Classic (80s-90s) TV Shows Then & Now

[Oni-91]

The BBC say they have no intention of restarting it though. *tear*

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!

Anyways, here's the other stuff I used to watch:

- The Crystal Maze (every kid in the UK watched this!)

- Fort Boyard (and I still do now!)

- You Bet! (...shut up!)

- Don't Try This At Home! (come on, it was You Bet! with fear. Some studio, same exclamation mark...)

- Fun House (if you didn't watch Fun House when you were a kid, you didn't have a full childhood!)

[Tenucha]

Man... I got a list of oddball childhood favourites,

TMNT/Usagi Yojimbo, Alf, Munsters, Dinosaurs, Muppet Show, Looney Tunes, CHiPs, Get Smart, Marsupilami, Earthworm Jim, Captain Bucky O'Hare, Wild West Cowboys of Moo Mesa, Bonkers, Sonic the Hedgehog, Inspector Gadget, Darkwing Duck, Tail Spin, Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers, Dinosaucers, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Super Mario, Batman (1966), Gargoyles, Looney Tunes, MacGyver and Knight Rider to name a few :3

And I'll throw in Dragonball and DBZ for good measure.

I'm 23 and these are the shows off the top of my head I used to always watch.

TMNT is classic... I still watch the first two movies but I did try to watch a few episodes on YouTube only to realize how corny is really is now. I'm sure there are still some golden episodes around but I only saw part of one with, like, the Nutrinos or whatever they were. Usagi Yojimbo for the win in crossovers!

Alf is still golden to me, I caught a few episodes on YouTube and I still plan on getting the DVDs sets despite the complaints on what episode versions were put on the discs.

Munsters are just way to classic. I loved this show so much. I have an extended MP3 theme somewhere on my computer.

Dinosaurs - ahead of its time... very smart, appealed to me as a kid and still hold an appeal to me even as an adult and not even on a nostalgia level... Gotta get the DVDs of this also.

Muppet Show is still just as funny as it was then... Gotta get the DVD sets for this.

CHiPs - Anyone who watches (or watched) Space Ghost Coast to Coast, my reason for the love of this show is the same as Moltar's, the crazy car chase that each episode build up towards.

Get Smart - can't wait for the movie remake with Steve Carell

Marsupilami - Cartoon about a yellow marsupial with a crazy cool tail!! I loved it as a kid. I love the idea as an adult. The Disney cartoon apparently sucks (I havn't seen it since I was a kid) but I'd love to find original UK publications of this (animated show? comics?)

Bucky O'Hare - oddball cartoon about a green space captain bunny. I havn't seen anything of it except the opening on YouTube. It's probably really bad by now.

Cowboys/Moo Mesa - Points of originality. When I found screen caps of the show, looked like a very low production value and could also be the corniest thing I had watched as a kid... So I'd rather just remember it being a favourite of mine from childhood

I always liked the darker Sonic seires, not the bright colorful Saturday morning Adventures Of... series. Both shows are quite bad now.

Inspector Gadget - I'll just leave that for my childhood memories as being awesome. It was alot of fun finding French and German language versions of the opening song.

I love the "cover song" Dr.Steel did for the theme.

Dinosaucers and Cadillacs and Dinosaurus - another couple shows I see no love for. I found the opening for both shows online (YouTube?) they're probably really bad now however... But I remember them being quite cool.

I threw Dragonball and DBZ in there... Dragonball was my first intro to anime when I was in 5th grade... I dont know what year that was... but both shows qualify as 80's cartoons anyway Even if they took a 'lil time coming over here (Maybe they qualify for 90's?)

Anyone remember Dinosaucers?

You sir, rock

[The Unsung Plumber]

I should have mentioned in my original post, but Rocko's Modern Life was then and still is now excellent, and needs a DVD release more than anything.

Hellz yes.

anyway, if you note my initials, DW, it would stand to reason that I LOVE Darkwing Duck. When I was 5, there was nothing cooler than having the same initials as darkwing.

[Tenucha]

That would be pretty cool.

You make your friends refer to you as "DW"?

I always wanted the action figures and either the plain or bike

[José the Bronx Rican]

I keep begging people not to get me started on cartoons, because I'm too busy to go in-depth. I was a fiend back in the day, and keep in mind I was an adult in the 80's, so it's not nostalgia talking for the most part.

These shows today are definitely much more sophisticated in all areas. Sure doesn't always make 'em better, though. Old TMNT to new TMNT, in overall quality, seems like a lateral move to me. However, there are conscious efforts to appeal to wider age groups now, and that means better writing and better humor for the most part. Batman, Animaniacs, Justice League and so on are at the high end. Stuff was written almost strictly for kids before (calling on the same veteran/freelance hacks they've been using for decades), and that makes some of it fodder for youtube comedy, especially early 90's USA Network output ("YOU... HURT... MY... JESSICAAAAA!!!"). Plenty of these programs age badly, but plenty don't, and the same will happen to these new ones.

Voice acting is not better. It's not much worse, but not better. And in localized anime? Hell no. Did everyone sound this effeminate in the original Yu-Gi-Oh? Don't let corny dialogue of the 70's and 80's fool you: a lot of those old-time voices were trained working in radio, and they knew how to read a line. Rob Paulsen is one of the last of the previous generation's greats. The fact we can have Peter Cullen-vs.-Gary Chalk arguments until the cows come home shows they did their thing in the old days as well. Generally better, IMO. Even the worst of the old days didn't reach the nightmare levels of Cream the Rabbit.

I remember watching Dark Water after all the bragging about how much was spent on animation, and while it was quite a good show, I wondered where the money went. My lament about animation nowadays is the depressing sameness of it all during the course of a series. The main reason I watch animated shows is for the animation ("Duh," right? You would think so, but...), and its quality can affect my impression of the series, whether or not everything else works well. I wish I could explain it further right now, but stuff nowadays in many shows are just good. "Just good" is not enough for me. Some shows back in the day ranged from "incredible" to "horrible" from ep to ep, and even within the SAME ep. It's much more consistent now, and that's supposed to be a good thing. However, if it's just OK - not bad, but not particularly great - and there's no hope it would get better, that depresses me.

I definitely speak from nostalgia about Transformers G1. What young male didn't think giant changing robots beating the shit out of each other was the coolest thing? That and Cullen were my reasons for Michael Bay's version not becoming a complete disaster. (But I'll be damned if I don't buy that RiffTrax!) Still, there's plenty of exciting (if a bit sloppy) Japanese animation I never get tired of. Season 3 was sure a turd, though, once they killed Prime and stopped going to Japan so much.

Speaking of killing, wasn't that a beautiful pussy-ass cop-out in the G.I. Joe movie, when they also KILLED DUKE, then ran into the dead Optimus backlash too late to fix it, so they clumsily dubbed in lines like, "He's gone into a coma" and "Duke's gonna be A-O.K.!!"

Everything from DIC sucked from my viewpoint, except Inspector Gadget and mayyyyyyyyybe Cops.

I collected Disney stuff by default since Gummi Bears, but then I noticed the nosedive in animation quality after the original 13 eps of Rescue Rangers, and although Disney opened up studios in France and England and Japan and improved again generally starting with TaleSpin, tapered off again with Darkwing Duck, and improved again with Gargoyles, I stopped collecting. I have to keep my Chip 'N' Dale tapes, though, because they used the butchered Disney channel masters for the DVDs, and because I still have the "uncensored" copies of "Dirty Rotten Diapers" and "Puffed Rangers."

Wish I had the time to pen a love letter to Tokyo Movie Shinsha of Japan for kicking everyone's ass without even trying in animation during the 80's and early 90's. The Smurfs just reached their 50th anniversary, but I hate them and I hate all of you (you know who you are!) who watched them as kids, causing the cancellation of Mighty Orbots.

I hate having to keep telling everybody that Looney Tunes is not, nor was ever, a TV show, just a pile of varying syndicated collections. Shorts animated for movie theaters was on a whole other level, and shouldn't count here. Yet, idiot labels like TVT release "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" and "Merrily We Roll Along" on CD as "TV" Themes. Assholes.

Before his passing, my father (in his mid-60's, mind you) became a huge fan of Dragon Ball Z, collecting everything he saw being sold on tape, bootleg or not. Go figure. I kept asking myself, how do you not get bored watching these folks talk for a half-hour, throw one projectile and say, "tune in next week"?

I gotta stop here. Maybe I'll talk in the future about how much I hate Thundercats (get your wooden stakes ready!), and about Sonic the Mutant Shark.

[The Pezman]

It's kind of funny looking back on old cartoons like TMNT, Captain N, Mega Man, etc. While I remember enjoying them so much as a kid, objectively speaking they're not very good. Production values are so much lower than cartoons today, the humor is not as good, voice acting, writing, music, it's all sub-par compared to the cartoons today.

Well yeah. But we as young kids were not going to notice or appreciate that. It was mostly OMG TALKING TURTLES BEATING UP ROBOTS AND MUTANTS! Seriously, what else could you ask for?

Animaniacs and the other Spielberg cartoons, by contrast, I actually enjoy a little more now because I actually get all the jokes. I had no idea at the time who Orson Welles was, and I was a huge fan of The Critic in high school (where Lamarche actually made his debut, I think). So watching him now made everything different.

Add to all this that nearly all of the famous voice actors of the day, along with Christopher Lloyd, came together to make Toonstruck, a little known but incredibly excellent point and click adventure game. Despite it being cartoony, it was definitely geared towards an older audience (a cow and sheep practice S&M... no, I'm not kidding). So that drove me to seek out the other work these people had done. Jim Cummings is my hero.

People tend to knock the new stuff, but shows of the last five years like Batman Beyond and Justice League Unlimited (to name a few) were great.

Meh... JLU was worse than Justice League. All the other heroes seemed ornamental anyways, as the writers still mostly focused on the original seven. However, I do love the Timmverse/Diniverse and am quite upset Mark Hamill isn't playing the Joker in the new Batman Beyond.

In terms of comedy, we've had stuff like Megas XLR, plus Nick shows with a broad appeal in terms of writing (eg. Fairly Oddparents.)

Fairly Odd Parents is probably the only Nicktoon today that can consistently entertain me from beginning to end every time. I don't know how the writers do it every time.

[Raziellink]

The Dutchies among us may remember a show called Telekids as well, which always aired on saterday morning which was great.

Sunday morning was where it was at. Ren & Stimpy, Pinky and the Brain, Spider-Man, X-men, and many more!

[The Unsung Plumber]

You make your friends refer to you as "DW"?

as a matter of fact, I do have a few friends who do:-P

[XZero]

When there's trouble you call DW...

Dustin Waldron! Let's get dangerous!

Sorry- I couldn't resist

[Tenucha]

With enough story planning and character development, it's not a bad name for a character in a series haha

[I-n-j-i-n]

I was too young to understand Star Trek The Next Generation when it first aired, but watching them now, I'm fully convinced it has some of the most intriguing and snappily written dialogue in any sci-fi or perhaps in all TV. For every ho-hum episode, they have one incredibly intriguing/funny/introspective one the next.

And I always loved Robotech, though Macross obviously is a few notches higher because it's the original material. The best bastardization of anything, ever.