So I got bored recently and decided to watch a random Inspector Gadget episode and oh boy, it really has not aged well at all.
The animation is horrendously cheap, the writing is pretty stiff and all the attempts at slapstick fail miserably.
So it got me thinking, what other shows have aged pretty badly?
The original TMNT and Captain Planet also come to mind, but TMNT at least varies depending on the episode while Captain Planet was always shit from start to finish.
I'm pretty sure anything from 80s to early 90s doesn't hold up.
Gadget and Captain Planet were never good, even back in the day.
TMNT is, as your rightfully said, hit and miss, but it was hit and miss back when it first aired, anyways.
Can't think of any shows that aged poorly. There are plenty of shows I thought were good as a little user, but growing up they had serious faults and older people didn't like them when they were airing.
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The first few episodes of TMNT up to the confrontation and subsequent battle in the technodrome are pretty much great. So was the one where the dude turned into a fly. It was a mixed bag.
Aged pretty well actually. The line delivery timing is never rushed, they use real world dollar amounts appropriate to the industry without going overboard, and even when they start reusing songs they always had at least one new one every episode.
I wish they'd kept finding reason to use Eric Raymond's catchphrase ("it's amazing what lawyers can do…if you pay them enough"), if only because its a damn good real world corporate asshole explanation of why he's not in jail (after kidnapping a girl no less)
TMNT had a pretty good pilot, then got worse every episode for the first seven or eight episodes, then totally bottomed out and never really got any better. Mikey had that fucking grappling hook for like ten times longer than he had nunchucks but nobody remembers that crap, they just remember the video games and Vanilla Ice.
B:TAS was basically the first good Saturday morning action cartoon by any real standard. I don't even get why Transformers nerds or Thundercats nostalgia exist.
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I don't think you know what 'aged badly' means, user. If it didn't do any of the things you listed it wouldn't have aged badly, it would have been just bad in the first place.
Something that looks like pic related definitely aged badly. It was a product of the eighties and it looks awful today.
G1 Transformers is a guilty pleasure for me, the cheap animation errors and horrific plots are truly a site to behold.
I love the fake Prime episode, Megatron creates a clone of Prime and the Autobots decide to have a race to see who the real Prime is, instead of asking each Prime a series of questions only the real Prime would know the answer to.
Not to mention the episode where Spike gets turned into an Autobot, that episode had me wetting myself with laughter.
Man, Inspector Gadget's formula fucking sucks. How the hell did it ever get fans?
Never watched it as a kid, always thought him and Penny were just irritating
I agree, Scooby Doo is even worse on that point. What kid wants to see fake monsters instead of real ones?
A lot of things just didn't live up to their potential.
imo KND is alright even today
Theme song. Sucks you right in and gets you pumped for the show.
Also the show did unlock kidnapping/bondage/loli kinks in people.
Yeah that theme song is so good and it shows you a premise with a ton of potential. A show with someone like Inspector Gadget has all the components required for a good cartoon, it just needs a better team working on it.
Ben 10 was alright even for its day, I couldn't stand the first season of Jake Long because Jake was an irritating little shit bag, never watched Code Lyoko.
Juniper Lee was CN's Jake Long but much worse in that it had that shitty Joss Whedon style of writing in which it thinks name dropping popular properties is clever and that "lol snark = comedy gold" and KND was always a mediocre show.
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It was never alright with me since it replaced Megas XLR.
>even if it got the EXTRA THICC treatment, it'd be complete garbage with forced political commentary and no shitting on MTV
Wasn't Megas XLR cancelled because of its shit ratings? In other words, "Chicks might dig giant robots, but the 6-11 demographic certainly didn't?"
Speaking of shows that didn't age well.
I refuse to believe these quads.
I'm sure it had good ratings but the high-production offset any profit CN was making off it, so they axed it.
That's why wildly popular shows get shit-canned: they cost too much money to make, and the ratings have to be unreasonably good to justify it.
why do people with mild gigantism have such a strangle hold on the ratings system?
Because they're the main target for the network. If your target audience isn't satisfied with your product, then no one else will be.
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Stop perpetuating this meme. Jody Schaeffer was just a producer and not involved in any writing or directing, George Krstic (the guy who made Downtown) and Chris Prynoski (the founder of Titmouse) were the real creative heads behind the thing.
No, they were planning on making a third season to actually act as the finale. It would have involved the reveal that Coop creating the Glorft and started a time loop.
You shut your whore mouth
Duck Tales is a timeless classic that still holds up. Quack Pack and Goof Troop aged terribly.
Nah, Ducktales aged badly and is boring as fuck
I watched the first season as it was airing and didn't have all that much to complain about. It slowly got worse and worse, especially as it got rebooted.
I always thought Jake was annoying. I was never really into it.
Now that just hurts. I will admit that the first season has a terrible problem with reusing animation assets, a problem that gets better as there are more seasons, but beyond that I don't see how it's aged badly. You have good episodes and bad episodes, but the plots are pretty decent overall. Ulrich is a crybaby drama queen though.
Cheap girly redlining of all the same problems Jake Long had.
Even today KND stacks up. It's about imagination and the desire to not grow up into a corporate drone or evil assist. What has not aged well about that?
I can't believe these actually got made and Greg Weisman of all people worked on the second season of W.I.T.C.H
Fun fact: IG was originally a kid oriented Lupin spin off.
KND is still fun as a kid show, just not great for adults.
winx was never good
nobody ever mentions Angel Friends, i know it was bad, but is existed
For Transformers: it would be nothing without the '86 movie. The improved animation, rock soundtrack, and Decepticons actually being a threat and killing Autobots left and right is well remembered. Plus Orson Welles as a planet that eats other planets.
As for Thundercats, like TMNT, it actually had a pretty good pilot episode and was darker than other 80's kids shows. They have the mutants fire on ships that are said to contain unarmed fleeing refugees! And Lion-o being a child stuck in a man's body. I'm sure it got worse from there, but it had potential.
The Winx comic was good though.
How to fix inspector gadget in 3 easy steps
None of those things has 'aged', they're all the same as when you saw them back in the day. Only you're an adult now, and time has passed, and you interpret them differently than you used to, perhaps seeing flaws you didn't notice before, perhaps not being as easily amused as you were as a kid, perhaps merely your tastes having changed with the passage of years.
I tried rewatching Inspector Gadget a couple years ago, it didn't hold my interest. I agree TMNT varied in quality, and yeah, Captain Planet was always shit.
well lemme talk about some of the shows here
I grew up watching this show. Why has it not aged well? Because the idea of a cop that is completely inept and stupid yet still some basically becomes a powerful secret agent doesn't play well with today's kids. even most 5 year olds know that a cop cannot be dumb and still somehow remain a cop.
Once again i grew up with this show. Jem has not aged well mainly because the song a episode format is considered boring and tasteless. With so many pop stars out there entertaining kids nowadays shows like Jem feel more like a parody of pop-stars then a actual show. Why watch Jem when you can watch Hanna Montana?
This show has actually been overshadowed by its rebooted successors. TMNT now stands for action and drama. Not goofy jokes and goofy villains who reuse the same plot (kidnap April O'Neil) in every episode.
When this show aired the majority of American kids were ripe for the picking when it came to brainwashing them with environmentalism. But now with so many kids as early as five years old understanding environmentalism and the fact that the show could not get away with showing every kid that their fathers and mothers are evil polluting corporate bastards, the show just does not hold up.
Too much exposure over the years has killed the original show, so yeah it aged poorly.
Both shows were good. They were subtle in showing girl power without being man hating. Sadly girl power is now annoying and soul crushing to males so the shows and shows like them cannot get any footing.
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Explain further.
He's a pedophile. What's more to explain?
You can never have enough. What's to explain?
and technically you can always get away with topless lolis. If someone calls you out on it, they end up looking like the pedophile.
It's amazing how the childhood filter can completely block out just how juvenile Krang and Shredder were. They never act like the fucking adults and antagonist threats they are supposed to be.
Thanks user. I never thought I would want this so much.
That's how I feel about G1 Megatron and Starscream. They just act like a couple of shitty children in a sandbox fighting over each other's toys. Starscream's voice does not help this.
Made even clearer by the crossover movie. Ch'rell a best.
And this is why G1 is overrated.