HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ zapzupnz

Would anybody be able to provide a summary? I find the narrator's intonation unbearably forced and unnatural, such that I don't feel like listening to it non-stop for 21 minutes. Scorn me, berate me, and downvote me if you will; but to my mind, poor narration in long-form video essays is no different to printing academic journals entirely in Zapfino.

⬐ anthonybsd

Video is pure distilled clickbait. Nothing ruined them. They slowly became less relevant and got absorbed into Time Warner. That's it.

⬐ SmellyGeekBoy

> I find the narrator's intonation unbearably forced and unnatural

I'm glad I wasn't the only one. There's a lot of misplaced upward inflection which I assume is the narrator's normal speaking voice that they're desperately trying to fight against to sound more "professional". In fact the phrases that don't do this sound like they've been pitch-corrected downwards (maybe they have, maybe it's some weird auditory illusion).

> to my mind, poor narration in long-form video essays is no different to printing academic journals entirely in Zapfino

I couldn't have put it better myself.

⬐ Al-Khwarizmi

In my mind, "long-form video essay" is pretty much a big red flag... I just don't have time. Text is much more efficient.

⬐ darkpuma

Cranking up playback speed to 2.5-3x makes it a bit more bearable.

⬐ jerf

I wouldn't be on YouTube at all if that feature didn't exist. I only which I had more than 2x in the mobile app, since I can't use JS to change it there.

(Since odds are high someone will ask, this is the bookmarklet I ended up settling on: javascript:void(document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = prompt()) This prompts you for the speed you want. It should be obvious how to specialize this to a specific speed if you want.)

⬐ johnnyg

Quora touches on this subject: https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Hanna-Barbera-dissolved

⬐ egypturnash

god I set it to run at 2x with subs and it was still very tl;dw.

⬐ ghayes

The current top comment seems to sum it up very well with a bit of personal experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19539948

⬐ veryworried

tl;dr: They got absorbed by Warner Bros and killed.

⬐ probably_wrong

The video doesn't actually live to its title, as there's an important link missing, but here's what I got:

They did very well for a long time, but then the 80s arrived. Suddenly there were better shows (Transformers, GI Joe) during the entire week rather than just weekends, and they lost a lot of market. They later went to Cartoon Network and created some new classics (Powerpuff Girls and co), but for some reason (not explained) that wasn't enough.

⬐ AstralStorm

Mostly they no longer were the near monopoly and CN was not aired as widely. It is harder to sell a whole station then a few shows. WB tended to sell separately their own only. (E.g. Bugs, Daffy, Looney Tunes)

HB ones were exclusives.

⬐ pfdietz

When the coffin containing the remains of the studio was being taken to its grave, it was carried by the same rocks and trees, over and over and over.

⬐ tclancy

You could tell which grave they were planning to use because it was the one that was drawn, not part of the painted background.

⬐ wodenokoto

The what, as far as I understand the video was 80s toy tie-in cartoons such as Heman, GI Joe and transformers that ushered in a new style of animation and a new way of financing them, ultimately leading to HB dropping in value and getting purchased.

What the video doesn’t touch on is:

Who are these studios animating them? According to the video, the entire tv animation market was more or less HB. How could these studio rise out of seemingly nowhere and produce high(er) quality animation?

Why wasn’t HB part of these tie-ins? According to the video, they owned the market. Aren’t they the obvious choice to ask to produce, when you want a cartoon about your new toy?

Why didn’t HB pivot towards more action animation in the 80s, when going up against TMNT and Dino riders?

⬐ benj111

"high(er) quality animation"

Are you talking about the merchandise tie ins? They weren't higher quality, certainly not on the 80s. Most of them seem to be Japanese and have that Anime thing of getting away with animating as little as humanly possible.

⬐ wodenokoto

Yes, I am talking about the merchandise tie-ins and I am claiming they are of higher animation quality than yogi bear, judging mostly from the clips used in the documentary, as I try not to use my warped childhood memory as a reference.

⬐ benj111

Thundercats or He Man made extensive use of slow pans, and still inner monologues and still face offs etc. And transformers was even worse.

The only thing that sticks out in HB cartoons is every character does the moonwalk everywhere. But they actually added to detail so you had a frame of reference to tell they were doing that.

⬐ JackFr

A someone who was heavily consuming cartoons over the relevant period, I find it remarkable that there was no mention of either WB/Looney Toons or the growth of Japanese animation. Makes me suspicious of his conclusions.

⬐ zapzupnz

I'm generally suspicious of anybody making long-form video essays on YouTube about such subjects. Unless they were in the industry, I tend to believe I'm merely having a Wikipedia article and perhaps a few interviews, taken from blogs or perhaps online magazines, regurgitated to me.

That's what Did You Know Gaming seems to be, for instance.

⬐ ccnafr

tl;dw: they got lazy at the end of the 70s and started copying their own hits over and over, putting out the same type of shows. Toy companies got involved and created their own toons, with a superior quality, and they were done after that. Cable also hit, and they couldn't keep up with the demand, so also lost additional market share.

⬐ vkaku

Also to see: plenty of reasons why 'Saturday Morning Cartoons' was killed.

Hanna-Barbera were my favorite animators, hands down. I could watch their toons any day and I would not get bored.

⬐ ourmandave

Wasn't Hanna-Barbera the guys who made the Brady Bunch Kids and other sit-com spin-offs? =[

As a kid I never noticed how commercial it all really was.

After reading some of the history you can see they've all been doing the exact same tried and true things since forever.

Merchandising, spin-offs, episodes written around new album releases, copy-cats of successful shows (e.g. Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie), etc.

So you end up with minimal janky animation, Disney child actors, and 1/2 hour toy commercials.

⬐ jerf

Sturgeon's Law isn't a new thing. The key has always been to find the best stuff. I think that's easier than ever.

I have to agree that virtually nothing Hanna Barbara has done has stood the test of time. Despite being so politically incorrect a lot of it has been buried, I can think of a few Looney Tunes that are still pretty good (Bugs Bunny conducting the orchestra is quite popular, I'm also a fan of a particular Bugs Bunny cartoon in which he stays overnight in Dracula's castle), and Disney's stuff is still generally watchable and enjoyable, but I'm sitting here racking my brains and despite having seen some of those shows as a kid, I literally can not relate to you a single episode of any of them.

⬐ None

None

⬐ ListeningPie

I watched this video yesterday evening and this morning this post is at the top of my feed. It is not the first time a specific topic ends up on both pages.

Is YouTube information being sent to Hackernews or is it just coincidence that my YouTube suggestions are in sync with Hackernews posts?

⬐ SmellyGeekBoy

I've had this pop up a few times in my recommendations over the past few days, too.

⬐ majewsky

When something interesting is trending on [insert popular platform] that this audience finds interesting, of course people are going to submit it here. This site is 100% submissions based.

⬐ ListeningPie

I did not realize or expect a Hanna Barbera video to be tending globally, I had assumed it was a algorithm driven recommendation That lead me to watching it.

⬐ rawmodz

Their first mistake was making a live-action remake of the Flinstones

⬐ gonzus

100% agreed.

⬐ aaron695

> What RUINED Hanna-Barbera?

Not really answered.

They mention other cartoons came in based on merchandise, but don't say why Hanna-Barbera couldn't/didn't compete.

⬐ jerf

"but don't say why Hanna-Barbera couldn't/didn't compete."

The answer is more a business answer than a creative one. When a business is highly, highly successful pursuing a certain strategy, that strategy becomes part of their internal cultural identity. The entire business is macroscopically and microscopically arranged around exploiting this particular opportunity. When the strategy stops working, such a culture will virtually inevitably double down on the strategy, which in a way makes things even worse, because that usually works for a little while. By the time it becomes undeniable the strategy is no longer functional, they've usually fallen too far behind to compete. And since usually the only way to see "the strategy is unsuccessful" is precisely that there is competition pursuing other strategies eating your lunch, the competition is always already there by the time the message finally gets through.

From the outside it's so easy to see. Early in the process it's easy to say "Jeez, guys, you've got literally 10 times the resources of anyone else in this industry, why not 'just' pivot your strategy?" But it's not a matter of just pivoting; it's a matter of rewriting the entire company's culture and way of doing business. That's why even when a company tries to co-opt the new strategy, they almost always undercut themselves somehow, either by being unable to really commit, or if they are in the rare case where they succeed, they undercut themselves by trying to use this success to pivot back to the original strategies they know and love. It can literally be easier to found a brand new company and start from scratch than to reform an existing company. There's a lot of examples of a couple of creatives disgruntled about the cultural limitations of their employers going and forming a business that follows a strategy that does very well, exploiting a niche their original employer never could have. (I'm more familiar with the video game industry, where Activision is an example of that, but this sort of things happens a lot over there. Or at least it did, before video games required so many people.)

Companies that develop cultures that can navigate this mess are rare. It doesn't seem that way, because of survivorship bias. For instance, you might say "But jerf, Disney seems to manage it OK", and, yeah, they do, and that's a non-trivial part of the reason why they are a decade-spanning behemoth of multiple industries, rather than a 1940s also-ran. And there's a lot of other companies you can name that can too. But those are precisely the rare survivors.

⬐ pm90

They did. It was that animated franchises came to dominate the scene. Then WB bought them, used them for a while and finally shuttered them.

But... the ultimate reason does seem to be simply: there was a lot more competition.

⬐ lightedman

Ted Turner trying to make the cartoons more family-oriented is what ruined HB.

In the 90s, they just had put out SWAT Kats. That could've been hugely marketable, but Ted thought it too violent, along with many other HB properties in development at the time. He changed that, and HB began a painful decline.

⬐ sirmarksalot

It's really just a clickbait title. If you look at his channel, he has an entire series called "What's RUINING/RUINED," all of which is basically him reading Wikipedia while playing cartoon footage.

⬐ fenwick67

This is a very popular YouTube format and I hate it

⬐ WorldMaker

I finally noticed that "Not Interested" is an option in the YouTube recommendations' qebab menus (vertical ellipsis ⋮) to immediately hide the suggestion, and since discovering that have been very happy to use that on all clickbait titles, including just about every usage of the word RUINED. It might mean that I'm slowly getting better recommendations, but it mostly means that at least for the periods of time that the recommendations are on screen I'm not staring at a bunch of dumb negative words and things that don't interest me.

I'm still close to using a browser extension to disable the recommendations system entirely as useless garbage to me, but at least this one tool helps some.

⬐ egypturnash

tl;dw but I'm gonna guess it comes down to "they sure did shit out a lot of cheap, terrible cartoons for a decade". I mean seriously Joe and Bill won an Oscar or two for their lovingly-animated Tom & Jerry shorts at MGM but once the theatrical shorts market dried up they started making stuff with the fewest drawings humanly possible, that rested largely on voice work. "Illustrated radio" is a term that animation nerds throw around for the vast majority of their output.

Then Turner bought them I think, then WB bought Turner, and IIRC just kinda merged them into Cartoon Network because having two studios in the same city is kind of a waste or resources. Also the whole rise of sending work overseas to Asia where your dollar buys an order of more magnitude more pencil mileage; animation was at the forefront of hollowing out the American industry by substituting cheaper labor across the globe.

Or at least that's what I recall from growing up in the seventies and being in the animation industry in the nineties/00s.

People who were kids with no taste and a lot of time to fill during the time they dominated Saturday Morning have fond memories of their characters but that stuff really does not age well. It maybe ages slightly better than most Filmation work. Slightly.

⬐ msla

> "Illustrated radio" is a term that animation nerds throw around for the vast majority of their output.

And they even cheaped out on the "radio" part, in that their jokes and plots were stale, unimaginative, and just as recycled as their backgrounds.

Rocky & Bullwinkle did "Illustrated Radio" well because it had a good writing staff.

The cardinal sin of making media is condescension. Don't talk down to your audience, and don't make media you yourself wouldn't consume.

(There might even be a broader lesson there.)

⬐ Hoasi

> The cardinal sin of making media is condescension. Don't talk down to your audience, and don't make media you yourself wouldn't consume. (There might even be a broader lesson there.)

Advertisers should pay attention to this more. Looking down at the "consumer" and downplaying the "audience"'s intelligence are still common practices.

As you said, the broader lesson applies to all media. The same sin affects bad entertainment and bad journalism (or infotainment).

⬐ rangibaby

Illustrated radio basically sums up most TV anime.

⬐ rectang

Hanna Barbera had good music (props to Hoyt Curtin, the Hanna Barbera musical director), sound design, and voice acting. But you are soooo right about the writing -- it is disheartening to go back and watch these cartoons now.

⬐ dvtrn

I have fond memories of those characters from my childhood and my adult hood when [adult swim] came along and gave us fresh and absurdist/adult-oriented versions of some of our favorite characters.

Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, The Brak Show, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, Sealab 2021, many others.

⬐ zazen

I hope you've discovered Venture Bros? Best of them all!

⬐ dvtrn

Yes. It's covered in the "many others". There's a Brock Sampson shirt somewhere in my closet.

⬐ rat87

At around 7 minutes he goes into Hanna Barbera's "Limited animation" including a surprising reference from Dextor's laboratory to the cheap animation style and that animator Chuck Jones called it "Illustrated radio".

The video puts the 80s era of licensed properties/toy cartoons (GI Joes, Transformers, etc.) as the first thing to really challenge HB due to the , and that during that time HB struggled to adapt and compete and that the Smurfs seemed like their only success during the era.

He says they had a revival after being bought by Turner in the 90s and making decent cartoons for cartoon network but were ultimately absorbed by WB animation after the companies merged.

⬐ Tsubasachan

Outsourcing in the animation industry isn't just something that hit the US. Japanese anime is now often made in Vietnam and South Korea.

⬐ anyfoo

> People who were kids with no taste and a lot of time to fill

Very true. I grew up in Germany, but we got most of the cartoons that were popular in the US (plus some Japanese stuff) as well, dubbed.

One particular situation from the late 80s or early 90s that I remember was when the channel that showed the Smurfs, which I liked, was somehow repeating the same episode over and over again. Maybe there was an error at the station (I wouldn't be too surprised if nobody paid that close attention to the children's programming), or maybe I just happened to catch all the reruns in strange coincidence. It's hard to remember the specifics.

But what I do remember well is that I watched that episode, one that I actually did not like to begin with, over and over again, disliking it more and more each time. When the episode started playing and I realized that it was that episode again within the first few seconds, I got so disheartened and disappointed. And then I continued watching it.

Nowadays, that's a pretty funny, if not somewhat bizarre, memory. As an adult, there is no way I would force myself through any show's episode that I don't like anyway repeatedly, why did I "have to" as a child? Similarly, I remember a few entire cartoons that I was not particularly fond off, or sometimes actively disliked, and I still watched those, too, "because that's what was on TV right now".

Apparently, realizing that I had agency over how I spend my own entertainment time was something I had to learn better growing up.

⬐ ilamont

Your story about feeling obliged to watch a bad cartoon over and over again resonates with me.

I was a film projectionist at a single-screen theater in Harvard Square in 1988, the summer "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" was showing. I saw the opening scene (the baby cartoon with Roger subjected to various painful acts) several hundred times.

The first time I thought it was funny. After 10 times it was boring. After 30 it made me very uncomfortable. I probably saw it about 250 times in all.

A few months ago I started to watch it with my son (it was on Netflix or Amazon), but I had to stop a few minutes in. The feeling of mild revulsion was just too much.

ETA: Makes me appreciate the patience of editors and other film professionals who are probably sick of seeing certain scenes by the time it hits theaters or the small screen.

⬐ jerf

I haven't specifically edited film, but I've done some similar things, and I've found when you have agency over the result it wears differently. You may still "get tired" of it, but it's a different sort of thing. I think it's easier to watch the same scene a hundred times if you're editing it actively than if you are just passively consuming it and making no active decisions. My bigger problem was really losing the perspective of someone who is brand new to the content than exhaustion.

⬐ ilamont

You're right. I had no creative skin in the game other than being the poor slob who was basically responsible for turning on a giant light bulb.

Regarding loss of perspective, that's why focus groups/test audiences are so important. From what I understand, they are particularly crucial for comedies where the timing of jokes matters so much and a mishandled edit can ruin the scene.

⬐ ataturk

TV was very mysterious back then. I would not see most of the episodes in a series as I had no way to record anything nor any idea when they were on besides having a TV Guide (which we never bought) or the local newspaper tv listings which got thrown out more often than not. TV was more of a random access experience back then. You got what you got. Saturday mornings were pretty awesome as far as cartoons went, but in some ways they weren't--it felt like not a lot of thought or effort was put into that programming and it was mostly about toy commercials. I watched a shitload of Saturday morning cartoons. I would usually get up at 6am and watch the national anthem which played both verses, and then some goofy local show involving a very fat lady and her dog would come on and she would talk about local scene stuff that I had no idea about. After that wa PBA bowling (TV Tournament Time). Cartoons came on around 7:30 or 8am, I think, and ran until about 11am. Maybe bowling was after, can't recall.

For most people, especially kids, shows had no continuity at all. I remember trying to watch Robotech (re-runs?) in the mid '80s and once in awhile I'd see two episodes in a row that were in the correct order. Doctor Who was the same way except that was on PBS and often times I could see a couple in a row. Things didn't change until my parents got cable sometime around 1985 or so.

One more anectdote I'll share: My kids both loved Scooby Doo so we bought all the old episodes on DVD. What strikes me most about the cheap animation is how few characters there were in Scooby Doo. If the gang was walking in a town or an amusement park, there were almost no local color--no people at all. That gives the show a creepy, xenophobic vibe. The gang is always all alone in an alien landscape, sort of like they were transported into an alternate reality.

⬐ komali2

For me I dunno if it's more agency or just more difficult to stay entertained. I used to play world of Warcraft for ten hours marathons on summer break. Same for counter strike, half life deathmatch... Hell even single player games like ocarina of Time would take me months to get through because chopping down all the signs in the beginner area, leaving, coming back, and doing it all over again would be enough "game" for me.

Now I barely touch games... Can do about an hour and a half of tv or movie max (barring good 2h+ films). Multiplayer games I can do maybe an hour or two a couple days a week, more if we're in the same room.

I mean I watched Alladin every day for a good few months once. I'm typing this out because I got distracted from Netflix just now. Something's different about me, I wonder if it's true for others?

⬐ anyfoo

That was true for me for a few years in my 30s. Now, for some reason, I’m actually very happy that I seem to enjoy games a lot again. Bought a Switch, and it’s getting a lot of use.

I only ever played single player games, though. Gaming was always “me time”, and there was always plenty of opportunity to meet people to be social, without games (unless it’s board games, which I enjoy too).

⬐ Kirth

This really resonates with me. I guess at some point games et all stopped being mentally "rewarding" to us.

⬐ gurkendoktor

> Multiplayer games I can do maybe an hour or two a couple days a week, more if we're in the same room.

Same here. I suspect that it's simply easier to enjoy these things socially and then do other things alone (like coding or reading).

⬐ icebraining

Maybe you're just more demanding nowadays.

⬐ anyfoo

That's definitely the case for me. After a long break in playing games where I thought games are just not for me anymore, I rediscovered that I actually still like spending lots of time with them. It just has to be the right games, and those differ from the games I enjoyed when I was young (the sets are dissimilar, but not entirely disjunct).

⬐ JasonFruit

I wonder if it's partly our broadened scope as adults. We can do real things in the real world, so pretend (more or less elaborate or formalized) is less appealing.