What went wrong?
How have they failed to make Tom & Jerry, Loony Toons & Scooby Doo relevant over and over again? How did they go from paragons of quality animation like Batman the Animated Series, Superman, Justice League & Teen Titans to countless failed Batman reboot cartoons, bland stuff like Young Justice and Teen Titans Go? They even hit it out of the park with Batman: The Brave and the Bold which made casuals, for the first time ever, actually give a shit about the rest of the DC Universe, but nope, three seasons is enough didn't sell enough toys. They even fucked up a perfectly promising Thundercats reboot with shitty writing and muh toy sales.
The only thing they've done right in the last ten years is their vanguard series of Cal-Arts cartoons which have set the new standard for the sustainable animation model. Even then this only came after the better part of a decade of trying desperately to chase toy sales with shit like Ben 10 and the novelty of the Cartoon Cartoon era with try-hard shit like Johnny Test. Not to mention them chasing off Craig McCraken and Gendy Tartovkosky, their two biggest stars and killing off the last viability of the DC animated brand by trying to revive Saturday morning cartoons with DC Nation. And let us all not forget Snyder's Live Action efforts for those long depressing years.
You can't make Tom & Jerry, Looney /TUNES/ or Scooby Doo relevant again because you either repeat their respective formula's only without the luxury of full animation or you take it in a new direction which people won't like because it's not what the characters are known for.
Warner Bros as a company, not just the animation dept, has always seemed like an example of too many cooks, or executives, in the kitchen.
Everything's just IPs and reboots and retooling of IPs. The wrong environment for anything creative or new to happen organically.
Tom and Jerry are by MGM, not Warner Bros. Literally the first few seconds of any episode has the roaring lion logo.
>>84163254
too many executives with too many agendas who are all too happy to sabotage each other at the drop of a hat.
On top of that many of them bluntly don't know what they're doing and live in yes men bubbles that not only protect them from the fact that they don't know what they're doing the yes men will bend over backwards to make blue into red if that's what is required.
Go look at the original superman movies. Not exactly high art but they understood that you play superman straight. He's a guy who wants to help people. Look at the '66 batman TV show, pretty fucking goofy. Along comes this guy named Burton and says 'A: batman is the least interesting person in a batman story once you get past his origin. B: lets make things dark. Not too dark, but just add a little edge to get people's attention." His batman did pretty good, but execs were used to adam west so we got Shumacher.
like 20 years later we get Nolan, only they learn the wrong lessons from that debacle and decide that every hero has to be Burton/Nolan's batman now. Unsurprisingly what works for batman does not work for Superman. (Green Arrow was literally a batman ripoff so OF COURSE nolanizing him works)
finally we come down to the studio's obsession with ratings and merch. Both of which are changing/going extinct. I haven't watched broadcast television in ten years. I use netflix but otherwise pirate my shit. The Saturday Morning Cartoon is extinct and when a show does well with a surprising demographic do the execs say "push some t-shirts or something"? no they say "can it, it's a failure."
>>84163340
They are now owned by Warner Bros. Have been for a while.
>They even hit it out of the park with Batman: The Brave and the Bold which made casuals, for the first time ever, actually give a shit about the rest of the DC Universe, but nope, three seasons is enough didn't sell enough toys.
Why paint this as if they did something wrong? A full run for a series is 52 episodes and it got the extra 13 that only popular series get.
>>84163254
>to countless failed Batman reboot cartoons
The Batman and Brave and the Bold were successful, and the only reason Beware "failed" was because Snyder was on a warpath and nuking all DC cartoons.
>bland stuff like Young Justice and Teen Titans Go?
kek
>They even hit it out of the park with Batman: The Brave and the Bold which made casuals, for the first time ever, actually give a shit about the rest of the DC Universe, but nope, three seasons is enough didn't sell enough toys
Now I know this is bait. Again, 65 episodes and a strong toy line is not a failure.
>>84163373
>Look at the '66 batman TV show, pretty fucking goofy. Along comes this guy named Burton and says 'A: batman is the least interesting person in a batman story once you get past his origin. B: lets make things dark. Not too dark, but just add a little edge to get people's attention." His batman did pretty good, but execs were used to adam west so we got Shumacher.
He was influenced by the darker direction that Batman was already taking in the comic books in the 80's.
>>84163530
>>84163787
The point is why not just keep it going. Why stop only to start another Batman cartoon?
This apologist rationalizing is the same mentality that these execs use to justify their constant rolling of the dice to try and make more money off a new rebranding or reboot.
>>84163787
BTB failed because the writing was terrible and CGI looked crappy. They also wanted to put their own spin on things by using lesser known villains instead of the more popular and recognizable ones - this ended up backfiring on them.
There was also some executive meddling involved because the show was still in it's development stage during a major shooting and the execs made them tone down the violence and replace realistic guns with lazer pistols.
>>84164868
you could argue they were just returning to the pulp roots there.
>>84164868
And to add the reason they went with Schumacher was because Batman Returns was too dark for their tastes and especially when they were trying to push it on kids.
No don't reign Burton in a little bit while having him use Billy Dee Williams as Two-Face, replace him instead for Batnipples. Great idea.
And even then B&R was another case of meddling to make it more kid friendly and to sell toys. Schumacher had some decent plans with Scarecrow/Batman Triumphant but B&R killed those plans.
Even their games are starting to show symptoms.
Network TV animation died, and the people who run Cartoon Network have little to no interest in doing anything but chasing their own warped ideas of success.
If anyone at WB has any creativity left in them, they oughta try and cozy up to Netflix. CN doesn't wanna do anything outside of it's current formula for success and whoever's in charge of DC animation doesn't give a fuck unless it's a grimderp DTV movie.
>>84165185
I wouldn't mind their animated movies if they'd at least do them in the bruce tim art style again.
Fuck this young justice bland face crap.
>>84165139
This whole latching onto the Nolan aesthetic for their Movies just reeks of cancerous modern notions of "trying something new".
"New" = Anything that has been proven successful and isn't twenty years old.
"Trying" = Heavy handed and hamfisted shoehorning the most superficial elements from said "New" thing.
It's the same way the execs at WB thought using Snyder's cinematographic style & camera filter from 300 was a sure fire cheat code to making successful graphic novel adaptations.
