Which were your favorite?

I could only remember that one with the "mushroom things in space" and the tune of the song, everyone thought I was mad until I rediscovered ULYSSES 31!!!!

It's pure win, and craps down all those modern cartoons' necks.

Here is the first episode. Observe.






I love the mix of serious subject matter with great potential, childish flimflam, repeating structure (tip, the first and 5th episodes are the best, then skip to the end) and 80's synth/rock fusion.

Every now and then, I go back and search for stuff I grew up on, and end up heartbroken as I realise it was actually kind of terrible.

Is Cowboy Bebop old enough to be considered a point of nostalgia (aside from nostalgia being a recurring theme in the show itself)? It's over a decade old now, but it holds up really, really well.



It's odd how I doubt it, actually, considering that the Transformers movie was certainly a welcome contender for nostalgia as the 90's progresses. I suppose I just associate true nostalgia with the cartoons of my childhood, in which case...

Hard to say that about Cowboy Bebop because its still popular to this day to newcomers Although if it is fine I'll say Neon Genesis Evangelion. When I saw this on SBS I was pretty much blown away & couldn't stop gawking at it Especially the intro which always got me excited. NGE really was the breakthrough for anime in the west



I wish the Eva 1.0 movie would start off like this but with an orchestra version & reanimated frame by frame. That'd be wicked

Robotech was awesome too (also known as Macross). Once again I'd like to see it with some updated animation for the whole series but use traditional methods instead of Harmony Gold butchering everything with digital



Also a thumbs up for Astro Boy, the 1980 series that used to be on ABC in the morning just before school



Oh yeah! Can't forget Mysterious City of Gold



Man, the 1980s were the best

Oh, evangelion can definitely be admitted to the halls of greatness. Cities of gold sent shivers up my spine, I haven't seen the intro in about 15 years and it was kind of a wave of nostalgia.

On a tangent, speaking of anime, Akira anyone?



And who could forget Ghost in the Shell?



And of course, Ninja Scroll - though I don't think I'll embed that here...

Good examples although I didn't find Ninja Scroll as good as everyone else thought. It was still entertaining but wasn't a classic imo. Perhaps its because I didn't see it until it'd been out for 10 years. I have to hold onto my DVD copy of Akira because they didn't include the original dub on the bluray version Biggest. Fail. Ever

I was trying to remember this title last night and today, it was a bugger to remember because I thought it was "Twins of Odyssey" and I couldn't remember the characters names or where to look. It was actually Twins of Destiny



Also who could forget Tintin? Unfortunately copyright laws are hammering down on people uploading the intros of cartoons on youtube which is just insane since they never show it on tv and people would at least like to remember their cherished memories. So I couldn't find the english intro - blistering barnacles!



And for the heck of it I'll just include Monkey Magic dubbed because its so awesome. Wish Siren would remaster it instead of giving us the VHS in DVD form

I really loved Cowboy Bebop, but I'm not sure I'd put that into my "nostalgia" pile. I feel that only cartoons that I've seen in my early years count. Which means the cartoons from the 80s. But I haven't seen the ones you guys have posted here. Perhaps the ones I've seen weren't aired here?

These are some of the ones I remember fondly:

Thundercats


MASK


Visionaries


Silverhawks

Ok... I'm having trouble embedding videos here. How did you guys do it?

I tried 3 different bits of code, and none of them works.

Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Ninja Scroll were something of a holy triumvirate of Australian anime for a while. Back in the Manga Video heyday, there wasn't a whole lot else of quality readily available, and so these three films have a nostalgic choke-hold on a lot of people almost by default.

I have rose-tinted memories of a lot of anime for similar reasons - it was simply what was available.

Twins of destiny I remember quite vividly. I was getting a bit too old for it at the time the ABC was airing it, but gradually became hooked, and did my darnedest to keep it to myself.

Perhaps it was because Twins of Destiny adhered to a mentality that other aired animation was moving away from - it was predominantly an adventure story. When Saturday Disney first started (the first episode actually being a Friday night episode of Winnie the Pooh), this is what the line-up was all about. Gummy Bears, Duck Tales, and yes, even Pooh thrived on the fantastical. This continued somewhat into Tale Spin and Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers, but was perhaps weakening by the time Darkwing Duck showed on the scene.

Some years later when I was moving through my teens, I got up early enough one Saturday to find that Saturday Disney still existed, and that my younger siblings were growing up on cartoons that were more like hyperkinetic school and dating dramas than tales of sweeping adventure. Sure, there were elements of fantasy, but the bad guy had gone from being an overgrown rat to the school bully or an unpopular teacher.

I know that Batman and Ninja Turtles have both been revived somewhat over the past few years, so maybe the type of cartoon I grew up on is coming back again, but in hindsight I can probably thank the extended absence for my discovery of anime when SBS aired Evangelion back in 1999.

First post-Evangelion anime obsession? The original Bubblegum Crisis




Ken Lee wrote:
Ok... I'm having trouble embedding videos here. How did you guys do it?

Just paste in the url and nothing else. the rest is automated.

Tim wrote:
Ken Lee wrote:
Ok... I'm having trouble embedding videos here. How did you guys do it?
Just paste in the url and nothing else. the rest is automated.

Thanks, Tim. That was beginning to get frustrating. Occam's Razor, I suppose: The simplest solution is usually the correct one.

But I've never been to a forum that didn't need some sort of code to post videos. So I made the natural assumption that we had to do that here as well.

Anyways, I managed to post those videos of mine. Those are the cartoons I remember most fondly.

I liked Transformers very much during its time. But re-watching them now... They're actually quite terrible. I find that Thundercats has held up a little better for me after all this time.

As a 90s kid I grew up with Cheez TV, so my nostalgia goggles cover such fine programs as Pokémon, DBZ, TNMT, Inspector Gadget and Biker Mice from Mars. Also, these two:

Quite possibly first introduction to mecha, other possibilities are Transformers and Beast Wars.

Anthropomorphic shark playing drums, 'nuff said.

Matt wrote:
Biker Mice from Mars.

Anthropomorphic shark playing drums, 'nuff said.

Oh man. I remember these two. I especially liked Biker Mice from Mars.

And in the same vein, I also loved Swat Kats

Some years later when I was moving through my teens, I got up early enough one Saturday to find that Saturday Disney still existed, and that my younger siblings were growing up on cartoons that were more like hyperkinetic school and dating dramas than tales of sweeping adventure. Sure, there were elements of fantasy, but the bad guy had gone from being an overgrown rat to the school bully or an unpopular teacher.

I think you hit the nail on the head Tim. Sure there's an element of nostalgia in remembering the old cartoons, and sure there was plenty of crap on the box, but we've gone from epic adventure to epic melodrama.

Cartoon characters these days seem more concerned that so-and-so is refusing to text them, or they're hanging out at the mall, or fighting with their evil parents. As a parent myself watching my daughter lose her identity to this crap (or run the risk of not fitting in at school because you don't follow the cool trends), it's harrowing.

Sure the old shows were formulaic, but the formula led on an adventure such that the next episode remembered the previous. Modern shows hit the reset button at the end, so when the next show starts it's all from the same comfortable point of normality. The simpsons was/is a lot like this I guess, so it's not just new shows that do it... But basically everything from 3pm onwards on schooldays and the saturday morning cartoons are these disembodied snippets of a story, a group of characters flung together with no context as to past accomplishment or future ambition, just a 15 minute story about what they did that day. I guess that's so network TV can jumble up the episodes or slot them in randomly as filler items without incurring the wrath of angry children.

Cities of Gold, although slightly dated, was an epic adventure, you actually felt that they were getting closer to the city and they actually get there. Ulysses is the same, eventually they do get to Hades.

Sure we had our whimsical, nonsensical and inane. But we had something that's missing from today's mainstream kid's entertainment and that's the epics, the adventures that span a whole school term you can talk to your friends about and wonder what comes next. I can imagine today's young children - "Did you see Ben 10 last night? It was so cool, he turned into the big ball thing and smooshed all the bad guys and everything went back to normal (they all laughed at the end!)" (wait, he did that the night before, and the week before that...)

I guess I live in nostalgia a bit, perhaps I am a stick in the mud, but I like my old stuff. Like this one:



And this:



And I guess the only reason is because I grew up with them.

Administrator wrote:
Cartoon characters these days seem more concerned that so-and-so is refusing to text them, or they're hanging out at the mall, or fighting with their evil parents. As a parent myself watching my daughter lose her identity to this crap (or run the risk of not fitting in at school because you don't follow the cool trends), it's harrowing.

Actually, one of the biggest complaints that I've always had with kids entertainment, is that they lead character always has a perfect life, and by token promises the same to its audience. Disney have done some great things, but they also have a lot to answer for - everything that Hillary Duff ever touched has messed my younger sister up, psychologically.

Of course, pumping people full of bullshit and trends is still going to pass with a G rating, while a semblance of cruelty or violence will automatically notch it up. Frankly, I've never understood why my mother felt fit to forbid that I watch TMNT or The Simpsons as a kid. I know why, but the reasoning doesn't resonate with me at all - The Simpsons (at least in its prime) did a fantastic job of mixing slapstick with balanced characters and a sense of reality about how life really works. If you run the full length of his character, I'll even go so far as to suggest that Bart may be a good role-model for young boys.

So, yeah - more Lilo and Stitch and less Lizzy McGuire, please. Because, well... God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

Dude where'd you get that last quote? I like it

It sounds like you and I could rant cooperatively about this forever needless to say I totally agree.

My main bugbear is every modern cartoon sensation explodes onto the scene with merchandising... soft iggle piggle toys, Ben 10 video games tshirts and hats. Walking down the shopping aisle with my daughter is like running a gauntlet of "I want this" and "such and such has that"... She's only six years old for crying out loud. When I was six I think I wanted to be a robot spaceship man and drive supercars. The worst of all this is the parents who cave - being the only boy at school who didn't own genuine transformers (I had cheap imitations), thundercats and voltron figurines and those stupid "Ring Wraiths" when they were all the norm was a lonely thing indeed and a good lesson in isolation. So obviously the marketing hype existed when I was a kid, but somehow it feels like it's been turned up a notch or seven since then.

Maybe age has turned me cynical. That's a good subject for another thread now that I think about it...

Cartoons and merchandise have always been intertwined, and it's not something that has become more prevalent. You're probably noticing it more because you can be more critical about the situation.

The cartoons in the 80s were unabashedly designed to sell toys, and act as glorified advertisements. The GI Joe: A Real American Hero was probably the most egregious of this. The toys for He-Man and Transformers were designed before the cartoons aired.

This is an entirely separate topic, but probably wouldn't be worth a whole new thread.

BUT! I saw a horrendous cartoon on TV last week:

Zorro: Generation Z
Here's a short clip of the intro, and the first part of the episode. It's terrible!