Let's Talk Children's Entertainment

[Avaitor]

Now this thread I was thinking about posting in the TV board, since I'm going to use some examples of live-action series. However, this is a board for animation, and I have a feeling that this will consist of 90'% discussion for cartoons, so I'll put it here.

Anyway, earlier today I was thinking about how I was never much of a fan of Disney Channel as a kid. It's no secret that I adored Disney as a child, but the Disney I liked didn't really connect to Lizzie McGuire, Proud Family, Raven, etc. Then and now, Disney meant quality family entertainment to me. The movies (mostly the animated ones, but plenty of their live-action films qualify, although moreso from Walt's time), the parks and a handful or so of their animated series are what qualified to me. Obviously anyone can go to the parks and have a good time, even if you can't do rides, and I still feel entertained from the likes of Peter Pan, The Little Mermaid, or DuckTales, but I couldn't get into most of the channel's programming for the life of me as a kid. And one of the few shows that did much of anything for me back then, Even Stevens, feels almost alien to me now. When I watched the channel back then, it was usually for something they didn't make, like Boy Meets World repeats or Vault Disney, when I could stay up.

But let's go back to Even Stevens for a sec. I remember the show being a more clever alternative to Lizzie and The Jersey from way back when, and while it is still a little sharper than what I've seen from either of those shows, I just don't feel very entertained by it anymore. I get the same feeling from it that I get from Doug, another show that I remember liking a good deal as a child, but bores me to tears now. Series like these weren't made for someone like me, a male in his early 20's. They were meant for the me of 10 or years ago. It's getting close to a decade since I started middle school, and the further away I get from this years, the less I feel connected to characters of that age.

Is that a bad thing? No, not really. I was entertained when I was a kid, so these shows did their jobs. Same with Pokemon and Power Rangers, which I also used to enjoy as a child, but have no real attachment to them beyond nostalgia now.

But there are some shows that I watched when I was a kid that still make me laugh or excite me about as much as ever. Shows like Dexter's Lab, Powerpuff Girls, Rocko's Modern Life, Rocky & Bullwinkle, TaleSpin. Need I mention how well the DCAU shows and Gargoyles hold up? Or that Yu Yu Hakusho had incredible storylines during its run? Of course, it's also public just how much I admire Ed, Edd n' Eddy. Even The Flintstones has some genuinely strong writing over the course of its run.

You're probably wondering why I'm bringing shows like these up. And to be fair, I don't really watch as many cartoons as I used to now. I can count how many animated series I keep up with on one hand, while I only occasionally pull out one of my non-DCAU DVDs or go to YouTube for a random episode anymore. But when I do go and watch an old episode of Animaniacs or DuckTales, there's plenty of good to find.

But the idea of making good children's entertainment still fascinates me. One thing I've learned, though, is that limiting yourself to appealing to JUST children, that will only end up cutting its lifespan down. I'm not a big fan of Adventure Time, but the show's appeal is quite apparent, considering how it treats viewers of all ages.

I only just scratched the surface here, and I intend to come back to this subject later. But what is your opinion of kid's entertainment? Are you easily entertained, or is there something you require to get invested into a series?

[Daikun]

IMO, television was always Disney's kryptonite. Even as a kid, I never liked Disney Channel. I was more into Nick and CN during my childhood. If you wanted to watch good Disney cartoons, they were in syndication, not really the main channels they owned.

Only in recent years did ANYTHING on Disney TV become watchable thanks to the migration of CN's old talent pool. I'm amazed at how quickly they jumped in quality from lame to awesome. I honestly thought I'd never need to watch the channel in my lifetime, but then we start getting Phineas & Ferb, Gravity Falls, Motorcity, Wander Over Yonder, new Mickey Mouse cartoons... It's like they suddenly pushed a button that says "Stop Sucking."

[Commode]

I watch less cartoons right now than I ever have in my life.  The last cartoon I watched was Rugrats(I was in an argument the other day with some one else over whether show was a children's show or not), before that I don't know, probably some Mickey Mouse/Donald Duck cartoons?

I watched a good amount of Disney Channel as a kid, but the Disney Channel that you talk about(what with the Even Stephens and all) was around the point I was becoming less interested in it, was probably to fixated on CN(which was fairly new to our household).  But in the 90s all I had was Nick and Disney(and SatAM stuff of course) so I watched it.  The days when it actually aired classic Mickey Mouse cartoons without any weird gimmick, it aired The Torkelsons(loved it as a kid), it aired The Muppets(classic episodes and a newer revival), it aired Disney Afternoon reruns, it aired the Disney Family Movie every night, sometimes two.  I realize that either there wasn't much exclusive material made for the channel, really all it aired was acquired stuff or stuff they made decades ago/for another network, but I still watched it.

[gunswordfist]

I watched Disney the least out of The Big Three but mostly because we barely had the channel. I really liked TaleSpin and GoofTroop and even Aladdin and Timon & Pumbaa (sp?). I am not really sure were I'd rank it against Nick. I think it was about a tie. I liked Doug, Rocko, All That, Keenan & Kel, Lake Eerie and Hey Arnold. Of course Cartoon Network flatlined them to me. Premiere/What A Cartoon/Cartoon Cartoons are still my favorite set of new (at the time) cartoons and they had Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry. And some time afterwards, Toonami hit its stride. Sheesh, it wasn't even close.

Looking back, what I think they each did best in their primes was Disney had good fun adventure cartoons, Nick blended live action and animated series better than anyone and Cartoon Network was great at bringing new programming along with classics. If only some network today was competent enough to do all of that (well maybe shy away from tween live action shows because I have lost ALL faith in those). I still can't stress enough how much we should be seeing a block of animated shorts that could go on to be full-fledged series like Cartoon Network used to do.

[Avaitor]

I watched a good amount of Disney Channel as a kid, but the Disney Channel that you talk about(what with the Even Stephens and all) was around the point I was becoming less interested in it, was probably to fixated on CN(which was fairly new to our household).

Yeah, when we got our annual or so weekly preview of Disney back when it was a premium channel, I did enjoy it. That was when they were airing repeats of Disney Afternoon shows and even some of their classics, as well as had stuff like Adventures in Wonderland and Welcome to Pooh Corner. I got the channel for good somewhere in between the time Lizzle McGuire and the Proud Family premiered, and at that point, the stuff I liked when I did see the channel earlier was mostly gone, and their originals just didn't appeal to me.

I didn't get around to this much in my post, but I wanted to point out that even as a kid, my tolerance for school-based shows was mixed, and around the time I was getting closer in age to some of the characters who were in these shows, my tolerance dropped even more so. It's partly that I don't really see the point of watching kids in school when I just came home from it, but also because most of these shows just didn't work for me. There were and still are exceptions to this rule though, but it takes a great sense of creativity to change that for me.

[gunswordfist]

That post makes me want to watch Recess.

[Spark Of Spirit]

I've never been a fan of Disney's live action shows (they've always had the same formula since Lizzie McGuire) but starting with Gummi Bears when I saw it as a kid I always went out of my way to watch their cartoons. I still enjoy most of their TDA line up now (Rescue Rangers not so much, nor the post-Gargoyles/Bonkers stuff) as they still provide entertainment with their stories and general lighthearted demeanor. They kept it going a bit after that (The Weekenders and Recess might not really be TDA-style shows but they had the same amount of effort) around Kim Possible and American Dragon (and probably W.I.T.C.H.) they completely lost me.

I enjoy stuff like Phineas & Ferb, Wander Over Yonder, and Gravity Falls but... they feel like they should be on another channel. It doesn't make them any lesser of shows, but they feel jarring on the Disney Channel instead of Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I didn't have the Disney Channel into the early 2000's, so I missed shows like Gargoyles, Ducktales, and other classics when I was growing up as a kid. When I finally did get the Disney Channel as part of a basic cable package, I just couldn't get into it. Save for Recess, and occasionally The Weekenders (which I barely even remember, now), none of the shows really did anything for me. I did watch American Dragon: Jake Long quite a while after it finished airing, mostly because Avaitor recommended it to me, and I enjoyed it quite a bit more than any other Disney cartoons from its era. That said, I think its safe to say that the vast majority of the Disney's channel's output was made for kids and ONLY kids. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, and I didn't find too many cartoons that were offensively bad for children to watch, but compared to the competition of CN, which was giving us much smarter and more experimental shows, as well as introducing us to a whole new kind of animation from Japan, the Disney Channel just didn't hold much relevance for me. Even Nickelodeon, which I was never actually a huge fan of, still had its fair share of shows that I loved, such as Rocko's Modern Life, Rugrats, and so on (I used to really like Hey Arnold!, as well, but I kind of feel that it hasn't aged as well as everyone else says). I also did find the early seasons of SpongeBob to be quite fun, even if I'm not a fan of the series (I will say that I don't really "get" the wrong bias that people have for it on this board, though).

Really, though, out of the big 3 kids channels on basic cable, I'd have to say that CN easily dominated all of the competition. Between Toonami and the Cartoon Cartoons, CN was in its prime, and IMO it was downright untouchable between 1999-2004, until it slowly started to get kind of stupid by 2005 (replaying Toonami on weekdays with Miguzi was when the channel really jumped the shark for me).