Wow.

[Toonboy]

I seem to be the only one who liked the animated series version of 101 Dalmatians. Oh well. It wouldn't be the first time I liked a cartoon that everybody else hated. But I thought the cartoon was a good representative the era when cartoons started to become entertaining again, along with Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, Timon and Pumbaa, and Darkwing Duck came at the head of this era. I felt this cartoon was a far more worthy follow up to its parent movie than Jungle Cubs was, which aired at roughly the same time. Maybe it was because Cadpig was one of the very first characters I ever fell in love with since Bunnie of Sonic the Hedgehog. After the 90s cartoons just haven't been the same until Avatar came along, and even then there haven't been any with characters I would consider crushes. XD But that's beside the point. If this cartoon was so bad, why did it get nominated for various Emmies and Annies? I guess the real question would be how I could watch some of these old Disney shows again like this one and Pepper Ann. I wonder if they're airing on *shudders* Toon Disney. :P

[Juuchan17]

Well, it was okay, but IMO pointless. Sure, it followed up a . . . continuing feel to its movie counterpart, but it just seemed to fail . . . . even though I will admit, I watched it.

I'm not saying it wasn't an entertaining cartoon; it just seemed to be more useful of getting more people (mainly the little kiddies) into the 101 Dalmatians franchise (which I think the live-action version was released close to this time and the re-release of the original film), that's all. I guess there are some people that thought this show was genius to be nominated for awards.

And I can tell you this: I betcha I'm the only person here that actually liked Jungle Cubs. *wants it on DVD* XD So I kind of understand how you feel, Toonboy.

Oh, Toon Disney doesn't show much "good" cartoons during the day; the good ones are at night (like early-morning times) - like Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers, Teacher's Pet, and others (including 101 Dalmatians). Well, that was the last time I checked this . . . I have no cable at home . . . wah.

[lupercal]

I've never seen the series, but I liked the movie, and I quite liked the DTV. I hated the live action films.

Pretty clearly Toonboy is a child of the 80's, whereas I'm a child of the 70's and earlier, as far as cartoons go, and grew up in an era when almost everything was so weak that there's no reason to get nostalgic about it except in the general sense that one gets nostalgic about childhood things. I can't OTTOMH think of a single animated series from the 70's that I would go out of my way to find again today, though admittedly I'm not thinking very hard.

The 60's I think were a little better.

I remember getting up on Saturday mornings to watch a show which consisted of Lippy the Lion and Hard-De-Har-Har, Touche Turtle, and Squiddly Diddly, and of course Kimba. I can remember being annoyed when Pebbles and Bam-Bam got their own stupid show. I think these shows were still being shown some years after they were produced in Australia, because I would have been about 2 when Lippy the Lion was made. I suppose it could have been worse. I might have been born five years later, and have no childhood cartoons to remember except things like Fat Albert and the animated Gilligan's Island.

So I came to the 80's renaissance as an adult, and to me the golden era is the late 80's and early to mid 90's. Not because I was a kid, but because cartoons suddenly became worth watching as an adult. I wonder which of us got the better deal. Sometimes I wish I'd been a kid in the late 80's, but then I wouldn't have realised how much things had improved.

Loop

[starlac]

I agreed with Juuchan17 that it was a little pointless, nevertheless I enjoyed it at the time, even though it’s not something I would go looking for now.

Sometimes I wish I'd been a kid in the late 80's, but then I wouldn't have realised how much things had improved.

This kind of issue seems a bit weird to me.

I was a kid back in the mid-to-late 80s and early 90's, but being in England I had a total choice of four channels to watch.

The strange thing, was that these channels children’s schedules would show cartoons from pretty much every decade gone by. So a modern show could end up sitting next to an older one. So I ended up seeing shows from the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties.

One minute Flintstones, or Topcat. The next Looney Tunes or a MGM short. Sandwiched between things like MASK and He-Man; or in later years Animaniacs and Tiny Toons. As well as home-grown stuff like Count Duckula and the Postman Pat. Disney Toons were (and still are, although the older ones aren’t) part of Saturday and Sunday mornings.

So I had an interesting variety of cartoons to watch and remember while I was a kid. Now though, the children entertainment section (outside of Cartoon Network or suchlike) is completely shot over here.

[Toonboy]

Well, concerning the 80s, back then I watched cartoons like it was all good, but looking back I realize that only a handful entertained kids but didn't pander to them, and the rest were, as Lupercal would say, essentially toy commercials in half hour format, although some of these were enjoyable in their own right. Of the good ones, I only remember a few. Mysterious Cities of Gold, Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea, and Ulysses 31, even today with the popularity of modern animes, I consider to be three of the best animated shows ever. Beyond those, Around the World with Willie Fogg and The Little Prince were entertaining for kids.

But then the 90s opened up with Sonic SatAM. I was a teen, but suddenly cartoons seemed different. They seemed to possess a vibrancy in tune with the attitude of the 90s. Most were still comedies. They were neither soul-burning dramas like Spartakus, but nor were they happy-go-lucky playful romps like half of the cartoons of the 80s seemed to be. Yeah, there was some junk, but many seemed to be shows both adults and kids can dig. As the 90s wore on, we got shows like Darkwing Duck, Batman: The Animated Series, Gargoyles, Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, Count Duckula in Great Britain, etc. I consider 101 Dalmatians to be at the tail end of this era. Then when 2000 and the years after burned on, it seemed to me that cartoons started getting more insipid and cookie-cutter again. Generation O was the last good cartoon I would see for quite some time, but it faded into obscurity while the next millennium would see a whirlwind of copycats like Max Steel and Mucha Lucha thriving. It wasn't until relatively recently with a burst of awesome and halfway decent shows like Avatar: The Last Bender, Dragon Hunters, Brandy and Mr Whiskers, Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends, and The Buzz on Maggie, did cartoons and Saturday mornings start to feel like the days of old again. But even then it's sometimes hard to find something good on tv because the good shows are still being overshadowed by stuff like you see on Jetix.

I guess I consider myself lucky to be young enough to straddle two decades that matter, the 80s and 90s. I guess we're all products of our taste and environment, but nothing about 70s seemed entertaining to me. I guess back then they were all being influenced by the disco era, but Jabberjaw, Josie and the Pussycats, and Hong Kong Phooey don't look at all too much different from each other to me.

[lupercal]

We're pretty much in agreement here. I grew up in the 70's, but to me most 70's cartoons are rubbish, so it's not just a case of what you grew up with. I also agree that the Golden Age ended somewhwere in the mid to late 90's, though I would say there has still been more good stuff in the early 00's than in the early 80's (BTW 'Count Duckula' started in the '88 in the UK. I don't know when it reached the US)

I'll still stick up for the 70's though - great decade for music (except for a couple of years in the middle).

Loop

[Juuchan17]

Hmm, I was born in the late 1980s, but I do remember many shows from the early 80's and even later . . . . thanks to today's television (like Boomerang, CN's cable channel for the older Hanna-Barbara cartoons).

I think every year has its "good" cartoon, sometimes it seems rare for every couple of years to have a "really great" cartoon (such as Avatar is for last year, IMO). And of course, there has to be a "just plain awful" cartoon . . . . It's anyone's opinion on these types of things. Personally, I enjoy a little bit of everything in cartoons: some really popular ones, some "in the middle" types of shows, and heck, I like some of the really bad ones (like Pokemon, which in its prime, was not that bad really).

- Juuchan17

[athena]

I think my intro to cartoons was somewhat delayed... I was taken to see Disney movies at a fairly early age, but when I came home TV cartoons were pretty much off-limits... too violent... I remember even Tom and Jerry getting a 'too violent' rating from my parents.

As I got older the restraints were loosened a bit... or I just broke them outright... I remember waking up at six in the morning many times just to catch a few episodes of Scooby Doo... plus later I did get to watch some staples like He-Man and Transformers--ironic given that Looney Tunes had been dubbed too violent in my younger years...

At any rate, this puts me squarely in the late 80s / early 90s era of prime cartoon watching.