When I was a kid — that's bound to turn everyone off, I know, but bear with me — cartoons were The Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Hour. Like the title said, it was an hour long show featuring the entire stable of Warner Brothers cartoon characters from the day. There were the two title characters, Bugs and that horrible bird (who wasn't secretly cheering for the coyote?), Foghorn Leghorn, Daffy Duck, Pepe Le Pew, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, Tweety and Sylvester, and the rest of the menagerie.
The animation was definitely low tech, with each frame being hand drawn by a human artist. The same went for all cartoons in those days, from the Walt Disney Studio creations through to Loony Tunes. Every move that you saw a character make on the screen had to be drawn out step by step by an animator. It was probably the most mind-numbing, tedious work that an artist could do. The introduction of computers into animation is probably the best thing that could have happened in terms of making people's lives easier when it came to doing the nuts and bolts of making cartoons.
The trouble is it seems that when they automated the drawing part of cartooning, they seemed to do the same thing with the scripts and the characterizations. Now I know that nostalgia is dangerous, and can create a skewed vision of the past, but it doesn't mean that some things weren't better than they are now. I still get pleasure from watching Bugs Bunny outwitting Elmer Fudd, so I know it's not just my memories playing me false when I say cartoons ain't what they used to be.
Take the DVD box set Stargate Infinity: The Complete Series, distributed by Shout Factory, for example. Originally Stargate was a movie that starred Kurt Russell and James Spader released back in 1994. The premise was that aliens had disguised themselves as a race of gods in the time of the Pharaohs and had left behind the means they had used to travel between the worlds, something called a Stargate. You can see the potential in this for a major amount of spin-off and so it's no surprise that following the movie were two television series, and from them was spawned Stargate Infinity, an animated version for a younger audience.
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