What was it about 2010 that had so much longevity in it?
Both Regular Show and Adventure Time premiered in this year and have had really long lifespans. Cartoons produced a few years before this (Chowder, Flapjack) and shows premiering after it (Uncle Grandpa) just didn't catch on as much.
Chowder and Flapjack occurred during/briefly after CN's dark period. Nick and Disney fell after the 90's with Disney recovering ever so slightly with Phineas & Ferb + Gravity Falls while Nick is still in its dark period.
Because those shows appeared for CN during that transition of shit to good, they ended up getting a small fanbase as a result. But they are the reason people paid attention to begin with which caused the wave of people to check out their later shows.
Another HUGE factor was YouTube. Because Regular Show and Adventure Time had their pilots posted online, it managed to get huge support before it even aired, causing the large fanbase to flock to it the instant it aired, versus having to build it from the first episode and onward like Flap and Chowder had to do. Its why Steven was huge right out the gate, Sugar already had tsunami levels of fans and hype.
They were also breaths of fresh air at the time. Especially since prior to that, the 2000's were a fucking mess in terms of tone. We had shit like Catdog with As Told by Ginger then Hi Hi Puffy, Teen Titans, Squirrel Boy, Dave the Barbarian. Literally every show was doing something different and most of them were doing it in a very poor or cheesy way. It felt like it was kiddie shit and hard to appreciate. Adventure Time, Flapjack, and Regular Show didn't seem to talk down to its audience despite still being enjoyable for kids.
Stream services are killing these shows though.
>>81439250
Uncle Grandpa's still around
Plus Robotomy and Symbionic Titan didn't last long while Generator Rex and Ben 10 UA had healthy lifespans
>>81439474
>Adventure Time, Flapjack, and Regular Show didn't seem to talk down to its audience despite still being enjoyable for kids.
>conveniently ignoring the little horse show in that statement
>>81439488
UG is on its way out, though. season 4 and 5 are just going to be rebranded season 3 episodes that are still in the pipeline.
i was going to include symbionic titan as a post-2010 show, but action cartoons just didn't seem like an apt comparison. it just takes a whole lot more effort and budget for animation to make an action cartoon show compared to comedy writing.
>>81439474
i figured as much. so you're saying AT and RS hit that sweet spot right after CN Real and whatever the Nick equivalent was?
>>81439527
My Little Pony is still very much for small kids. If you actually read the script, it reads like a Littest Pet Shop episode, just with 5% more tension/consequence. The difference is the voice actors are VERY good so they never feel like they're SHOUTING AT THE AUDIENCE IN A STILTED MANNER SO THE BABIES CLEARLY UNDERSTAND OUR WORDS. They read the script like fucking voice actors and it makes the writing seem decent.
Otherwise, aside from a couple moments of dark magic happening or a character getting really angry, it's still very, VERY much a little kid show. It caught on for completely different reasons than AT and RS. MLP's fandom was a phenomenal accident that cannot be repeated. Steven proves that AT's success can be repeated if you get a pre-existing fanbase beforehand.
>>81439559
>hit that sweet spot right
Pretty much. They are the Little Mermaid equivalent to Disney's renaissance while Flapjack and Chowder are more like Oliver & Company and Brave Little Toaster.
Spongebob has been going for 17 years.
Rugrats lasted for 16 years.
Fairly Odd Parents has been going for 15 years.
It's not unheard of for cartoons to last way longer than their contemporaries. And the other way around too, plenty of cartoons go out way sooner than average.
>>81439620
Flapjack is more like the Roger Rabbit, since it paved way for AT and RS.
>>81439635
>All Nickelodeon shows
Nick literally cannot let go of the 90's. In fact most of their announcements as of late have been "Check out our 90's rebrand block" or "We're rebooting a 90's product".
They're so fucking irrelevant it hurts.
>>81439659
Also like, half of the Flapjack alumni went on to make popular shows.
Adventure Time's pretty easy to explain. Timing had a lot to do with it, sure, but at the same time it's influenced at least half of all cartoons made after it.
Regular Show's a bit harder to pin. Frankly, every time I'm reminded it's still on the air, I'm surprised. But I guess it just appeals more directly to a new demographic that didn't exist for cartoons 10-15 years ago.
>>81439682
someone post the family tree of people working in animation that has flapjack as a major branch
>>81439565
>My Little Pony is still very much for small kids.
That...doesn't contradict your earlier statement. It might be for small kids and it's clearly enjoyable for kids, but as you said with these other shows, it doesn't talk down to its audience.
>>81439620
>hate The Little Mermaid
>love Brave Little Toaster and Oliver and Company
>hate Adventure Time and Regular Show
>love Chowder and Flapjack
God damn it, this works too perfectly. I should just stop enjoying things just to see if they gain traction.
>>81439807
My point was that it doesn't run into that problem because the script itself is still very much "Character A has hurt Character B's feelings. Is this the end of their friendship?".
If two characters got into a fight in Adventure Time vs. My Little Pony, Adventure Time would be way more crass and vulgar about it in comparison. They might have Finn and Jake beat the shit out of each other, and in fact they have. MLP never does that, at most they'll have a race or just get really sad. The show is as simple as those pre-school shows that DO talk down to their audience, like a Barbie show or even those Tinkerbell movies were are pretty cheesy. But since the voice actors are actually decent, they make the script work which saves it.
The actual writing itself is your average small kid show. Get worse voice actors and it would be a show that talked down to their audience. AT, RS, SU, Flapjack, etc have things that would be too adult for MLP's primary audience, and that's what I mean by it doesn't talk down. It's not afraid to have an alcohol comparison with K'nuckles getting drunk or Finn talk about how he's getting sick of PB leading him on or that Steven constantly deal with war veterans who are one step close to waking up in the middle of the night screaming. Their scripts are a bit more mature than Rocko's Modern Life wacky dacky doo, Rocko gets flattened like a pancake while trying to mail a letter ah-yuck CHOKEY CHICKEN ADULT HUMOR GET IT.
>>81439807
>it doesn't talk down to its audience
If you shill hard enough, you can make people believe anything.
Pic related, when the Barney movie was being developed, David Geffen claimed that the Barney character didn't talk down to 3 or 4-year-olds, but you'd be hard-pressed to find someone on /co/ with that same opinion.
>>81439474
Clearly you weren't in the Su boat when it premiered most didn't care about or watched regularly until peridot was introduced, the character that started the fall of nieche fan base into a cancerous disease
>>81440065
I remember the internet being flooded with SU fanart, and in fact it still is, only after a couple of weeks of SU's premiere. There's like, a hundred pieces of SU fanart being made every minute.
>>81440124
the only crime is that it isn't all of jasper
>>81439925
Hm. I think I see what you mean.
Still think Mlp deserves more credit, but what with its banishment across the whole board...which at this point is just really sad.
>>81440124
Yeah mostly after coach Steven premiered. Like I said before know no gave it a glance or thought until lapis came into the picture. It only got worse when peridot was let loose and fan art was being spilled out everywhere it was insane
>>81439250
>Conveniently ignoring Young Justice in this talk, which takes place in 2010 and aired in the first week of 2011, practically still 2010.
>>81440246
we're not talking about action cartoons, friend
>>81440246
Every action cartoon from the past decade has been cancelled. Avatar is literally the only exception from this rule.
>>81440317
and korra still got dumped on in its last season
why is there no sustainable market for action cartoons?
>>81440339
You need every episode in order to follow the show. Actions are hard to fell invested in if most of the episodes relie on the past knowledge of previous episode. Avatar not so much because the threat was the same all three season not counting zukos honour
>>81440339
Needs a large budget to pull off (Comedy can basically have no animation like South Park and still be successful in humor) and it needs double to triple revenue in merchandise to make up for the budget. Plus it needs a reliable network to not fuck up its schedule which is especially hard to do now since kids don't even watch TV, let alone keep up with serialized cartoons. Unless I'm old, there was no Netflix at the time of Avatar.
>>81439565
SU does okay, but it will never be the international money-machine merchandising crossover-hit juggernaut that AT was for almost its entire run. The intensity of SU's niche fandom makes it seem like the show's a bigger deal than it actually is.
>>81439925
There was actually a real fight at the end of season 4
>>81441082
I think it COULD reach those levels if CN fucking cared. But since Sugar probably told them from the get go the show has a solid ending, they don't seem to be working as hard to make it a juggernaut in merch, despite it being literally prime for it. They probably don't want to invest in a show that they see as being over in just a couple of years and are trying to milk what they have now by panning out the new episodes with large hiatuses.
>>81439754
Seconding this
>>81439488
>Generator Rex and Ben 10 UA had healthy lifespans
Generator Rex already had sixty episodes paid for before the first one aired. If not for that, it would have been killed off a lot earlier since CN executives decided there was no future in action cartoons well before the first season ended.
>>81439474
>Adventure Time, Flapjack, and Regular Show didn't seem to talk down to its audience despite still being enjoyable for kids.
As The Great Swampy Marsh said about Phineas and Ferb: "the show was not created just for kids; [we] simply did not exclude them as an audience"
This is FUCKING KEY to GF, AT and SU's success. Regular Show is more "adult" to begin with, so it probably applies a little less. It's the new wisdom now that animation is more or less on equal footing with live action as a wide-appeal medium.
>>81441128
>Cheeseburger Backpack
AND SO IT BEGINS
