>Excuse #2: Cartoons From The 80s Were Bland and Uncreative

This is one excuse that kind of irks me, but it kind of rings true. Compared to the 90s and 2000s, the cartoons from the 80s were bland and uncreative, primarily because of the era of their production. That's because animators of the day loosened up a little before they got restrained on broadcast television and lightly tightened on cable. Still today's animators have a bit more freedom to experiment . . . but only if they're independent or working at a progressive, freethinking studio environment like Frederator.

But as to the stagnant belief of critics that the cartoons of the 80s were bland and uncreative, well, riddle me this. Aside from Fat Albert, Schoolhouse Rock, Battle of the Planets, and Star Blazers, can you show me a good cartoon from the 1970s that wasn't a Scooby dropping (mystery-solving teens/young adults with a unique distinctive character that the show was based on), based on a preexisting property, nor was a spinoff (implied or direct) of another property? You can't because there weren't many memorable shows from the 70s that didn't have those elements. In fact, it was probably the most bland and uncreative era in animation, even more so than the 80s. At least with the 80s, they had a bit more of an imagination. They combined the wackiness of Maxwell Smart with the gadgets of the Robotic Stooges to create Inspector Gadget. They gave a teenager the ability to transform into a car by getting him wet with hot water in Turbo Teen long before Ranma Saotome made his fateful trip to China. They sucked a video game player into a virtual world arming him with only a control pad and zapper gun on Captain N.

Was every spark of imagination a success? Heavens, no. But dammit if they didn't try.

What's that last excuse critics of the 80s used. Oh yeah, they say that "nothing good came from the decade."