with sluggishly-paced crude gaggery, and to accommodate them the Roadrunner was completely derailed into actively fighting back against the Coyote, firing cannons at him and so forth. Watch "The Solid Tin Coyote" for a good look at how far off-base the series got. Better yet, don't (and just so that you know what we're dealing with here, keep in mind that "The Solid Tin Coyote" is pretty much universally regarded as the best of Larriva's efforts in this series).
 * And then It Got Worse. If you ever see a cartoon with the opening described above, except with a company credit that reads "Warner Bros.-Seven Arts" instead of just "Warner Bros." then you should run for the hills. Because there is absolutely nothing good that will result from the cartoon that you are about to watch.
 * And then, there was Loonatics Unleashed...
 * Tom and Jerry à la Hanna-Barbera's television studio in The Seventies. AKA, whenever Hanna and Barbera didn't directly make them.
 * Put it this way: maybe you've seen reruns of the Gene Deitch shorts, the Chuck Jones shorts, the 1992 movie, Tom and Jerry Kids, and the occasional short from Filmation's The Tom and Jerry Comedy Show on Cartoon Network or Boomerang? How often (if at all) do you recall the television shorts from the 1970s?
 * To someone who never saw the 1975–77 shorts (which, yes, does say a lot in and of itself), the Gene Deitch shorts are the Dork Age.
 * If you see Jerry wearing a red bowtie... run, just run.
 * Interestingly, CN Asia now airs the 1970s TV shorts every now and then... as well as the 1980 Filmation era shorts (though they no longer run Deitch's shorts). Now that is a Dork Age.
 * The 1996 Flash Gordon 1996 animated series, in which Ming was green and Flash and Dale rode hoverboards.
 * Then there's the second season of the 1979 Filmation series, also known as The New Animated Aventures of Flash Gordon. The first season is frequently considered to be both the best screen version of the character and the best Filmation cartoon. The second season gave us Gremlin the Dragon.
 * Someone at Turner Broadcasting must really dislike the 1980s episodes of The Jetsons and Jonny Quest, because Boomerang's rerun rotation of the shows go up to the last episodes of their first seasons, but then goes back to the beginning like nothing happened afterwards. Yet they still show the Jetsons' Christmas Episode every December. Thankfully, though, this contempt for the later years of The Jetsons and Jonny Quest isn't shared by the rest of Time-Warner, because the episodes are being made available in every other place where one can watch the show.
 * While each new incarnation of the Transformers franchise brings its haters, the Beast Wars sequel Beast Machines is almost universally loathed by the fandom. For one, the writers were told to not actually continue any story threads from Beast Wars because they wanted there to be its own story. They also brought in the idea of Cybertron as an originally organic planet, a state that the Maximals were fighting to return it to (never mind that the dominant race of Cybertron has been robotic for millions of years), and a number of spiritual aspects that were never present in any of the previous series. This was compounded by the fact that Beast Machines supposedly exists in the same continuity as Generation 1.
 * Beast Machines has gained ground with many fans in recent years. Compared to the dodgy storylines and iffy animation quality of Armada, Energon and Cybertron, the writing and certainly the CGI animation of Beast Machines looks pretty good in comparison.
 * One might also argue this of Generation 2, though never to the face of a Generation 1 fan.
 * How about the fact that in Beast Machines the robots transform by magic. I'm frankly surprised that not only did this particular issue not cause a cacophony of fan outrage, but seems to go mostly unnoticed by the fandom.
 * Beast Wars? Generation 2? None of them can hold a candle to the monstrosity that is Kiss Players.
 * Let's just say this; Beast Wars saved the franchise from dying out, in the west, and renewed interest in "organic" Transformers after the Pretenders of G1 fell flat; by contrast, not only did Beast Machines completely kill off the concept of "organic" Transformers, but it also ensured that the West never made another Transformers series for almost a decade. When the only thing that kept the series from being a Franchise Killer was Japan, you know it rightfully deserves a spot as a Dork Age.
 * The Disney Animated Canon has seen at least two Dork Ages. The first happened between the late 1960s and the late 1980s due to the death of Walt Disney, and ended with the Disney Renaissance, while the second happened just recently, starting in the 2000s. In the case of the latter era, the only true non-Pixar successes released at that time were Lilo and Stitch, The Princess and the Frog, and Tangled.
 * During the late 1970s and early 1980s Scooby Doo went through one. The addition of Scrappy, the removal of the entire gang except for Shaggy (himself no longer a hippie) and with every episode featuring "cousin so and so", well, there's a reason that the original 60s version is the most well known.
 * Oddly enough, Scrappy's creator, Mark Evanier, wrote a series of blogs explaining, among other things, how Scrappy actually saved the show. So, yes, Scrappy rescued his Uncle Scooby from the Scrappy heap.
 * The Flintstones has that show where they get new neighbors--the Frankenstones, who were basically a prehistoric version of The Addams Family or The Munsters--only with an unsympathetic Frankenstein's Monster as a head. Most of the episodes were about Fred having a fight with Mr. Frankenstone. Yes, in the original cartoon some monstrous neighbors were mentioned, but only episodically and never as major characters. It didn't help that the show also featured shorts that were ripping off other shows, so we could watch Captain Caveman imitating Superman (he was even Clark Kenting) with Betty and Wilma as two Lois Lanes, teenage Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm solving Scooby Doo Hoaxes with Dino, as well as Fred and Barney in a Buddy Cop Show, patrolling the streets with a goddamn Shmoo, which was constantly molesting Fred.
 * Games Animation era of Ren and Stimpy and Adult Party Cartoon.
 * The My Little Pony cartoons had a dark age that lasted for nearly two decades. It started with the My Little Pony Tales series, the Lighter and Softer Generation 3, or the Spinoff Babies Generation 3.5. Tales was a short lived Slice of Life series which threw the rest of the continuity out the window and was set in a world where the Ponies were essentially humans in Horse bodies. Generation 3 lacked essentially everything the original series had (action, villains, a plot, etc) in exchange for a somewhat Slice of Life version of the series that Tastes Like Diabetes. Generation 3.5 was essentially deformed "chibi" versions of the Generation 3 cast as Babies, though it didn't even try to make sense in the series continuity. Eventually the series got out of this dark age when My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic came along and restarted the franchise, being more like the original show.
 * My Little Pony Tales and Generation 3 have their fans and defenders, but you're unlikely to find anyone who disagrees that G3.5 was a Dork Age. It was created solely to fill in the gap between the proper end of G3 and the arrival of Friendship is Magic so they wouldn't have a gap without toys or a show marketing them out there, and it shows.
 * The post-movie seasons of SpongeBob SquarePants is notorious for this. While Season 4 wasn't that bad, it served as more of a warning sign of what was to come. Season 5 introduced a "movie" that served as an annoying exercise in musical tedium, while seasons 6 through 8 were unessescarily Darker and Edgier and Bloodier and Gorier, with things like Squidward having his toenail ripped off, Mrs. Puff trying to get SpongeBob killed in a demolition derby, Mr. Krabs 'driving Plankton to suicide', Patrick nearly burning Gary alive, and Squidward seemingly attempting suicide.
 * Star Wars the Clone Wars, as mentioned above, plunged into one during Season 1 and its movie (and took the Star Wars franchise in general with it). However, it had a good last impression with the introduction of Cad Bane in the season finale, which gave the show a boost in quality that it's generally managed to keep.