Just Go Sit Over There With Clutch, Scooby.
There's an animation festival going on in the city. Although the festival is aimed largely aimed at kids, the animation itself is high-quality stuff, including several classic animated shorts we watched back when we had access to That's Rentertainment!, a wonderful video store in Champaign, IL.
It's a pity that Americans persist in thinking of animation as something fit only for children. Disney played a part in creating that attitude, with its films sanitized of adult themes, but I place the blame at the doorstep of Joseph Hannah and William Barbera, who pioneered animation's full-scale entry into television. Because TV had to operate on a much shorter production schedule, and typically on a much smaller budget, Hannah-Barbera had to cut every possible corner. Naturally, the end result was lousy. Fred Flintstone's car drove past the same bush dozens of times in a brief scene, and program after program, so nobody would have to be paid to draw another. When the Superfriends speak, only their heads move, bobbing stiffly, because there has to be some motion to let the viewer know who's talking, but moving anything else costs money. Scooby-Doo doesn't run into a tree, but runs off-screen to produce a *bonk* noise, followed by a cut to a still shot of him lying dazed at the base of a tree. Only kids, who didn't know any better, kept watching.
I'm passionate about animation, and when the subject comes up with my friends, there's always someone to defend Scooby-Doo: "Scooby-Doo was great!" Why? Well...he just was. To which I say: thppbt! Technically, Scooby-Doo was no better than Clutch Cargo, the ancient cartoon in which nothing moved but the characters' mouths, where a film of the voice actors' actual mouths had been inserted into a cut-out region of the characters' faces, with the net result that the animated mouths slid around the faces in a vaguely creepy fashion, like Alicia Siverstone’s lips.
TV Cartoons got a lot better in the past ten years or so, but there's still a long way to go. Animators still struggle with tight schedules and small budgets, but make up for it in new ways. Background and character design is, if not better, then at least original. The writing is a lot tighter, too. Perhaps kids raised on a higher quality of cartoon will learn to recognize higher quality cartooning. I look forward to a day when people whose vision is not clouded by nostalgia can watch Clutch Cargo and Scooby Doo and wonder aloud what the diffrence is.