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Post your favorite infamous John Kricfalusi Blogspot Moments:
When I was a kid, Sunday was a thrilling day. I got to look at a huge glorious full color pile of newspaper comics in every imaginable style.
Great classics like Li'l Abner, Dick Tracy, Brenda Starr, Pogo, Dennis The Menace and more...
Even the newer comics were drawn beautifully-The Flintstones and Yogi Bear by Gene Hazelton and Ed Benedict, Beetle Bailey by Mort Walker, Big George by Virgil Partch... I used to make collections of all my favorite strips.I copied my favorite drawings and read the jokes and stories over and over again.Whoever picked all these great strips sure was kind to the readers.
I feel sorry for kids today. George will explain why...
There used to be semi-plausible excuses for why modern animation was so crappy (1970-1990):
It costs too much so you have to have tons of executives who want you to aim at the lowest common denominator.
You have to send all the animation overseas.
It has to be done too fast.
These aren’t very good excuses but they are something at least.
However I can’t figure out any excuse at all for why the newspaper funny pages have gone to hell.
Each artist can do a whole strip himself-only 4 panels a day.
They get paid a mountain of money.
It can all be done in the country.
You don’t need hundreds of artists, so you can pick the best ones.
There are people alive today who can draw really good cartoons, but they aren’t in the newspapers for some unexplainable reason
>>478341
I remember reading his blog and him ranting about the 90s animaniacs artstyle like it was a some eldritch horror, a mockery of life.
>>478341
Why does this sound like a Bill Watterson rant he just stole and put his name on?
>>478341
it's funny because there were complaints that those postwar 50s-60s comic strips he's talking about were dumbed down and artistically insubstantial compared to prewar strips (that's a favorite Watterson complaint btw, according to him the golden age of newspaper comics was in, like, 1931)
Replies:>>479003
>>478997
paper and ink got more expensive postwar so they couldn't afford to do those huge page-sized strips like Gasoline Alley and the other ones Watterson jerks off to
Replies:>>479398
>>479003
Yes exactly like that. BW worships this era of newspaper comics as hard as John does 1940s Warner Bros.
>Grrr, I hate dry SoL cartoons so much everything needs to be DudeXtreme gags all the time
>unless it's Mike Judge 'cause he's a buddy of mine then it's ok
>"Does Mattieshoe prefer Beatlemania (registered TM copyright 1977, pat. pend., all rights reserved) to The Beatles, too?
>Let's hear it for derivative, soulless corporate product - Hooray!!
>I speak from (horrible) experience when I tell you that I personally witnessed the Tiny Toons and Animaniacs writers write THEMSELVES into the cartoons! (The artists were supposed to supply them with flattering caricatures. However, they KNEW better than to ask me!)
>They also wrote sycophantic, reverential references to Spielberg and Martin Scorcese, (Tarrantino wasn't as well known in those days, I guess) in a desperate and pathetic effort at jockeying for future live action gigs (after they were finished "slumming" in animation, that is.)
I can name the guilty parties (Tom Minton was definitely NOT one of them) if anyone is interested.
>All this on top of the fact that the finished Animaniacs product (you can hardly call it a cartoon) is unwatchable by thinking adults - or even advanced children, for that matter.
>I'm sorry, but reality hurts sometimes. The truth will set you free, son..."
Replies:>>479018
>>478635
Since you bring that subject up, APC was apparently the result of John K listening too much to R&S fans who demanded lots of grossout jokes and female nudity. Which does prove why you shouldn't necessarily listen to animation fans too hard.
>>479015
John did just that when he got a chance to make his own shorts involving Hanna-Barbara characters. I'm sure he thought it was thrilling to produce material for his favorite childhood cartoon characters but like all fanboys he inevitably used it as a vehicle for all the retarded stuff he always wanted to see those shows do when he was a kid. The image of Boo-Boo and Cindy rubbing their tongues still gives me the heeby-jeebies.
Only the most hardcore animation fans understand why John hates everything after the '60s. It's because during the golden age of animation, a popular trend was to make the art look as funny as possible. Looney Tunes did this. The jokes were visual based. The idea was that you only do things in animation that you can't do in live-action. If you watch Ren and Stimpy or any of John's work, you'll notice that it's 97% visual humor and 3% written humor. Animaniacs thrives on written humor. Plus some people just don't think it's very funny.
>>479020
Funny visuals are nice and with today's budgets rarer than they could be, but good writing is important too. Many Looney Tunes shorts had writing as good as the art. These things gotta compliment each other, otherwise you wind up with a John K show where the art is crazy but the jokes are simple poo and fart gags.
>>479020
Perhaps he hates shows like Animaniacs in part because it was able to stay on the air for over 5 years while every time he tries to do something with his own characters they're either taken from him or the show itself is canceled.
>>479020
It's the same thing with John's criticism of post-1965 H-B. Those cartoons, which include Scooby Doo and all of Alex Toth's action cartoons (Space Ghost, Herculoids, etc), get a bad reputation because some people think John is the god of animation. He thinks there's only one style and that style is his and that he's the messiah of animation and the only one who can truly capture the work of Bob Clampett or Chuck Jones. Meanwhile, I think that he has a terrible interpretation of their work and that they'd hate it too if they were still alive. John has some good insight on animation, but for some reason I don't think he follows all of what he says himself.
Replies:>>479058
>I like old cartoons. Repeat after me. I don't like anything made after about 1970. Except for girls.
Uggh.
>>479048
In 1970 was about the time that the idea of formulas came about (ie. Scooby-Doo), people started talking down to children and using the "demographic" writing style, and, what John hates the most, focusing on writing over art that looks cool. Plus he was probably tired of people asking him his opinion on Fairly Oddparents, Invader Zim, My Gym Partner is a Monkey etc.
Replies:>>479272
I never understood George Liquor, he's not as easy on the eyes to look at like Ren & Stimpy, he's ugly and obnoxious. I don't find anything he says or does very funny. I guess the reason John uses him so much is because he owns the rights to the character. And the SpikeTV episodes turned a lot of R&S fans off. IIRC, the series premiere for Adult Party Cartoon was pretty big, but fell like a rock afterwards.
Replies:>>479277
>>479062
All the artists and animators John idolized started out as general purpose artists with a full skill set and incredible imaginations. John's like Rob Liefeld, who grew up watching a highly abstracted medium and chose to imitate what he thought he was seeing instead of covering the basics of the craft. And it's like AI: you have diminishing returns with each generation studying the previous one too closely instead of the basics where Kyle Carrozza has no clear idea of funny storytelling because he studied John who himself had to have his hand held by Bob Camp. This is the reason schools like CA have entire courses in cartoon storytelling because they can't teach that on the job any more than boarding.
Replies:>>479323
>>479272
John is reasonably autistic, self-aware just enough to think he's just wacky, and his comprehension of humor boils down to "awkward and crude" without any real thought put into the mechanics of comedy. SpongeBob had its grossout moments but there's still fundamentals of comedy in the plots: John can't see some colors of the spectrum so to speak so that goes over his head. He sat down and said "Crapface the Duck," made an ugly version of Donald and thought he had a sure thing. His technical skills as an animator aren't for me to judge but that's not enough to understand FUNNY. He trips across it occasionally but he's still trying to live in 1965, making fun of 1965 character tropes none of his audience have experienced, and is depressed none of us "get it." Cans Without Labels is a concept you could get 30 seconds' laughs out of on a good day, not a story premise.
>>479277
> He trips across it occasionally but he's still trying to live in 1965, making fun of 1965 character tropes none of his audience have experienced, and is depressed none of us "get it."
Actually he's living in 1982, a junior animator working on shitty limited animation Saturday Morning cartoons that are there to plug toys and dreaming of being able to transport himself back in time to the Warner Bros. studios in 1941 even though he'd never hack it in those times because he doesn't have the skills to be Bob Clampett and never did.
He said that Tiny Toons are a mutilation of the original Looney Tunes, that the animation is bad and is dominated by bad writers pretending they emulate the original shorts but they don't because they can't draw and thus commits a lot of "sins" like stolen plots from current movies, refer to other current cartoons all the time and explaining the jokes. Also says that if something has the word "toon" in the title, is a guarantee that isn't a cartoon.
>>479332
>that the animation is bad
Of the several studios that animated TT the only one I'd argue really weren't good at it was Encore. The downside is with five different studios doing the show the animation could widely vary from episode to episode with very little consistency.
I wish I could download all of the TMS episodes of Tiny Toons and Animaniacs. I guess it'll have to be a project for me to do some day when I have free time...
Replies:>>479349
John isn't entirely wrong. I know animation snobs in the '90s really didn't like TT or Animaniacs at all, they widely perceived them as cut from the same cloth as Muppet Babies, A Pup Named Scooby Doo, Tom and Jerry Kids, etc. Did I mention nothing in TT ever approached the insanity of '40s W-B? And Animaniacs outside Pinky & The Brain and a few other bits was turbo bueno.
>>479332
He disliked the Simpsons as well for similar reasons (too dialog-driven and not cartoony enough) but does respect Matt Groening and said he thought the Ullman shorts were better than the show.
Replies:>>479517
>>479332
John worked on TT Season 1 which may explain why he hates that show so much.
>>479338
Not true at all TT and Animaniacs did have a major adult fanbase which is why Tress MacNeille got stalked by a psycho furry and they made fun of Internet neckbeards.
Replies:>>479507
What leaves me a little cold about John is actually his work. Indulgent, "subverted" pastiche retro throwback, much of it as static and uninteresting as the Saturday Morning cartoons he hates. Worse is that his actual content is largely stupid grossout/shock gags and dumb satires of 1950s-60s American culture. All style and no substance, in my opinion, and I think Bob Clampett and friends would have been appalled to have seen their signature style abused for cheap, unintelligent toilet humor. I also don't care for his Tarantino style tracking in of old kitsch music hits as an incidental score. It's like if David Lynch made fart jokes, when John probably wants to be John Waters (or even, again, the Tarantino of animation).
Wouldn't consider myself a so-called 'spumfag' but a lot of John's criticisms do ring true to me. I take more issue with his expected objections to the retro-flat revival of the 2000s than anything he had to say about 70s-80s slop and Tom Ruegger - quit pretending Tiny Toons and Animaniacs didn't suck outside of Pinky & the Brain and maybe Slappy!
I reference pic related on an almost weekly ocassion when someone asks me why nobody gives a shit about North American cartoons nowadays.
Aside from Animaniacs he also has a hatred of all Seth MacFarlane shows
>>479352
Because Seth succeeded where John failed ie doing a lot of shock gags and sendups of American culture from his childhood. Figures he'd be jealous af.
Replies:>>479509
I thought he also hated Pixar but then other times he said he liked some of it.
>>479508
in some cases he'll say he likes X thing just to get people off his bumper
Nonetheless Animaniacs was mostly annoying and has aged very poorly. While I don't hate TT it was too different in tone to exist in the same world as the Warner Bros. characters.
>>479343
He designed one character in Season 1 of the show, he was not ever a regular part of the production team.
This really isn't helping anything, John.
Replies:>>479563
>>479556
Really, what parents would let their teenage daughter sleep over at the house of a guy who is 20 years older and not related to them?
Nickelodeon hated George Liquor so much that they didn't rerun the R&S episodes with him in them and they let John keep the rights to the character under several conditions, including that he could never be depicted as a serial killer. Because they knew some things about John the rest of the world didn't.
>>479559
That's what makes Johnny boy all the more disgusting, he knew these girls were in a vulnerable postion living with careless trailer trash parents who couldn't give less than a shit about them.
every "student" animator John tutored was always a young girl he never to my knowledge tutored any males
What's monumentally fucked up is that he was a pretty decent looking and charismatic guy, even through his 40s. If he just stuck to legal women (or just married and settled down) then we wouldn't see him as any worse than Butch Hartman.
Replies:>>479600
>>478341
I remember being generally enraptured by his teachings back in the day as a young teen. They stopped airing Ren and Stimpy before I got a hold of Nickelodeon where I lived so I didn't have that nostalgia but he wrote with such confidence about his thought process that I took him on as a mentor figure in regards to animation.
Looking back, while there was good material to learn from, he clearly had a bias where it wasn't necessary, as plenty of work that he disliked was still good on its own terms. Still don't get his beef with The Iron Giant, a film I think most people think is amazing on all levels.
He's a bit like Razorfist, where he can have great takes and I appreciate learning and being recommended amazing works thanks to him (got into pulp novels because of him) but then he'll just really hate on something that I don't think is warranted.
John idolizes Bob Clampett but he doesn't understand that for Clampett animation was just a way to have fun and make a few bucks while he was at it. For John animation is a cult based around his childhood cartoons.
Ralph Bakshi said once that John's main reason for getting into animation was to get back at his father.
Replies:>>479757
>>478341
John K's gotta make the list of top 10 most hated figures in animation history.
>>479757
>Alf Kahn
>Paul Terry
>Lou Scheimer
>Walt Disney
>Al Jean
>Seth MacFarlane
>Glen Kennedy
>Don Bluth
>Butch Hartman
>>479760
>Walt Disney
My dad said he met Ollie Johnson at a con once and he assured him all of the bad stories about Walt (that he was a Stormfag, cheapskate etc) were false. He said Walt drove his animators along with a whip not because money was especially important to him but because he wanted the best possible product they could deliver.
Walt only deserves scorn for being anti-union, nobody ever came up with any convincing evidence that he had a beef with Jews.
>>479765
he took the '41 animators' strike personally because the Disney animators, at least the senior ones, were treated like royalty. They had air conditioning which most studios back then didn't, a rec area, and animators could order lunch and have it delivered to their desk.
Replies:>>479770
>>479767
Not their fault. The audience for theatrical animation was dwindling over the '50s due to the rise of TV and they were in fact quite successful at making animation on a TV budget that looked reasonably good.
>>479769
H-B hate is mostly over what happened in the late '60s onward with their earlier run being well regarded.
>>479760
Andy Heyward and Rev. Donald Wildmon (if it was today Wildmon would be some e-celeb grifter ala Nick Fuentes)
Michael Eisner, but mostly for his later years when he no longer had Frank Wells to check his more retarded ideas.
Replies:>>479777
>>479775
Little unfair tbqh. Iwerks ran into creative conflict with Walt Disney and left the studio because he had a hard time adapting to talkie cartoons. He returned to Disney in the late '30s and spent many years developing many technical innovations in animation, some of which are still in use today. Chuck Jones said Iwerks was a genius technician with no sense of humor at all.
>>479776
afaik it was because Iwerks didn't want to use in-betweeners and preferred to do entire scenes himself, which he was certainly capable of doing but it took a lot longer to finish an animation project and they had deadlines to meet.
>>479765
Nah, go beat up Klasky-Csupo for that. Overworked, underpaid animators and Gabor Csupo wanting nothing whatsoever to do with unions.