Hi 5 to the OP for mentioning some of the best cartoons of all time from back in the day!

I can tell you what happened - Power Rangers. Live action kids shows started appearing and were horrible yet successful. It takes less time to film actors than to have to draw thousands of frames for a 20 minute show. Producers took the easy way out. Power Rangers would lead to things like Teletubbies and other brain damaging live action shows. This was a time period where older cartoon fans made a big switch to Anime, a la Pokemon, Dragonball Z and the like.

There were some cool, lesser known cartoons in the 80s too, like Dragon's Lair (based off an arcade game!) and Gummi bears (came before Duck Tales and Rescue Rangers)

Im just glad u mentioned Beast Wars, still my 2nd favorite show of all, also Adventure Time and Regular Show take up the majority of my tv time these days

Heres room for though. I know nearly every cartoon you mentioned in the first paragraph. I never heard of as single cartoon that you have mentioned in the 2nd to last paragraph. You do the maths.

I come from England.

Honestly, I couldn't disagree more.....Here's why....I'll try to keep this short and sweet.


Back when animation came out, animators/cartoonists had to actually draw the animated short frame by frame. Just look back at the clips from the DSs flipnote studio app. While those are nothing compared the early cartoons of the 20s and onward, the principle is still there, You have to draw the cartoon frame by frame. These early animators had to draw tens of thousands of frames at 24fps for a short subject that only lasted 7-10 minutes long.

I remember in an interview the famous Mel Blanc was in once (the Letterman show), he said that full animation was (and still is) expensive. He said cartoons made this way at the time cost 50k. It was 1982 when he was interviewd and at the time it cost half a million. Now just imagine how much it costs now to make a cartoon at full animation. If I remember correctly it cost GONZO, (anime company) a million dollars per episode for Afro Samurai. That's insane.

So what I'm trying say is that because animation has gotten very expensive, (thanks to things like inflation) animators have went from full animation, to limited animation, to CGI and the dreadful adobe flash. Now I'm not hating on adobe or CGI but these new animators have relied on these two "too" much. In my honest opinion, these two have take away the creativity from people since cartoons made with adobe look like cardboard cutouts on a 2D plane with no real movements.

Thats my take on why cartoons suck now a days.

even if you refuse to acknowledge Fim's legitimacy, we also have Adventure Time, Regular Show, and Gravity Falls.

There was no cliffhanger. It was just Coop driving off with an alternate-universe Megas, a whole new (old) mecha to check out...

I don't frequent taverns more than I watch TV .  

I competely disagree with you cartoons in the 90s to the early 20s where the boom. Sure there are some good ones now here and their, but not as diverse or many as before.

You Crazy

And I seriously hope your not talking about Samuai jack.

I think this is a very subjective topic. I grew up during the late 90's and early 2000's so I feel as if I had the best generation of cartoons some might agree and then some might disagree. I think it all depends on which generation you grew up in.