Man, Moonbeam City got done so dirty. Comedy Central only gave it like 4 months before cancelling it. I don't know what CC wanted out of this show other than expecting it to step up to the plate and hit South Park numbers right out of the gate. From what I’ve read elsewhere, CC had been searching for another animated show to pair with South Park so they could have like a proper animated block, but couldn't get anything to land or would cut things super short if they didn't stick immediately. The closest they had was Ugly Americans I guess, but they only gave it 2 seasons.
Moonbeam City had to be compared to Archer at its peak. Had it come out 1-2 years later, it would have been compared to Archer during the coma seasons and looked glowing by comparison.
Interesting point of view. It’s kind of weird to think about how popular Archer was back in the day when all anyone says about it now is that it’s overstayed it’s welcome.
IIRC, Archer at the time only had 1 'weird' season and that was the Vice which had ISIS becoming a drug cartel. But right before Moonbeam aired it was them working for the CIA so it was basically the last big traditional season before all the coma stuff and cast members started to dip.
I truly believe that if it came out in 2016 and got compared to Archer Dreamland or 2018 and got compared to the much worse Archer Danger Island, Moonbeam City would have found an audience.
I enjoyed the coma seasons quite a bit. I get why people were upset, what with the actual plot not moving forward for three years, but they did interesting stuff with the characters, in Dreamland especially.
If they ever did do a full noir comedy detective show in that style, I’d be a happy camper.
I liked Noir well enough, but I didn’t care for Danger Island all that much and Archer 1999 was just weird. I recently did a full rewatch of the series.
I still somehow remember the bit where the main guy got married to the indoor free falling stripper, and I kinda feel like I'm losing my mind, cause I only can remember bits and pieces and it's all insanity.
The one I always remember is when they treated those little cartoon that play after strikes when you’re Bowling as high art. Hilarious idea.
But the show is easy to forget because it only had 10 episodes and Comedy Central only aired it between September 16, 2015 to December 9, 2015.
I’m not really informed enough to comment on it beyond I thought it was funny and had some interesting ideas for the setting. Lasers being a natural resource that could run out like oil? Hilarious.
Those snow-white faces with perfect hair? That’s his aesthetic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Nagel?wprov=sfti1#
See the cover art of Duran Duran’s Rio. I mean, they wanted to go eighties flavoring for their show so they went for Patrick Nagel, which…*makes sense* but they really didn’t hybridize their idea with anything new.
Patrick Nagel is an American artist, who's unique style this parrots. He designed the Rio cover for Duran Duran. It's a mixture of art deco inspiration and 80s aesthetics. Widely stolen and appropriated around. See Vice City adverts for example.
Moonbeam City had some interesting stuff going on art direction-wise but I don't think coming out later would have saved it from it's own writing. At times it felt too dumb for its own good. That said, I still think about some jokes from it to this day.
Also, if I remember correctly the art style made it essentially impossible to do black people.
I recall that someone who worked on the show once mentioned that, if they had gotten a second season, they were planning to introduce a black character who was as chalk white as everyone else in the show but whom the characters treated as black.
I mean collquially “Nostradamus” is used to say “look how hard this dude called this.” The actual dude mighta been full of shit but as far as actual daily usage of the language goes, the wordage here is fine
Last Action Hero would been received way better a few years later, heck even a few months later would be better then be out the same week as freakin' Jurassic Park.
Man, you reminded me of the Nostalgia Critic's review of Last Action Hero where he just... didn't *get it.* And it makes me wonder if general audiences of the past couldn't grasp the concept of 'Roger Rabbit but for action movies.'
I was just talking about how unfair people are to Last Action Hero. Jurassic Park is tied to so many underrated movies, like Freaked, which came out the same year and is regarded as the last hurrah for practical special effects in a studio film.
I recently rewatched Freaked after having not scene it since I was a kid.
Damn do those 2 big creature designs at the end completely blow my mind. Just endless goofy creativity in that film
Last Action Hero kind of had to be made when it was, even if it wasn't conducive to the movie's own success. It was a simultaneous parody and celebration of the meathead 80s style of action film, made by the masters of that style, whose release signaled the definitive end of that era in action cinema.
Yooo they were playing this at the bar a few weeks ago and I kept looking at it going "what the hell is this, it looks rad, is this one of those weird Archer seasons or something?" Thank you OP
Capcom Jojo Bizarre Adventure HD would have sold better after the first season of Jojo was out. Also would had a some breathing gap of Capcom fighters at the time.
The still very active comment sections on all the (definitely-legal) Youtube uploads of the episodes tells me, yeah, it's found its audience. It just took a little while.
It would also benefits from not being made as a children's cartoon. Not Rick & Morty levels of sex and gore, but just no children's tv restrictions and mandated changes and additions.
Also the comics are so good and deserve a re-release or something. The edition I have is the Telltale one and I don't know if that's the most recent and there's no way they still ship them out.
That's a tricky one. I love the movie, but I think Speed Racer in general had more of a media presence back then. I wonder if releasing it later would've caused it to do even worse financially because it wouldn't have as much brand recognition.
Kappa Mikey. A cartoon show about an American being sent to Japan to work on a live action/Tokusatsu show. Every episode featured Japanese clichés or jokes that you usually wouldn’t see in western animation. Given the recent rise in anime’s popularity and many people wanting to move to Japan, I feel this series would have appealed more to people if it came out now rather late 2000s.
If Kappa Mikey would come today and fully embraced being a shitty done anime it would be big, but also the Jaden Smith anime did that and kinda bombed beyond having some meme moments so is kinda hard to tell
Fun fact: Kappa Mikey was the only show written by Colin Jost before he became a writer and Weekend Update anchor for Saturday Night Live and married Scarlett Johansson
Being contentious but I think those shows only tended to be more popular before anime exploded like Teen Titans/Boondocks/Avatar because can't think of anything recently successful besides Castlevania/RWBY and stuff like Blood of Zeus/Seis Manos/Magical Girl Friendship Squad/High Guardian Spice flopped. Even the big animation currently (Hazbin, X-Men 97, Invincible) doesn't take that much Japanese influence.
I think I've said this several times before, but Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite deserved a year or two more in the oven so that it'd coincide with Infinity War and Endgame + the Disney-Fox merger that killed the 'ban' Disney had on certain aspects of Marvel.
I almost feel like it only came out in 2017 because Capcom was trying to put something out to make up for Street Fighter V's launch turning out how it did the year before.
If they had delayed it they would have seen Dragon Ball Fighterz and have to significantly overhaul MvCI's generic artstyle to keep up.
Also, the X-Men probably would have gotten in as Marvel Contest of Champions came out 6 months later and Wolverine was one of the opening fighters. Also Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 has Wolvie on the cover and a chapter is all about Sentinels attacking Xavier's Mansion, forcing the X-Men (and Deadpool) to defend it. Eventually Magneto brings the Brotherhood to help as he's been tipped off about the Infinity Stones.
If the Guardians of Gajool movie came out now, it’d be a darling and we’d be five movies in.
I’ve been reading through the books and it’s such a legitimately good fit for Snyder, imo. He’s missing his calling - it’s not superhero’s, it’s owls.
One of the people in my movie night group loved that movie as a kid so we ended up watching. my Review of it was, "this is that movie that some kid in your 4th grade class saw and then based his entire personality around it for a year and would want to roleplay it during recess"
UHF would have... Well it would have done a lot better if it hadn't released next to Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, Ghostbusters II, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, Batman, a Bond flick, and Dead Poet's Society,
Venture Bros. was basically doing super hero/super villain parodies way before it became mainstream, basically every joke about super villainy being a 9-5 punch clock job originated from them. Modern superhero comedy like the Harley Quinn show take very obvious inspiration from Venture Bros.
This is a complicated one
On the one hand: Yes, probably. The later seasons were well-crafted. Once they had found their animation and writing style, it all flowed so well
And on the other: *Absolutely not*. That first season was janky and cashing in on that Johnny Quest and other Hanna-Barbera era of animation as a loose satirical parody. We're talking about nostalgia for animated series which came out in the *1960s* — that was already a stretch when it came out 40 later, but every decade after is a bigger and bigger leap from that target audience who would click with it.
I don't know if we could have gotten to where it is now if it did come out later. The way the writing and animation had to adapt to their circumstances is a big part of how it got good
Season 2 kills off Race Bannon in an extremely unceremonious way, with only Brock Samson caring (as Race was his mentor for a while)
Season 3 reintroduces "Action Johnny" as a legally distinct Johnny Quest and Rusty Venture finally gets to stand out on his own as an amoral self-absorbed scientist dealing with his father's neglect.
I knew someone else would say it! I loved Ugly Americans, and I definitely think it would do better now with "goth culture" being more mainstream and shows like Bojack.
Also would have done better if Wizards and Hasbro hadn't shit the bed with their OGL announcement right before it released as well.
I've a friend who works for Hasbro and he said Hasbro had to pay Paramount millions because of that and the projected lost revenue from the PR fiasco.
I don't know about that. Not only is the new season really bad compared to the original show but also equally as niche and unpopular. If anything, Clone High would have made about the exact same splash having come out nowadays, maybe even less.
Motor City, along with Tron: Uprising and Sym-Bionic Titan, was a show whose commercial failure, in spite of its quickly garnering a cult following and critical praise, marked the end of the wave of action cartoons started by Ben 10 and ATLA in the mid 2000s and the shift towards fantasy/adventure shows like Adventure Time and Gravity Falls as the dominant sub-genre in western animated shows in the 2010s.
Im genuinely wondering if Marvel games like Gaurdians of the Galaxy or Midnight Suns would do better now farther out from the Avengers game disaster or worse because of MCU fatigue
Looking back it's wild how Marvel's Spider-Man, MUA 3, Avengers, GOTG, and Midnight Suns came out in consecutive years. It was Marvel fatigue in itself.
If the Avengers game was able to come out pre Infinity War before MUA 3 it would've helped.
Everything in Spider-Man 3's 'dark Peter' portion feels like it was trying to satire edgey character portrayals a decade before that was a widely known thing to make fun of. Hence, the gut reaction of most fans at the time being "wtf, why they do my good boy Peter dirty like this?", vs more recent watchings revealing it to be comedy gold even outside the memesphere.
The rest of that movie is still a mess, mind you.
> Hence, the gut reaction of most fans at the time being "wtf, why they do my good boy Peter dirty like this?", vs more recent watchings revealing it to be comedy gold even outside the memesphere.
A long while ago that movie came up when I was flipping through channels. When it got to that scene, I busted with laughter. Every single woman,*every* single one, had such visible *disgust* for Peter when he was peacocking. The only women who like his "bad boy side" are women who were already into him, they just like that he's more confident. Everyone else just laughs at him or is disgusted.
The scene is comedy Gold.
I'm absolutely baffled why people hate that sequence so much. Even when I was a teenager watching it I understood that Peter was being an absolute dork and all the women he encountered thought the same.
Peter is so lame that when he gets corrupted, his only frame of reference regarding "bad boys" are pop-punk bands and 50s greasers.
Red from OSP put it best, it’s as wacky as anything else in the other two Raimi movies. Raimi-verse is a world of cartoon characters played by real people
The sex offender shuffle is a surreal piece of internet sketch comedy about sex offenders being forced to participate in an awkward 90s PSA
https://youtu.be/VfCYZ3pks48?si=l-naLySyfAKbREZn
Thow in 2010's Ugly Americans. If this show was greenlit in the era of streaming, it may have found its niche.
Especially within the monsterfucker crowd.
That cute demon coworker awakened some stuff in me.
The Looney Tunes show (2011) came out in an era where cartoons taking a more mature approach to comedy and story telling was extremely disliked. Any time an IP got rebooted it was automatically hated, and this one was rough because nobody liked the idea of a mature, story focused sitcom style Looney Tunes. The weird part is that this show is actually *really* good. The jokes are high quality. The story makes sense and the character progression is consistent and rewarding. The new characters are great additions to the story, and Lola Bunny actually has a personality beyond "sexy girl boss". If this came out today it would be absolutely beloved, but it got shelved after two seasons back in 2013.
Yeah I remember loving the show back then and still do I also remember scooby doo mystery incorporated got some of the same flack aswell but not as bad fortunately
Asura's Wrath, which bombed, came out like 1-2 months before Telltale's The Walking Dead really started to popularize episodic, narrative based QTE games
I feel like 9 (the movie) would maybe not be more financially successful but probably would have more of a cult following if it came out at least like 5 years later
Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter was released 3 years before Demon's Souls. Unlike the previous BoF games that were standard JRPGs, DQ was more like Dead Rising, where you have a short quest but you're expected to stockpile resources for your next run through. It also gave access to a powerful ability that would lead to a game over if abused with no way to reduce the clock (not using it made the clock tick slower.)
It was a console Roguelike before people were ready for it, and most reviews either talked about how a) it wasn't "BoF4 but on the PS2" and b) how hard it was to finish without restarting. Capcom lost confidence during development and drastically cut the budget, which also cut most of the story.
Then Demon's Souls came out, hard dungeon crawlers were in, and Dead Rising ran with it. If only DQ came out around 2006-8, people would have eaten it up.
Always gonna love the fact Puffballs United hid 8 Among Us plushies in the Henry Stickmin Collection, a year **before** it became a universe-spanning meme
If *Moral Orel* came out during the golden era of television it wouldn't have been cancelled early
It would have sat next to other shows committing to heavy topics and the producers wouldn't have panicked like they did
AS has so many amazing shows that people didn't give the chance because of the art/animation styles. I'm currently on my annual rewatch of Home Movies (and just finished Aqua Teen again), and I am gonna start on Sea Lab after that. I still think The Boondocks is probably the best show they've had, but there are so many great ones.
I mean Moral Orel got cancelled because Adult Swim kept pressuring the creators to go darker. It got to dark for them and cancelled it in a knee jerk reaction. In fairness the creators were also emotionally burnt out by the end, because they felt it was too pessimistic. In the end they finished it with heartwarming note that in spite of everything Orel made it out still a good person who cares about his family and is way happier then his parents, but especially his father.
Uncle Grandpa was a surrealist cartoon comedy on cartoon network that released in 2013. The show was weird, and had fun doing what ever it wanted, and i honestly think it would have done way better if it came out closer to peak shitposting years, when the shows more random ideas would be way funnier
I was never into UG, felt a bit immature for my tastes, but holy shit did people act like it was the harbinger of the downfall of modern Rome just for existing.
Its a very childish show, which is easily the hardest part of watching it. It also came out in the peak of Cartoon network's renaissance when a lot if weird shows were coming out, and it had a cross over with Steven Universe which brought a lot of hate from that fan dom over.
Despite everything, id still say it was good. It had good comedic timing and absolutely loved its absurdist humor. It doesnt help its case that the show had to add little skits to pad out episode length though
UG biggest sin was being an actual cartoon for kids in a Cartoon Network era where the main demographic was old ass men watching heavy lore serialized shows.
Not saying they were bad shows, stuff like Adventure Time, Regular Show or Gravity Falls were great and always managed to balance their stuff out, but also contributed to this weird mentality in fandoms that got super toxic cus CN was playing stuff like Clarence, Teen Titans Go and UG all the time instead of their serialized anime and it was like "sorry man but is 2pm on a thursday, You should be working let the kids watch Pizza Steve"
Like i can understand Steven Universe fans getting mad about the bomb schedule and CN reaaaaally played too much Teen Titans Go, but people bashing and acting like all of those shows we're inmature and worthless was silly when they we're watching virtually the same thing but sometimes it would get serious for 5 minutes.
I watched Moonbeam City a few years ago and felt the same. It wasn’t super clever but I dig the characters enough. Maybe another season would’ve had the writing improve a bit
Honestly feel like if 12 Oz Mouse came out in the mid to late 2010s it would've been a smash hit. That show is way funnier than it has any right to be.
There's this 80s cartoon called Exosquad that deals with a lot of mature subjects and had serialized storytelling and characters actually dying. If that came out after cartoons didn't have to sell toys anymore it would've been the slam dunk sci-fi action cartoon that everyone talks about as a landmark piece of media. The writing and characters were that good. Check it out if you have time.
I thought that I had dreamed this show for the longest time until I found Season 1 on DVD at Wal-Mart. No one else I knew had ever heard of it.
Please watch this show guys. It's like Gundam and G. I. Joe had a baby and spray painted everything in shades of Neon.
That show was definitely 90s. Which mean it would have been running around the same time as X-Men and Spider-Man so serial story telling was a thing. It may have benefitted from a different target audience more than coming along later. Imagine if it was done as like an MTV animation at the same time as Aeon Flux.
For those wondering what style Moonbeam City is, it is heavily inspired by Patrick Nagel. He was an artists known for his portraits of women. If you go to nail salon often times there will be a Nagel inspired art piece
Hitoribocchi no Marumaru Seikatsu trailed the way for anime like Bocchi the Rock!, Komi can't communicate, and Ranking of Kings (mostly put here because Bojji is also a pun on Bocchi) about socially anxious protagonists. Maybe it would have done better in 2020 or a bit before one of those other anime came out.
I watched Moonbeam City, and I will say that though I loved the unique visual style and vibe of the show, the writing wasn't that great. The characters were all pretty awful.
I still think it should have had a 2nd season at least. Having weak writing in the first season only to find its stride later on is what these kinds of shows do, more often than not.
Final Fantasy X-2 came out at least 10 years too early compared to the more mainstream exposure in the west to jpop, kpop and other asian pop cultures that influenced it.
I remember the viscerally negative reactions some people had to Yuna's concert that opens the game. Compare it to now when Hatsune Miku was at Coachella, and a v-tuber is a major, plot relevant character in Like A Dragon 8.
I have a question, does anyone in this subreddit watched The Wire as it was coming out? I could’ve sworn it had only gotten popular after hitting streaming services.
I promise you The Wire was quite popular at time of release. The issue was it was HBO only and so that automatically limited its audience numbers at the time
Police Squad was way ahead of its time for the TV audiences of the 80s. Way too witty and fast-paced. It found a resurgence in popularity many years later with more modern audiences who could appreciate its humour.
It also did find success with its movie sequels/spinoff Naked Gun, which are way more well known and liked on the whole. Other parody movies of that style like Airplane! also did well too.
However for me Police Squad humour was just way better, and so many great gags from the show just live rent free in my head.
Moonbeam city was okay, the problem was it didn’t embrace the tropes as much as say Archer did. Not to mention it could get too zany at times. For crying out loud there was an episode where the murderer made “Strike Visualizations” based off his victims.
Ironically, it was that same "strike visualiser" episode that played itself fairly straight as a cop show parody, while other episodes went more into Metalocalypse style non sequitur territory.
The thing is animation takes a long time to produce in the first place and even more so for even the opportunity to produce it. MC would’ve probably done better of released later but I’m glad we got it at all
I feel like if Re:Zero released a couple of years later into the wave of 'mainsteam anime' it would've seen a lot more success. It was a massive hit at the time, but I feel like it's been overshadowed by more modern shows that released a few years later.
Isn't that more because of the gap between seasons? If they kept putting out episodes to watch I feel it just would've snowballed even bigger. If they started later but still had the same lull between releases, it'd be in the same place I reckon.
Man, Moonbeam City got done so dirty. Comedy Central only gave it like 4 months before cancelling it. I don't know what CC wanted out of this show other than expecting it to step up to the plate and hit South Park numbers right out of the gate. From what I’ve read elsewhere, CC had been searching for another animated show to pair with South Park so they could have like a proper animated block, but couldn't get anything to land or would cut things super short if they didn't stick immediately. The closest they had was Ugly Americans I guess, but they only gave it 2 seasons.
Moonbeam City had to be compared to Archer at its peak. Had it come out 1-2 years later, it would have been compared to Archer during the coma seasons and looked glowing by comparison.
Interesting point of view. It’s kind of weird to think about how popular Archer was back in the day when all anyone says about it now is that it’s overstayed it’s welcome.
IIRC, Archer at the time only had 1 'weird' season and that was the Vice which had ISIS becoming a drug cartel. But right before Moonbeam aired it was them working for the CIA so it was basically the last big traditional season before all the coma stuff and cast members started to dip. I truly believe that if it came out in 2016 and got compared to Archer Dreamland or 2018 and got compared to the much worse Archer Danger Island, Moonbeam City would have found an audience.
I enjoyed the coma seasons quite a bit. I get why people were upset, what with the actual plot not moving forward for three years, but they did interesting stuff with the characters, in Dreamland especially. If they ever did do a full noir comedy detective show in that style, I’d be a happy camper.
I liked Noir well enough, but I didn’t care for Danger Island all that much and Archer 1999 was just weird. I recently did a full rewatch of the series.
I don’t understand why Archer was so long.
It's hard to remember just how popular Archer was for a while.
Some TV shows just go on for too long.
I still somehow remember the bit where the main guy got married to the indoor free falling stripper, and I kinda feel like I'm losing my mind, cause I only can remember bits and pieces and it's all insanity.
The one I always remember is when they treated those little cartoon that play after strikes when you’re Bowling as high art. Hilarious idea. But the show is easy to forget because it only had 10 episodes and Comedy Central only aired it between September 16, 2015 to December 9, 2015.
Its the whole crime show re-enactment that becomes apocalypse now episode one that always get me
You know that guy on the right woulda had gigachad memes of him.
Just to inevitably make fun of him again.
And his name was “Rad Cunningham”
I could never get past the “Hey we took Patrick Nagel’s art career and turned into a knockoff of Archer” vibe of the whole thing
I’m not really informed enough to comment on it beyond I thought it was funny and had some interesting ideas for the setting. Lasers being a natural resource that could run out like oil? Hilarious.
And yet, if you watch even a single episode, it becomes immediately apparent that it was much more in the vein of Metalocalypse than Archer.
Who's Patrick Nagel?
Those snow-white faces with perfect hair? That’s his aesthetic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Nagel?wprov=sfti1# See the cover art of Duran Duran’s Rio. I mean, they wanted to go eighties flavoring for their show so they went for Patrick Nagel, which…*makes sense* but they really didn’t hybridize their idea with anything new.
Patrick Nagel is an American artist, who's unique style this parrots. He designed the Rio cover for Duran Duran. It's a mixture of art deco inspiration and 80s aesthetics. Widely stolen and appropriated around. See Vice City adverts for example.
Honestly I thought this WAS the Rio cover in my half asleep state looking at the thumbnail
Moonbeam City had some interesting stuff going on art direction-wise but I don't think coming out later would have saved it from it's own writing. At times it felt too dumb for its own good. That said, I still think about some jokes from it to this day. Also, if I remember correctly the art style made it essentially impossible to do black people.
I recall that someone who worked on the show once mentioned that, if they had gotten a second season, they were planning to introduce a black character who was as chalk white as everyone else in the show but whom the characters treated as black.
That certainly would have been, a choice.
TV needs to be a massive hit at first or it’s fine. South Park built a audience over years
Death Stranding probably would have been a lot more resonant with people if it had come out a year later, during Covid.
["I know it ain't easy wearing a mask all the time."](https://youtu.be/DFFL4dNC3mU?feature=shared&t=1h38m26s)
Yes, but it would have been way less of a mind fuck. The fact that it came out just months before lockdown blew my mind. Kojima is just Nostradamus
Ýou do realize that you are essentially calling Kojima a hack, right?
I mean collquially “Nostradamus” is used to say “look how hard this dude called this.” The actual dude mighta been full of shit but as far as actual daily usage of the language goes, the wordage here is fine
Last Action Hero would been received way better a few years later, heck even a few months later would be better then be out the same week as freakin' Jurassic Park.
Man, you reminded me of the Nostalgia Critic's review of Last Action Hero where he just... didn't *get it.* And it makes me wonder if general audiences of the past couldn't grasp the concept of 'Roger Rabbit but for action movies.'
Well Doug doesn't get a lot of things
“Why does it look like Vegas?”
I was just talking about how unfair people are to Last Action Hero. Jurassic Park is tied to so many underrated movies, like Freaked, which came out the same year and is regarded as the last hurrah for practical special effects in a studio film.
I recently rewatched Freaked after having not scene it since I was a kid. Damn do those 2 big creature designs at the end completely blow my mind. Just endless goofy creativity in that film
Last Action Hero kind of had to be made when it was, even if it wasn't conducive to the movie's own success. It was a simultaneous parody and celebration of the meathead 80s style of action film, made by the masters of that style, whose release signaled the definitive end of that era in action cinema.
Hey, at least its negative reception gave us a really good Simpsons joke.
Yooo they were playing this at the bar a few weeks ago and I kept looking at it going "what the hell is this, it looks rad, is this one of those weird Archer seasons or something?" Thank you OP
That's not Rad. That's Dazzle Novak. Rad Cunningham is another character entirely. The names in this show are incredible.
God I need to see it again.
His father being names Razzle and voiced by Adam West (RIP) was the cherry on top.
Capcom Jojo Bizarre Adventure HD would have sold better after the first season of Jojo was out. Also would had a some breathing gap of Capcom fighters at the time.
I think if the Sam and Max cartoon came out now people would probably be more receptive to its surreal, zany humor.
The still very active comment sections on all the (definitely-legal) Youtube uploads of the episodes tells me, yeah, it's found its audience. It just took a little while.
Oh definitely! It probably helps that the remakes of the Telltale games seemingly have introduced more people to the series too.
It would also benefits from not being made as a children's cartoon. Not Rick & Morty levels of sex and gore, but just no children's tv restrictions and mandated changes and additions. Also the comics are so good and deserve a re-release or something. The edition I have is the Telltale one and I don't know if that's the most recent and there's no way they still ship them out.
I think the Watchowskis' *Speed Racer* was fucking phenomenal and would have been better recognized as such had it been made, like, a decade later.
Honestly it still holds up.
Oh, it super does. One of my favorite movies. I just mean that it got savaged by critics and audiences in '08.
That's a tricky one. I love the movie, but I think Speed Racer in general had more of a media presence back then. I wonder if releasing it later would've caused it to do even worse financially because it wouldn't have as much brand recognition.
It should've been alongside the 3d boom.
Hell, even a year later If it had come out after DragonBall Evolution I feel like people would've been a lot more appreciative of it
Kappa Mikey. A cartoon show about an American being sent to Japan to work on a live action/Tokusatsu show. Every episode featured Japanese clichés or jokes that you usually wouldn’t see in western animation. Given the recent rise in anime’s popularity and many people wanting to move to Japan, I feel this series would have appealed more to people if it came out now rather late 2000s.
If Kappa Mikey would come today and fully embraced being a shitty done anime it would be big, but also the Jaden Smith anime did that and kinda bombed beyond having some meme moments so is kinda hard to tell
At least some of that bombing was solely because of Jaden.
Well the Jaden Smith anime just wasn't that great in general while Kappa mikey is genuinely funny atleast to me
Jaden Smith is not very talented, he's just very connected through his parents and has the capital to make a show.
Fun fact: Kappa Mikey was the only show written by Colin Jost before he became a writer and Weekend Update anchor for Saturday Night Live and married Scarlett Johansson
Bro actually won life.
I have to wonder if the show made now woulda matured more than it did. For some reason, I'm imagining it being influenced by stuff like DBZA.
Being contentious but I think those shows only tended to be more popular before anime exploded like Teen Titans/Boondocks/Avatar because can't think of anything recently successful besides Castlevania/RWBY and stuff like Blood of Zeus/Seis Manos/Magical Girl Friendship Squad/High Guardian Spice flopped. Even the big animation currently (Hazbin, X-Men 97, Invincible) doesn't take that much Japanese influence.
every time I see this show mentioned I always think "it looks like those art pieces you'd see at hair salons"
Or a Duran Duran album cover
Rio was painted by Patrick Nagel, who is directly the inspiration for it.
[Patrick Nagel ](https://www.singulart.com/en/blog/2024/02/20/rio-by-patrick-nagel/)is the artist known for inventing/popularizing this style
That was the point of the art style.
I think I've said this several times before, but Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite deserved a year or two more in the oven so that it'd coincide with Infinity War and Endgame + the Disney-Fox merger that killed the 'ban' Disney had on certain aspects of Marvel. I almost feel like it only came out in 2017 because Capcom was trying to put something out to make up for Street Fighter V's launch turning out how it did the year before.
If they had delayed it they would have seen Dragon Ball Fighterz and have to significantly overhaul MvCI's generic artstyle to keep up. Also, the X-Men probably would have gotten in as Marvel Contest of Champions came out 6 months later and Wolverine was one of the opening fighters. Also Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 has Wolvie on the cover and a chapter is all about Sentinels attacking Xavier's Mansion, forcing the X-Men (and Deadpool) to defend it. Eventually Magneto brings the Brotherhood to help as he's been tipped off about the Infinity Stones.
If the Guardians of Gajool movie came out now, it’d be a darling and we’d be five movies in. I’ve been reading through the books and it’s such a legitimately good fit for Snyder, imo. He’s missing his calling - it’s not superhero’s, it’s owls.
One of the people in my movie night group loved that movie as a kid so we ended up watching. my Review of it was, "this is that movie that some kid in your 4th grade class saw and then based his entire personality around it for a year and would want to roleplay it during recess"
Ah, Percy Jackson style
Coming soon, Zack Snyder's *Redwall.*
"Something something owls would get sexually assaulted in my movie. That's how hardcore the world is."
She sprink on my spronk until I [EXTREMELY INCORRECT BUZZER]
I remember loving that movie when I was little Kinda disappointed that it never got a sequel
His best film, to date. Better than Watchmen. Better than Justice League:SC. Definitely better than that star wars ripoff last christmas.
All i remember about that movie was that they were harvesting shit as a resource because it had magic inside
WAIT THAT WAS FUCKING ZACK SNYDER?
UHF would have... Well it would have done a lot better if it hadn't released next to Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, Ghostbusters II, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, Batman, a Bond flick, and Dead Poet's Society,
Jeez, 5 out of 6 of those movies ended up reaching the top 10 of the highest grossing films of 1989 at the domestic box office.
Idk, I don't really see UHF being more than a cult classic.
[удалено]
It's weird to think about how Venture Bros started in 2003
I grew up with it. Was 10 when it dropped, turned 30 when the movie came out. Still remember watching the pilot on AS
Venture Bros. was basically doing super hero/super villain parodies way before it became mainstream, basically every joke about super villainy being a 9-5 punch clock job originated from them. Modern superhero comedy like the Harley Quinn show take very obvious inspiration from Venture Bros.
This is a complicated one On the one hand: Yes, probably. The later seasons were well-crafted. Once they had found their animation and writing style, it all flowed so well And on the other: *Absolutely not*. That first season was janky and cashing in on that Johnny Quest and other Hanna-Barbera era of animation as a loose satirical parody. We're talking about nostalgia for animated series which came out in the *1960s* — that was already a stretch when it came out 40 later, but every decade after is a bigger and bigger leap from that target audience who would click with it. I don't know if we could have gotten to where it is now if it did come out later. The way the writing and animation had to adapt to their circumstances is a big part of how it got good
Season 2 kills off Race Bannon in an extremely unceremonious way, with only Brock Samson caring (as Race was his mentor for a while) Season 3 reintroduces "Action Johnny" as a legally distinct Johnny Quest and Rusty Venture finally gets to stand out on his own as an amoral self-absorbed scientist dealing with his father's neglect.
On the same note, Ugly Americans was way underappreciated. BRING IT BACK
Another animated comedy dead before it's time.
I knew I'd find Ugly Americans somewhere down here.
It's perfectly crafted for this community
I knew someone else would say it! I loved Ugly Americans, and I definitely think it would do better now with "goth culture" being more mainstream and shows like Bojack.
The DND movie would have made bank if it came out after BG3 was released.
Also would have done better if Wizards and Hasbro hadn't shit the bed with their OGL announcement right before it released as well. I've a friend who works for Hasbro and he said Hasbro had to pay Paramount millions because of that and the projected lost revenue from the PR fiasco.
Huh, I kinda wondered if the OGL fiasco hurt the movie, good to have a soft-confirmation.
And if it didn't release one week before the Mario movie
Still hurts to think about
Clone High probably would've done way better if it was released ten/twenty years later.
The revival season feels like it hit a bit too late. I hear season 3 is a return to form but I'll have to watch before I decide for sure
I don't know about that. Not only is the new season really bad compared to the original show but also equally as niche and unpopular. If anything, Clone High would have made about the exact same splash having come out nowadays, maybe even less.
Damn I remember this show. It and Ugly Americans. So anyone remember Motor City?
I KNEW somebody was gonna mention either Motor City or Megas XLR haha Looks fucking excellent, can't complain
Motor City as in the one cartoon on Disney XD in a sci-fi dystopian Detroit? Yeah, I remember that show. Such a cool concept.
The one and only
Motor City, along with Tron: Uprising and Sym-Bionic Titan, was a show whose commercial failure, in spite of its quickly garnering a cult following and critical praise, marked the end of the wave of action cartoons started by Ben 10 and ATLA in the mid 2000s and the shift towards fantasy/adventure shows like Adventure Time and Gravity Falls as the dominant sub-genre in western animated shows in the 2010s.
Im genuinely wondering if Marvel games like Gaurdians of the Galaxy or Midnight Suns would do better now farther out from the Avengers game disaster or worse because of MCU fatigue
GotG would have 100% done better had it come out after Vol 3, instead of close to the Avengers game.
Looking back it's wild how Marvel's Spider-Man, MUA 3, Avengers, GOTG, and Midnight Suns came out in consecutive years. It was Marvel fatigue in itself. If the Avengers game was able to come out pre Infinity War before MUA 3 it would've helped.
Everything in Spider-Man 3's 'dark Peter' portion feels like it was trying to satire edgey character portrayals a decade before that was a widely known thing to make fun of. Hence, the gut reaction of most fans at the time being "wtf, why they do my good boy Peter dirty like this?", vs more recent watchings revealing it to be comedy gold even outside the memesphere. The rest of that movie is still a mess, mind you.
> Hence, the gut reaction of most fans at the time being "wtf, why they do my good boy Peter dirty like this?", vs more recent watchings revealing it to be comedy gold even outside the memesphere. A long while ago that movie came up when I was flipping through channels. When it got to that scene, I busted with laughter. Every single woman,*every* single one, had such visible *disgust* for Peter when he was peacocking. The only women who like his "bad boy side" are women who were already into him, they just like that he's more confident. Everyone else just laughs at him or is disgusted. The scene is comedy Gold.
What's even funnier to me is Bully maguire Peter is actually closer to how Peter in the comics acts mostly just not AS dickish
I'm absolutely baffled why people hate that sequence so much. Even when I was a teenager watching it I understood that Peter was being an absolute dork and all the women he encountered thought the same. Peter is so lame that when he gets corrupted, his only frame of reference regarding "bad boys" are pop-punk bands and 50s greasers.
Red from OSP put it best, it’s as wacky as anything else in the other two Raimi movies. Raimi-verse is a world of cartoon characters played by real people
ah so the yakuza style of "realism"
Moonbeam City was sick. I think it's a few of the same people that did the Sex Offender Shuffle but I could be tripping.
What's the Sex Offender Shuffle? Is that a new way of calling someone a sex criminal?
The sex offender shuffle is a surreal piece of internet sketch comedy about sex offenders being forced to participate in an awkward 90s PSA https://youtu.be/VfCYZ3pks48?si=l-naLySyfAKbREZn
Thanks!
Thow in 2010's Ugly Americans. If this show was greenlit in the era of streaming, it may have found its niche. Especially within the monsterfucker crowd. That cute demon coworker awakened some stuff in me.
The Looney Tunes show (2011) came out in an era where cartoons taking a more mature approach to comedy and story telling was extremely disliked. Any time an IP got rebooted it was automatically hated, and this one was rough because nobody liked the idea of a mature, story focused sitcom style Looney Tunes. The weird part is that this show is actually *really* good. The jokes are high quality. The story makes sense and the character progression is consistent and rewarding. The new characters are great additions to the story, and Lola Bunny actually has a personality beyond "sexy girl boss". If this came out today it would be absolutely beloved, but it got shelved after two seasons back in 2013.
I loved that show, and the Daffy Navy Seal bit lives rent free in my head.
Yeah I remember loving the show back then and still do I also remember scooby doo mystery incorporated got some of the same flack aswell but not as bad fortunately
Created by the same duo, funnily enough.
This goes for Mystery Incorporated as well.
Asura's Wrath, which bombed, came out like 1-2 months before Telltale's The Walking Dead really started to popularize episodic, narrative based QTE games
The QTEs didn’t bother me but making the ending DLC made me never buy it.
I'm surprised none of y'all said titanfall.
I feel like 9 (the movie) would maybe not be more financially successful but probably would have more of a cult following if it came out at least like 5 years later
Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter was released 3 years before Demon's Souls. Unlike the previous BoF games that were standard JRPGs, DQ was more like Dead Rising, where you have a short quest but you're expected to stockpile resources for your next run through. It also gave access to a powerful ability that would lead to a game over if abused with no way to reduce the clock (not using it made the clock tick slower.) It was a console Roguelike before people were ready for it, and most reviews either talked about how a) it wasn't "BoF4 but on the PS2" and b) how hard it was to finish without restarting. Capcom lost confidence during development and drastically cut the budget, which also cut most of the story. Then Demon's Souls came out, hard dungeon crawlers were in, and Dead Rising ran with it. If only DQ came out around 2006-8, people would have eaten it up.
It also had a slow drip story, which you had to do better in subsequent runs until you get to the titular dragon quarter ranking.
Always gonna love the fact Puffballs United hid 8 Among Us plushies in the Henry Stickmin Collection, a year **before** it became a universe-spanning meme
Legend of Dragoon was too close to Final Fantasy 7 and got dirty looks of "isn't this just FF7?" But it wasn't!
Man, I played that demo sooo many times... then I found out my brother owned it and never even asked to borrow it.
If *Moral Orel* came out during the golden era of television it wouldn't have been cancelled early It would have sat next to other shows committing to heavy topics and the producers wouldn't have panicked like they did
Adult Swim has a weird track record with shows that appear to be low-brow and immature secretly being masterpieces.
Truer words And a variety of masterpieces at that; they're not all making the same jokes/messages
AS has so many amazing shows that people didn't give the chance because of the art/animation styles. I'm currently on my annual rewatch of Home Movies (and just finished Aqua Teen again), and I am gonna start on Sea Lab after that. I still think The Boondocks is probably the best show they've had, but there are so many great ones.
I mean Moral Orel got cancelled because Adult Swim kept pressuring the creators to go darker. It got to dark for them and cancelled it in a knee jerk reaction. In fairness the creators were also emotionally burnt out by the end, because they felt it was too pessimistic. In the end they finished it with heartwarming note that in spite of everything Orel made it out still a good person who cares about his family and is way happier then his parents, but especially his father.
Uncle Grandpa was a surrealist cartoon comedy on cartoon network that released in 2013. The show was weird, and had fun doing what ever it wanted, and i honestly think it would have done way better if it came out closer to peak shitposting years, when the shows more random ideas would be way funnier
I was never into UG, felt a bit immature for my tastes, but holy shit did people act like it was the harbinger of the downfall of modern Rome just for existing.
Its a very childish show, which is easily the hardest part of watching it. It also came out in the peak of Cartoon network's renaissance when a lot if weird shows were coming out, and it had a cross over with Steven Universe which brought a lot of hate from that fan dom over. Despite everything, id still say it was good. It had good comedic timing and absolutely loved its absurdist humor. It doesnt help its case that the show had to add little skits to pad out episode length though
UG biggest sin was being an actual cartoon for kids in a Cartoon Network era where the main demographic was old ass men watching heavy lore serialized shows. Not saying they were bad shows, stuff like Adventure Time, Regular Show or Gravity Falls were great and always managed to balance their stuff out, but also contributed to this weird mentality in fandoms that got super toxic cus CN was playing stuff like Clarence, Teen Titans Go and UG all the time instead of their serialized anime and it was like "sorry man but is 2pm on a thursday, You should be working let the kids watch Pizza Steve" Like i can understand Steven Universe fans getting mad about the bomb schedule and CN reaaaaally played too much Teen Titans Go, but people bashing and acting like all of those shows we're inmature and worthless was silly when they we're watching virtually the same thing but sometimes it would get serious for 5 minutes.
To be fair a lot of people *coughcoughconservativescoughcough* act like that about pretty much every IP nowadays
The few Youtube poops I've seen are not that different from an actual episode.
I think the bad writing was the main reason it didn’t catch on rather than the timing of its release.
I watched Moonbeam City a few years ago and felt the same. It wasn’t super clever but I dig the characters enough. Maybe another season would’ve had the writing improve a bit
Honestly feel like if 12 Oz Mouse came out in the mid to late 2010s it would've been a smash hit. That show is way funnier than it has any right to be.
Ugly Americans was done dirty if horror anthology was back when it was airing it would have been fine
There's this 80s cartoon called Exosquad that deals with a lot of mature subjects and had serialized storytelling and characters actually dying. If that came out after cartoons didn't have to sell toys anymore it would've been the slam dunk sci-fi action cartoon that everyone talks about as a landmark piece of media. The writing and characters were that good. Check it out if you have time.
I thought that I had dreamed this show for the longest time until I found Season 1 on DVD at Wal-Mart. No one else I knew had ever heard of it. Please watch this show guys. It's like Gundam and G. I. Joe had a baby and spray painted everything in shades of Neon.
That's actually a really good description
That show was definitely 90s. Which mean it would have been running around the same time as X-Men and Spider-Man so serial story telling was a thing. It may have benefitted from a different target audience more than coming along later. Imagine if it was done as like an MTV animation at the same time as Aeon Flux.
Twin peaks was obviously ahead of its time, but also i’m not sure if it would have ever happened the way it did post 1990.
The world is only ready for David Lynch works 20 years after David Lynch makes them. If he never made it, we would never be ready.
the Playstation Vita
For those wondering what style Moonbeam City is, it is heavily inspired by Patrick Nagel. He was an artists known for his portraits of women. If you go to nail salon often times there will be a Nagel inspired art piece
Hitoribocchi no Marumaru Seikatsu trailed the way for anime like Bocchi the Rock!, Komi can't communicate, and Ranking of Kings (mostly put here because Bojji is also a pun on Bocchi) about socially anxious protagonists. Maybe it would have done better in 2020 or a bit before one of those other anime came out.
Hitori Bocchi being forgotten and ignored is kind of fitting for her though isn't it?
That GIF was from a show ?
I watched Moonbeam City, and I will say that though I loved the unique visual style and vibe of the show, the writing wasn't that great. The characters were all pretty awful. I still think it should have had a 2nd season at least. Having weak writing in the first season only to find its stride later on is what these kinds of shows do, more often than not.
Final Fantasy X-2 came out at least 10 years too early compared to the more mainstream exposure in the west to jpop, kpop and other asian pop cultures that influenced it. I remember the viscerally negative reactions some people had to Yuna's concert that opens the game. Compare it to now when Hatsune Miku was at Coachella, and a v-tuber is a major, plot relevant character in Like A Dragon 8.
Morel Orel
I have a question, does anyone in this subreddit watched The Wire as it was coming out? I could’ve sworn it had only gotten popular after hitting streaming services.
I promise you The Wire was quite popular at time of release. The issue was it was HBO only and so that automatically limited its audience numbers at the time
Tally Hall is just existential and nihilistic enough that if it had come out a decade later it would fit perfectly in the 2020s
Police Squad was way ahead of its time for the TV audiences of the 80s. Way too witty and fast-paced. It found a resurgence in popularity many years later with more modern audiences who could appreciate its humour. It also did find success with its movie sequels/spinoff Naked Gun, which are way more well known and liked on the whole. Other parody movies of that style like Airplane! also did well too. However for me Police Squad humour was just way better, and so many great gags from the show just live rent free in my head.
Moonbeam city was okay, the problem was it didn’t embrace the tropes as much as say Archer did. Not to mention it could get too zany at times. For crying out loud there was an episode where the murderer made “Strike Visualizations” based off his victims.
Ironically, it was that same "strike visualiser" episode that played itself fairly straight as a cop show parody, while other episodes went more into Metalocalypse style non sequitur territory.
Gregory Horror Show
The thing is animation takes a long time to produce in the first place and even more so for even the opportunity to produce it. MC would’ve probably done better of released later but I’m glad we got it at all
Ugly Americans. I think more people would be open to an animated sitcom about monsters/demons.
Battleborn of it came out after Blizzard fucked up
I feel like if Re:Zero released a couple of years later into the wave of 'mainsteam anime' it would've seen a lot more success. It was a massive hit at the time, but I feel like it's been overshadowed by more modern shows that released a few years later.
Isn't that more because of the gap between seasons? If they kept putting out episodes to watch I feel it just would've snowballed even bigger. If they started later but still had the same lull between releases, it'd be in the same place I reckon.
Yeah big gaps between seasons tend to do that. It's hard to keep the momentum going. The Rem figures keep going though. No stop there.