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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.8 - NOVEMBER 2000
Boom and Doomby Martin "Dr. Toon" Goodman
This past summer we bore witness to one of the great turning points in the history of television entertainment. What a concept! Take nearly a dozen distinct entities, place them in a cutthroat environment in competition with one another, and watch as one by one they disappear. Some are ejected almost immediately, others after slow deliberation. The tension builds as we wait to see who remains, and who is vetoed into obscurity. Finally, the audience is asked to become the final arbiter, and the winner receives riches, recognition and licensing opportunities for...oh, at least a year or so before the next Celebrity-Of-The-Nanosecond comes along. What's that you say? Survivor? No, no, not at all; the above is a near-perfect description of the past year in primetime animation and next to it island beetle larvae taste like escargots à la chablisienne. Was it only July of 1999 when I did a column for this magazine lauding the advent of primetime animation? Was it so long ago when every network press kit, animation magazine and newspaper was touting the Primetime Toon Boom? Pick up your local TV Guide or hit your remote channel menu today and you will find nary a sign of this plethora in pen-and-ink. In the beginning there was The Simpsons and King of the Hill, and so it is again. Armageddon has befallen the Great Toon Boom. Immediately only Futurama has emerged alive (and with some promotion) as from a blasted shelter, a dazed survivor blinking painfully in the cathode-ray light (I'll believe The PJs are back when I actually see it -- What? It is back? Where was that promoted?). In every direction, failed series litter the ruined landscape, never to be seen again. There was a time when the mere mention of Capitol Critters or Fish Police was good for a sarcastic howl among animation insiders; well, most of the primetime animated series that premiered during the past year strove mightily -- and failed -- to match the average market share of those two bellyflops. Several of them could have finished fourth or fifth in the Saturday morning ratings, and one -- poor Mission Hill -- would have struggled to beat out Lady Lovelylocks and the Pixietails, were that wretched show still in existence. Clearly, no one is laughing now.
How Did This Happen? Tom Turpin, CEO at Will Vinton Studios, opined that the very novelty of animation had worn off due to stylistic similarities between the various series. AP Television writer Frazier Moore, in a nationally syndicated article, seemed to simply consider the entire toon bust as the death of a fad, saying, "...primetime's cartoon craze was its own undoing, as crazes usually are. On TV, there's never enough of anything new and different until it's all old and all the same." In short, quite a few qualified network insiders and media analysts had their say on the meltdown of primetime toons, and these unfortunate shows (several of which died after less than three episodes) will be recalled by most network execs in the way that Chernobyl is remembered by Greenpeace. All of the viewpoints given above are valid, but it seems that something important was left out of these perceptive and cogent analyses: the fact that these series were produced for primetime TV. Is that important? More than anyone might realize.
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