Follow the Leader/Western Animation

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• Silly Symphonies was one of the most influential cartoon series of The Golden Age of Animation--and as a result, it was also one of the most copied. Virtually every studio from the time (except Terry Toons) had its own knockoff of Walt Disney's lush cartoons: Max Fleischer's Color Classics, Walter Lantz's Cartune Classics, Columbia Cartoons' Color Rhapsodies, Ub Iwerks' Comi Color Cartoons, Harman and Ising's Happy Harmonies, etc., etc. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies began this way, as their titles suggest, but changed dramatically later, as we all know.
  • The various Mickey Mouse clones of the era, like Foxy, Bosko the Talk Ink Kid and others. Though Mickey himself was partly based on Felix the Cat.
• Thanks to the success of Toy Story, Finding Nemo and other works of Pixar, the movie biz is flooded with CGI children's movies. Nowadays, any animated movie must be computer-generated if is to have any chance against the viewing public, or face utter commercial failure. Hence the saying, traditional 2D animation is dead? or at least not meant to be taken seriously.
  • For a while Dreamworks Animation was single-handedly playing Follow the Leader against Pixar, as part of Jeffrey Katzenberg's Take That against Disney after the success of Toy Story. A Bugs Life begat Antz (which was rushed for release before Bugs), Monsters Inc. begat Shrek, Finding Nemo begat Shark Tale, and Ratatouille begat Flushed Away. The practice stopped when Pixar finally stopped publicly discussing their projects in advance, to John Lasseter's dismay (he felt that DreamWorks' copycat tactics betrayed the studio-agnostic camaraderie that animators previously nurtured).
  • The success of DreamWorks' Shrek series has led to many animated movies with lots of Toilet Humour, pop-culture references, Celebrity Voice Actors and Fractured Fairy Tales.
  • One exception is the popularity of The Simpsons Movie. But to be fair, The Simpsons has been around since 1989, and was obviously bound to do well, thanks to its already long-established worldwide appeal.
  • Ironically, Pixar is now developing traditional 2D films. The pendulum might yet swing back...
    • The success of Enchanted seems to have helped people realize that a genre/medium is not old technology, it isn't replaced just because something new and flashy comes along. Traditional animation will be coming back when people get tired of CG Animation.
• Back in the late-1980s/early-1990s Disney animation renaissance, quite a few 2D animated features were cranked out by other companies (or finally released). Most were fantasy musicals (The Swan Princess, Thumbelina), even if they weren't initially written as such (Quest for Camelot, The Thief and The Cobbler).
  • As The Nostalgia Chick and many others have pointed out, after Don Bluth had an awesome decade of the 1980s while Disney slumped, it turned the other way in the 1990s. Bluth gave in and tried to copy them. Anastasia is probably the most blatant try, even though it's a good movie in its own right.
• Before they begin copying Disney, the success of Don Bluth in the mid-1980s (back when he was under Steven Spielberg's control) led to a number of animated movies that are mostly about non-humans (or in some cases, humans) saving their home from danger. These include Rover Dangerfield, Fern Gully (which also included certain Disney elements), Were Back a Dinosaurs Story, Once Upon a Forest, Balto and The Pagemaster.
• Batman the Animated Series was such a hit that it led to a wave of similar [[[Comic Book]]]: The Animated Series type shows using a similar back-to-basics approach. Comic-based animated shows before would try all sorts of gimmicks and be "hip" to the times, while B:TAS was targeted towards "adult" stories that kids can still understand. It's immediate contemporaries include X Men the Animated Series, Spider Man the Animated Series, Phantom 2040, etc. This is without considering the producers themselves repeating the pattern throughout the DCAU.
  • X Men the Animated Series was in production at the same time as Batman, both shows premiered within a month of each other, so it's not so much that one was truly following the other. If anything, its both shows who helped spawn their clones. Like the DCAU shows, Spider Man the Animated Series follows X-Men and included a lot of the people who had worked on the earlier show, like Avi Arad.
  • Disney's Gargoyles has been said could have be influenced by Batman:TAS, with its similar Timm Style art design, dark and moody atmosphere, and complex storylines.
• The popularity of The Ren and Stimpy Show led to many more Gross Out Shows, notably Cow and Chicken, a trend that seemed to meet its end in 2001 with the canceled-after-a-season The Ripping Friends (incidentally made by John Kricfalusi, the creator of Ren and Stimpy). Granted, arguments could be made for The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack.
• The success of Scooby Doo launched a whole boatload of other series about mystery-solving/crime-fighting teens and their talking animal/car/whatever friend. Most of these copycats were actually produced by Hanna-Barbera, the same studio that created Scooby-Doo.
  • There are so many clones that the Boomerang channel has a block called "Those meddling kids" dedicated to Scooby Doo, and its many, many clones.
• The success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1987 led to the creation of numerous other Teenage Mutant Samurai Wombats shows.
  • Even the Licensed Games inspired imitators in the form of Battletoads and Cheetahmen. Both tried to spin off cartoon series as well, but the Battletoads cartoon flopped instantly and the Cheetahmen cartoon never got off the drawing boards.
• Whilst the extent to which more adult-orientated animated shows such as Family Guy and South Park are direct 'rip-offs' of The Simpsons is a subject of bitter and acrimonious debate across the Internet, it is fairly safe to say that without the enduring popularity of The Simpsons, which showed there was a market for animated programming aimed at more adult audiences, the former two shows -- plus a lot of more obscure and more quickly forgotten similar shows -- would probably have never been greenlit thanks to the Animation Age Ghetto.
  • After the show first premiered, there were a number of prime time animated shows that came out afterward, like Capitol Critters and Fish Police, that lasted barely one season.
  • Beavis and Butthead garnered probably even more controversy than South Park. Precisely because the Animation Age Ghetto was still in full bloom.
• The Simpsons itself inspired plenty of prime time cartoons aimed at slightly more mature audiences on network television such as The Critic, Futurama, Dilbert The Animated Series, The P Js The Oblongs, Clerks The Animated Series, Mission Hill and Family Guy.
• After the success of The Incredibles, more and more CGI-animated movies started mirroring its method of animating human characters with caricature proportions so as to create smoother human animation and avoid freaking out the audience .
• Teen Titans set the tone for the past few years of kids' action cartoons. Comedy-action blending and Rule of Cool became far more prominent, as did Animesque artwork (which was already gaining in popularity anyway).
  • This in turn caused Ben 10, whose success caused Cartoon Network to bring in more action cartoons to the network.
• An example from Italy: When the comic book Angels Friends was adapted for TV, the characters went from looking like grade-school students... to looking a whole lot like the Winx.
  • And in a reversal of fortune, the TV series itself has been adapted back into a comic book, using the Winx-ified character designs.
• Ever since SpongeBob SquarePants proved popular, it started a string of cartoons with random humor and an idiot protagonist trying to match its success. Examples include Camp Lazlo, Coconut Fred, Chowder and Fanboy and Chum Chum.
  • It could be argued that even SpongeBob SquarePants took more than its share of inspiration from Ren and Stimpy, minus the gross-out humor. The two shows share loose artwork, manic pacing, surreal humor, hand-painted close-ups of the characters, and the same music cues.
• Animated Anthology shows were often made in the 1990s due to the popularity of Liquid Television. Some include Cartoon Network's What a Cartoon Show, Disney's The Schnookums and Meat Funny Cartoon Show, WB's Animaniacs, and Nickelodeon's Ka Blam!.
• Parodied on an episode of The Simpsons. The episode revolves around bartender Moe stealing Homer's idea for a drink recipe and renaming it the Flaming Moe. He even goes as far to rename his bar after the drink. His bar becomes a popular club spot, attracting even the likes of Aerosmith. After Homer outs the recipe to the general public, dozens of bars, restaurants and carts sprout up on the same street with variations on the name- e.g., Flaming Meaux.
• Star Trek the Animated Series episode "Beyond The Farthest Star": In particular, the biomechanical alien architecture and never-seen-before-or-again wavy warp-through-a-star effect were both duplicated shortly afterward by Space Battleship Yamato. (Also some suspiciously similar background music.)
• During the mid-1990s, Cartoon Network produced a couple of cartoon series where the characters had very stylized designs, intentionally looked rather one-dimensional and were drawn with thick black outlines around their bodies (the style was intended to be a throwback to certain 1950s cartoons). After the success of The Powerpuff Girls in 1998, this style became enormously widely used in cartoons both by Cartoon Network and by other companies, and remain so to this day, partly thanks to the rise of Flash animation.
  • This ironically mirrors how Limited Animation caught on in the 1950's. It started out as a unique artistic statement, but later became an excuse to create cheap, lazy animation.
• With the success of Michael Bay's Transformers movies, Hasbro decided to hire a "creative steward" to reinvent its other big property, My Little Pony. The result was Lauren Faust getting the deal to produce My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic And as a result of that, The Hub is introducing more similar shows and advertising them as part of the same lineup as My Little Pony.
• The Jetsons was rather blatantly created by Hanna Barbera to cash in on the success of their other animated sitcom in an unusual setting, The Flintstones.
  • And a decade later, they tried again with The Roman Holidays.