Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has held up relatively okay.
Relatively. Great animation and cast, and some really neat designs (the Technodrome is just a wonderfully goofy Kirby-style machine). The writing...well, the first season or two wasn't bad, though the pizza and cowabunga jokes got old in a hurry and weren't that damn clever to begin with. I liked the stuff where they broke the fourth wall ("Kids, don't try this at home, we're trained professionals"), but that got overused too, and was largely cribbed from the Ralph Bakshi/John K Mighty Mouse. (Speaking of which, anybody know where I can find any of that stuff?)
On top of the animation and casting, I noticed the music is actually pretty damn snazzy while I re-watching it recently. One song that I continue to hear in my head on the occasion plays in the first friggin' episode when pre-mutation Rocksteady and Bebop start chasing April.
I putzed around Youtube for a clip, but turned up empty-handed...except for clips of the cartoon with lines from The Big Lebowski dubbed over them. Quality.
As did Tiny Toons and Freakazoid.
Tiny Toons and Animaniacs were hit-or-miss, but when they were on they were ON. Freakazoid was less extreme in both the brilliant stuff and the horrible stuff, but a good show all-around -- I was in my late teens before I watched much of it, so I'm not sure it counts for my "stuff I watched as a kid" theme either.
I always felt Animaniacs was a lot more hit-or-miss than Tiny Toons since I always saw as the more 'wacky and bizarre for its own sake' show. But it might be because I was just getting into animu at that point.
Freakazoid was also pretty amazing for me since I can rewatch an episode now and then and find a joke that floors me that I missed the first time around either due to being too young or too ignorant of pop culture. The Nerdator episode where Spielberg gets abducted followed by a cut away to Freakazoid making a joke about DreamWorks was fantastic when I heard it a year ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZHichaemV4#t=2m36sIt might just be my nostalgia goggles, but after re-watching the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, I still enjoyed it and fondly recalled being brought home from kindergarten JUST in time to see it or waking up early on Saturday and Sunday morning to catch it on the Family Channel (along with Wish Kid).
I love the premise of The Super Mario Bros Super Show, and have said before that it's exactly the formula I'd like to follow in making a cartoon: a different genre parody every episode, pretending to be a continuing story but actually being completely discrete and unrelated. (Excel Saga had a similar setup, but with slightly more continuity than Mario had.)
Last time I saw any Mario toons was at the '06 Kon; I was disappointed. It could be that we just watched the first ep or two and the show got better later on, or it could be that the whole thing WAS a fairly mediocre execution of a really brilliant premise; I'd have to watch more to make the call. (It's also possible that it loses a lot without the original music; the Birdo episode really felt like it was missing something without Surfin' Bird. I remember the nonsensical pop music segments being a huge part of the show's goofy charm. I am given to understand that the Milli Vanilli episode from the SMB3 toon has no Milli Vanilli music either.)
I agree wholeheartedly. If I remember right, it was some kind of royalty or copyright issue that got the music edited down to instrumentals instead of the covers?
One of the things I really appreciated was how the casting was as good as TMNT, where every voice actor/actress fit their roles so well that it's hard, if not impossible to not hear there nowadays. As much of a nutcase Lou Albano was, I can't help but replace Charles Martinet with him. The same goes for Luigi much more so now since he's become a whipping boy.
Harvey Atkin as Bowser!
Sad to say that the writing on the Mario 1/2 Super Show was just generally uninspired; they'd knock up a theme for the episode, take it to whatever natural conclusion, and cut back to Lou Albano acting like a moron. The SMB3 cartoon actually fared a lot better as they were willing to do some truly off-the-wall shit like Koopa Hosts a TV Show and Mario and Luigi Get Turned into Dogs. Then it got repurposed into the SMW cartoon and was crushed under the weight of the misconception that because the game had a dinosaur in it, everything had to be prehistoric caveman crap.
And everyone knows that for prehistoric caveman crap you can never beat CrooooOoooOoOOOoOOOoooOOO.
Yes. I think that was around the point where I stopped tuning in frequently because I thought the cavemen were a needless addition to case. Hell, Yoshi kind of was too with that obnoxious Mama Luigi angle.
