It's been decades and decades, but I sort of suspect they don't hold up. Anyone watched these lately? Are they good, clever, witty, or just something colorful that's moving to keep kids glued to the screen?
I recall both "The Herculoids" and "Space Ghost" being startlingly violent when I saw them as a kid.
_________________ The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.
The release has been pushed back to this coming Tuesday, October 1st.
Jilerb wrote:
It's been decades and decades, but I sort of suspect they don't hold up. Anyone watched these lately? Are they good, clever, witty, or just something colorful that's moving to keep kids glued to the screen?
Top Cat was basically Sgt. Bilko as cats, with similar characters and plots, and it holds up equally well:
"Wait til Your Father Gets Home" was a pretty straightforward family sitcom style show- it even featured the voice of Tom Bosley, Howard Cunningham from "Happy Days" as the voice of the father. Some fairly big guest stars (well, for a cartoon at the time), like Don Adams, Phyllis Diller, Monty Hall, Don Knotts, Rich Little, Joe E. Ross, Isabel Sanford, Jonathan Winters, Casey Kasem and Pat Morita. I loved the show when it ran in syndication in the 70s, but I bought the DVD set when it came out in 2007 and couldn't make it through two episodes. I haven't felt the need to revisit, so I'll save my Blu-ray money for something else.
_________________ “Don’t take life too serious. It ain’t nohow permanent.”
I recall both "The Herculoids" and "Space Ghost" being startlingly violent when I saw them as a kid.
Interesting -- I saw them in my early teens during the beginning years of Cartoon Network and found them incredibly tame as far as violence. Context is everything!
I recall both "The Herculoids" and "Space Ghost" being startlingly violent when I saw them as a kid.
Interesting -- I saw them in my early teens during the beginning years of Cartoon Network and found them incredibly tame as far as violence. Context is everything!
I saw them first run in the 60s and thought they were tame.
_________________ “Don’t take life too serious. It ain’t nohow permanent.”
Cartoons underwent a reform period in the late 60's and early 70's. As we moved through the Vietnam War and the hippie-dippie way of seeing the world assumed cultural dominance, there was a concern that Saturday Morning cartoons were all too consumed with violence, and the virtue of might generally. The next wave of cartoons were more about problem-solving, mysteries, gangs of teenagers with a "Scooby Doo" type comic relief, racing, and the like.
Space Ghost and Herculoids were right before cartoons started getting more Scooby-ish. So in terms of explosions and bad guys getting physically whomped, they were on the peak of that last trend. They must have seemed violent to the 70's tastes.
Lord knows Race Bannon put more people six feet under than either one of them, though.
I vaguely remember that Frankenstein character (maybe he was in Laff-a-lympics?), but I've never heard of either of those shows.
No, not part of the "Laff-a-lympics" bloc, but those cartoons did run (Or, I guess, re-run) somewhere around that time. I remember having seen them as well.
_________________ The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.
Cartoons underwent a reform period in the late 60's and early 70's. As we moved through the Vietnam War and the hippie-dippie way of seeing the world assumed cultural dominance, there was a concern that Saturday Morning cartoons were all too consumed with violence, and the virtue of might generally. The next wave of cartoons were more about problem-solving, mysteries, gangs of teenagers with a "Scooby Doo" type comic relief, racing, and the like.
Space Ghost and Herculoids were right before cartoons started getting more Scooby-ish. So in terms of explosions and bad guys getting physically whomped, they were on the peak of that last trend. They must have seemed violent to the 70's tastes.
Lord knows Race Bannon put more people six feet under than either one of them, though.
Yes, by 1970s cartoon standards those '60s cartoons were pretty violent. And that goes double for "Jonny Quest," which showed more or less realistic-looking people getting blown up or shot or falling to their deaths.
By the early 1970s there were a lot of concerns (largely justified) about the effects that TV was having on children. Those concerns focused onto an understandable, but rather simplistic, concern about TV violence in particular. Even prime-time series got noticeably less violent for a couple of seasons there, from what I have read. Meanwhile, on Saturday mornings, out-and-out fighting became basically forbidden in new shows for several seasons. Old slapstick cartoons featuring the likes of Bugs Bunny got grandfathered in, though they were often censored. But new 1970s cartoons just didn't show any sort of combat for several seasons. Which is why the Scooby-Doo formula, where the protagonists respond to threats by running away, became so popular for awhile. It was a way to show excitement and action without actual violence.
You think "Space Ghost" looked tame compared to 1980s cartoons like "G.I. Joe?" Try the original season of "Superfriends," where the closest thing you saw to a fight was Superman pinning the arms of an evil robot duplicate Superman behind his back and announcing that he'd hold him there until his batteries ran down (I'm not making this up).
The panic over TV violence had mostly blown over by the late 1970s. At that point some of the 1960s series like "Herculoids" and "Johnny Quest" were re-run on Saturday mornings. That's when I found them so startlingly violent. They really were, in comparison to what I'd seen before. And then there was the syndicated "Battle of the Planets" version of "Gatchaman," which was toned way down from the original but still pretty startling.
_________________ The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.
Even prime-time series got noticeably less violent for a couple of seasons there, from what I have read.
Adult shows in prime-time started looking for premises where the problem gets solved without fighting, a gun, and even the old "whomp them on the back of head to knock them out cold" solution (which doesn't really work neatly in real life).
Shows such as Kung-Fu were a step in this direction, where he walks the earth trying to be wise and fighting only as a last resort. Another trend to see is a "western" in the form of Little House on the Praire. Scratches the western itch, but with no sheriff, no gunfighters, etc.
But my favorite example is Grizzly Adams. Moves out to the wilderness like Jeremiah Johnson. But Jeremiah Johnson was before the change, and he's like a frontier Punisher killing Indians (for massacring his family). Adams, though, never fights -- he calls upon the animals to help him in all sorts of inventive ways. The theme song is full of granola-chompin' goodness. I loved the show, even though deep within my heart was stirring a Frontier Punisher.
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