Creator Backlash/Western Animation

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Examples of Creator Backlash in Western Animation include:

  • Chuck Jones grew to hate almost all of his pre-1948 cartoons (sans certain shorts like The Dover Boys), so much that he said if he had the choice he would have burned the negatives to all of them.
    • Additionally several WB staff such as Frank Tashlin expressed dislike for Porky Pig, due to having less flexibility and humor value compared to zanier characters such as Bugs Bunny. According to animator Mike Fontanelli, this resentment still stands with many modern executives at Warner Bros and is partly why the character is so sparsely used in revival features and merchandise.
  • The Warner Bros. animators grew to dislike much of their early work, especially the sappy Disney-like cartoons and Buddy cartoons they made from the mid-to-late 30s.
  • Shamus Culhane disliked his sole Popeye cartoon "Popeye Meets William Tell", citing it as "an interesting failure" in his autobiography, mainly because he never wanted to make a regular Popeye cartoon in the first place, instead wanting to make a short centered around Wimpy, which was vetoed by the Fleischers.
    • Culhane was also not proud of how his animation on Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels was ruined by sloppy inkers and bad in-between work, and that he would have quit if it wasn't for his contract.
    • Culhane also despised working on the Hearst Studio Krazy Kat theatrical shorts that he did inking work on. His humble feelings on them are as follows;

"The films were atrocious, the worst crap you can imagine. They never used the characters. Offisa Pup rarely appeared, Ignatz Mouse was not in love with Krazy;[1] they never used the desert landscapes. The staff just batted the stuff out as fast as they could for something like 750$ apiece."

  • Max Fleischer considered Mr. Bug Goes to Town to be a failure, and refused to acknowledge the film as one of his achievements in a 1950s interview—although it may have been because it was the film that contributed to destroying Fleischer Studios and getting him booted out; the fact that he and David Fleischer had a terrible falling out while they were making the film probably didn't help matters either.
    • He also hated the Made-For-TV Out of the Inkwell cartoons, and was horrified when he first watched them.
  • Strange as it sounds, some sources claim that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera hated Scooby Doo, and only kept the show running because of how insanely popular it was.
  • Both Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones grew to hate the cartoon "The Daffy Doc", not because they thought it was a bad cartoon, but because it used an iron lung as a gag prop during a time when polio deaths were on the rise.
  • Hugh Harman of the Harman and Ising claimed late in his life that he grew to hate all but three of the shorts he made--"The Old Mill Pond", "Blue Danube", and "Peace on Earth".
  • Ian Pearson and Gavin Blair of ReBoot fame were once famous for the computer animation in the Dire Straits Money For Nothing music video. They were proud of their work... at the time, but they despised that they had the suffix title of "Those guys who did Money for Nothing." They showed their feelings in an episode of ReBoot, where two look-alikes for the CGI movers from the video audition at Enzo's birthday party, only to get sandbags dropped on them from high offstage.
  • Donald F. Glut was one of the few members of the Transformers Generation 1 cartoon staff who openly expressed distaste for the series, lambasting its quality as actual art (including the episodes he wrote) and claiming that he only worked on it for the money.
  • J. Michael Straczynski expressed a similar opinion for his work on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.
  • Trey Parker and Matt Stone don't seem particularly proud of the early seasons of South Park, which had the highest ratings of the show's run, but came before its metamorphsis into a satire on current events and pop culture.
    • In fact they hate season 2 so much that they didn't even do commentaries on the DVDs like they did for the other seasons.
  • The Simpsons
    • "The Principal and the Pauper," which retconned Principal Skinner's past, saying instead he had assumed the life of the "real" Skinner and then brushed these revelations under the rug in a blatant reset button. Both Groening and Skinner voice actor Harry Shearer have publicly criticized the episode. The later "Behind the Laughter" episode referred to this one as "gimmicky" and "nonsensical."
    • "A Star Is Burns," a crossover with The Critic forced upon the show by the network. Groening removed his name from the episode in protest.
  • Disney director Wilfred Jackson was so ashamed of his first directorial effort, a Mickey Mouse short called "The Castaway", that he vowed never to make a film that didn't feel like a Disney picture again.
    • Walt Disney (the man) hated the 1935 Silly Symphonies short "The Golden Touch" after he finished it he never directed a short again. According to Jack Kinney's autobiography, he allegedly blasted an animator over a mistake and the animator shot back that he was the one who directed The Golden Touch. Walt stormed out—but came back later and angrily warned him to never, ever mention the cartoon again.
    • Walt also had some dislike of Goofy, as mentioned in Neal Gabler's biography on Walt. According to Gabler, Walt "threaten[ed] constantly to terminate [the Goofy series of shorts] before relenting, largely to provide work for his animators."
  • Thurop Van Orman HATED a handful of episodes from the second season of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack. So he added a Laugh Track to them, along with a "drawn in front of a live audience" gag.
  • The Bananaman cartoon series was hated by just about virtually every cast member that starred in it, as well as Steve Bright, who wrote the Bananaman comic strip. To a lesser extent this also applies to the strip's original artist, John Geering, who liked the series overall but wasn't fond of how his characters had been redesigned.
  • Tex Avery expressed a dislike for his character Screwy Squirrel, even going so far as to kill him off for real at the end of Screwy's fifth and final short.
  • An in-universe example from Rocko's Modern Life: Ralph Bighead has Wacky Deli created so that he will be released from his contract in order to become a real artist. It doesn't work.
  • John Kricfalusi of Ren and Stimpy fame has warned his fans not to study his cartoons from the original series. He summed it up saying "For one thing that we did right, there was a million of mistakes". However, when using examples of a well-constructed story and good dialogue, he uses the cartoon "Stimpy's Invention" quite a lot.
    • He was so embarrassed for having directed the "Nurse Stimpy" episode due to the heavy amount of editing it went through, he ended up crediting himself as "Raymond Spum" at the title card.
    • He also doesn't like the Adult Party Cartoon episode "Fire Dogs II" for its slow pacing and abysmal timing, although he thought the story and characterizations were fine.
      • In fact, he dislikes the fact that the whole series had to be "adult", the adult content actually being forced on him by the network (while he's constantly blamed for having Protection From Editors and thus creating the unpopular adult series by his own choice), so it could stand next to the likes of Family Guy or South Park. When recently asked if he'd like to continue making Ren and Stimpy cartoons, he replied with "yes, but just the ones for kids".
    • The Ripping Friends is also apparently very hard for him to watch because of all the Executive Meddling.
  • One seems to get that impression watching the 3rd Family Guy Star Wars special It's A Trap! with Stewie quickly mentioning they were going to do Return of the Jedi and Peter sighing and saying "Let's get this over with." followed by the opening scroll turning into a massive rant about how they (they being Seth MacFarlane and the rest of the crew) never wanted to do this nor Something Something Something Dark Side and only did so so Seth could do other projects without them (them being 20th Century Fox) complaining.
    • On the other hand, Family Guy does a lot of throwaway lines, so it's hard to tell if they really meant it.
    • Judging by Quagmire's epic Take That, Scrappy! rant to Brian in a season eight episode the writers really, really regret "Not All Dogs Go To Heaven" and its moral that "religion is for idiots".
    • Recent episodes of Family Guy use tons of Self-Deprecation gags about the show or other works the creators are responsible for (the Star Wars specials also include several jibes to Seth Green's Robot Chicken). Granted given the overall tone of such gags (and the fact they are expressed by less than sound individuals in the show) it may also count as Take That, Critics!.
  • Phil Vischer - upon giving an interview regarding his new series, Jelly Telly - mentioned that he now considers his earlier series, Veggie Tales, as something of a failure because it stressed basic morals while largely downplaying the Christian beliefs behind those morals; Vischer says that Jelly Telly was created to rectify this problem.
  1. ↑ This is a mistake on Culhane's part, as it was the other way around in the comics
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