Seinfeld Is Unfunny/Western Animation: Difference between revisions

** Disney princesses. [[Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney film)|Snow White]], [[Sleeping Beauty (Disney film)|Princess Aurora]], and [[Cinderella (Disney film)|Cinderella]]. Boy, they were rather shallow characters, weren't they? Especially after [[Beauty and Thethe Beast (Disney)|Belle]], [[Mulan]] (considered a Disney princess), and [[The Princess and Thethe Frog (Disney)|Tiana]] had way more traits and conflict between other characters.

** Genie in ''[[Aladdin (Disney film)|Aladdin]].'' A-List actors did not star in speaking roles before this. They all did afterwards.

** The relative tameness of old cartoons is lovingly parodied on ''[[The Simpsons (Animationanimation)|The Simpsons]]'' with "That Happy Cat", an early Max Fleischer-style "Itchy and Scratchy" cartoon, in which all Scratchy does is walk along a street. Even the 20s and 30s Mickey could be subject to this after the rise of ''[[Looney Tunes (Animation)|Looney Tunes]]'' and ''[[Tom and Jerry (Animation)|Tom and Jerry]]''.

* ''[[The Ren and Stimpy Show (Animation)|The Ren and Stimpy Show]]''. Unprecedented and freakish when it debuted, it practically invented the "gross cartoon" paradigm. The gratuitous amounts of snot, [[Toilet Humor]] and [[Family -Unfriendly Violence]] were something completely new and unknown to the audience. Nowadays, Ren and Stimpy wouldn't shock or disgust many people ([[Squick|unless we're talking about the adult version]]), with the spawn of many cartoons that used similar [[The Grim Adventures of Billy and& Mandy (Animation)|characters]], [[The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack (Animation)|humor]] and [[Cat DogCatDog|drawing]] [[Cow and Chicken (Animation)|style]] after Ren And Stimpy's success.

*** ''Ren & Stimpy'' also managed to avoid this by virtue of, as stated on its trope page, its imitators [[Shallow Parody|only copying one of its multiple inventive elements]] (that one being [[Gross -Out Show|the disgusting animation]]).

* ''[[Shrek (Animation)|Shrek]]''. Back in 2001, this iconoclastic take on [[Fairy Tales]] and use of pop-culture references felt like a welcome reprieve from the usual animated fare. Now, with several films, including a few from Shrek's own studio [[Dreamworks Animation]], [[Follow the Leader|following the same formula]], the sheen has worn off the franchise.

** Most consider this trope to have reached [[Up to Eleven]] with the [[Trailers Always Lie|misleading ad campaign]] for Disney's ''[[Tangled (Disney)|Tangled]]'', which tried to portray a more traditional fairy tale as a hip spoof of fairy tales--meaning, in essence, that the [[Trope Maker]] for such traditional movies is now scared to admit they're still making them.

* ''[[Re Boot (Animation)|Re BootReBoot]]'' was the very first fully CGI television show that came out in the [[The Nineties|early nineties]] and was a pretty big success at the time. In this day and age, shows with CGI are completely common, and most people would consider ''ReBoot'' pretty tame in terms of computer accomplishments, although it had a great story, wonderful characters, and is still hailed today as one of the best, if not the best, CGI show of all time, with its biggest competitor for the title being another Mainframe series: ''[[Beast Wars]]''.

* ''[[The Simpsons (Animationanimation)|The Simpsons]]''. The first two seasons [[Early Installment Weirdness|look really awkward to anyone who was introduced to it at a later date]], but it's hard to overstate how revolutionary the show was at the time, and how quickly it became a phenomenon.

** ''The Simpsons'' as a whole is very much a case of this trope by this point. During the shows golden age of the early to mid 90's, the show was extremely original, and not only because it was an animated program intended for adults. Its particular style of satirical, subversive humor made it stand out not only as a television cartoon, but as a ''comedy''. To younger people who have spent their adolescent years watching shows like ''[[South Park (Animation)|South Park]]'' and ''[[Family Guy (Animation)|Family Guy]]'', whose brand of humor is very much derived from ''The Simpsons'', it is probably quite hard to appreciate just how groundbreaking the yellow skinned family and their show were back in their heyday.

** And don't forget the numerous film references in ''The Simpsons''. They started this trend in animation and back then when they did it was often surprising, not done that often before and very amusing. Soon Disney movies like ''[[Aladdin (Disney film)|Aladdin]]'', the Dreamworks films like ''Shrek'' and ''[[Shark Tale]]'' and every adult cartoon series, from ''[[South Park (Animation)|South Park]]'' to ''[[Family Guy (Animation)|Family Guy]]'' have been including references to popular films ever since.

** Itchy and Scratchy's violent cartoons were originally intended as a parody of traditional cartoon violence like in ''[[Tom and Jerry (Animation)|Tom and Jerry]]'' and ''[[Looney Tunes (Animation)|Looney Tunes]]'', which was often very painful, but never bloody or fatal. So Itchy & Scratchy's gruesome battles surprised and shocked viewers because you never saw violence this extreme in mainstream animation. Nowadays, thanks to controversial and often gory shows like ''[[South Park (Animation)|South Park]]'', ''[[Family Guy (Animation)|Family Guy]]'', and ''[[Happy Tree Friends (Web Animation)|Happy Tree Friends]]'', the violence in Itchy and Scratchy doesn't seem that noticeable. Also, the disappearance of all classic 1930s-1950s cartoons on television means that the original reference target and thus the joke is lost on younger generations.

** The concept of the trope itself is brought up in the first "Treehouse of Horror" episode. Lisa reads [[Edgar Allan Poe]]'s ''[[The Raven (Literaturepoem)|The Raven]]'' to Bart as an example of a truly scary story. Bart is naturally unimpressed and wonders why anyone would find a poem scary. Lisa theorizes that people in the mid-19th century were just easier to scare, having not seen any of the modern day's gore-fests.

{{quote| '''Bart:''' Oh yeah! It's like watching ''[[Friday the 13 th13th (Filmfilm)|Friday the 13 th]]: Part 1''. Pretty tame by today's standards.}}

* While ''[[Toy Story (Animationfranchise)|Toy Story]]'' still holds up remarkably well, the graphics that were state of the art back in 1995 pale in comparison to what's being done today. The humans look [[Uncanny Valley|almost as plastic as the toys]], there's an airless quality to the outside scenes, and the animation is not as fluid and nuanced as what we see today. Not that the movie has now become unwatchable, far from it, but compare it to ''Toy Story 2'' just four years later and the improvement is remarkable. And then compare ''that'' to ''Toy Story 3'' eleven years after, and you appreciate how much CGI has evolved in such a short time. Also, consider the fact that before ''Toy Story'', the number of fully computer-generated feature films was exactly zero, and it would be another two years before there was another one. [[Technology Marches On|With CGI so ubiquitous today]], it's hard to imagine how mindblowing an experience it was to see Woody and Buzz for the first time.