cartoon nowdays cant touch classic like dbz

[misterd]

DBZ was made after I was a kid, so I don't consider it a classic. ;)

If anything, I'd say thanks to many made-for-cable programs the overall quality of animated shows has pretty consistently increased for the past 20 years. Stuff I watched as a kid - Scooby Doo, SuperFriends - were well and truly awful; I just didn't realize it because I was 5. Later cartoons, like Joe, TF, and TCats were better, but they were shit too - just less noxious than what had come before.

Now, I've never actually watched DBZ so I can't rightly say that it's any good or not, but the basic argument is a classic one, and so it's flaws are well traveled. For the sake of argument, let's say DBZ really IS a "classic" show. Fine. But that doesn't make it representative of the rest of the cartoons on at the time. True classics are few and far between, and should be ignored as statistical outliers unless you can find some evidence that the quality was typical.

To change genres, I could argue that none of the sitcoms on TV is as good as All in the Family was, and I generally think it's true, so long as you ignore the later seasons of AitF. But I think if you look at the average sitcom or drama of the time period, they weren't all that good. In fact I'd say if you took the very best shows of that time period, and put them up against the very best of today, today would be more likely to win, thanks to more sophisticated production, fewer restrictions, and a much larger pool from which to draw.