SeekerInAFakeMoustache wrote:I can't help but notice, too, the vast majority of the "worst cartoons of all time" there listed come from the eighties. Either eternity's shrunk since I was a moppet, or this is yet another example of the mysterious bias against the 'toons of Generation X (you know, the bias that likes to pretend "Dungeons & Dragons" or "The Mysterious Cities of Gold" didn't happen?). The description of "Jem" all but confirmed this suspicion, as under the trappings, it basically says, "Jem's actually not a bad show at all, but we're listing it anyway because it's contemporary with Transformers and Silverhawks." Sound logic, that.
Nail on the head.
Now don't get me wrong, the 1980s had some horrible cartoons.
How
Turbo Teen even made it to air is one of the
greatest mysteries of the universe.
But I feel that
Transformers was singled out because of its iconic connection to the era. Most of the animated shows of the era were in the same vein as
TF, what many consider to be "glorified 30-minute commercials". However, TF managed to seperate itself from the pack in various ways. Using the formula first established in the
G.I. Joe relaunch -- assigning characters to each individual robot, and taking extra care in giving them personality as well as character. Sometimes the voice alone did the trick (see: Soundwave).
I've maintained that the original
Transformers had one of the best voice acting teams ever, as many of the voices on the show are memorable -- especially the most popular characters on the show. Otherwise, you wouldn't even see people incessantly trying to recreate them on Youtube nowadays.
When lists like these come out, I often wonder what the heck people are looking for in an animated show when they give such criticisms; if you're gonna knock
Transformers for its plot holes, animation errors, and things like that, fine -- but that clearly was from someone who had never seen the television show.
Since G1 (and I mean all the way through Zone), I think only Beast Wars has been successful in really capturing the things that made the original so memorable (great voices, engaging storylines, and whatnot). It's a shame Beast Machines had robot designs that looked like pure dung (how do you go from Optimal Optimus to ... Monkey-bot and Monkey Mode?) -- that could have been a lot better.
Beast Wars II and Neo had awesome beast Transformers, but... all the criticisms you see in Armada and beyond showed its head there (one could even argue it showed as early as
The Headmasters but that's a totally different post).
I like the robots (that aren't recolors or what not) from Armada and beyond -- they actually look the most like "Transformers" of anything that's been associated with the line in years. But when presented in the United States, Hasbro made the mistake of trying to create continuity where there isn't -- and the legal tape crapola that mucks up the logical "reimagining" of classic characters, the hasty dubbing (it was at least tolerable in Energon, but unbearable in Armada) and what have you...really brought those series down in the US. It's a shame, because it had many of the great voices from Beast Wars reprising appropriate roles (IMO, Gary Chalk and David Kaye should be this generation's Optimus Prime and Megatron unless they can get the originals full-time).
In short, if TF really was as crappy as that list (and others like it) says it was, no one would be talking about it today. It's why the truly horrible shows of the 1980s are forgotten by all who don't contribute to sites like Retrojunk and the like who have photographic memory of the real
crap that got on TV back then.
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