Good news for M I D D L E A M E R I C A :grillman: :solidarity: :porky-happy:
Under boss David Zaslav, Warner Bros. Discovery has expressed a desire to focus more heavily on IP across all its businesses, so now that CNS has to share development and production resources with WBA, it’s difficult to imagine a future in which the studio’s original animation output can match what it has been in the past. As long as Zaslav is king, Cartoon Network Studios is likely to shift more strongly towards reboots of its existing catalog, as it is currently doing with The Powerpuff Girls, than launching new IP.
Wanna know the future of animation? Look at video games. It's gonna be huge studios churning out the same characters and stories year after year, because of unexamined and self-fulfilling truisms.
"New IP just doesn't make money!"
They'll repeat that over and over - so much and for so long - that bespoke independent studios will start forming and producing original memorable artwork. And they will still insist, "New IP just doesn't make money!"
Honestly I think we'll see IP's created and used for the sake of video games. Cyberpunk, LoL, and The Witcher all saw huge waves of video game customers from their shows. WB is already there with their smash clone.
So it'll be cartoons viewed as marketing for video games basically. Probably mostly free to play skinner box shit marketed at kids.
China saw it coming
So it's like the 80's again but it's cartoons for video games instead of cartoons for toys.
Yup, except there's no more cocaine being given out and sadly the soviet union does not exist anymore. So just an even shittier version of the 80s :rust-darkness:
Just wait until President DeSantis starts secretly buying and shipping krokodil from Russia to fund Pro-US insurgents
President DeSantis of the breakaway free nation of Floridastan joins the Russian Federation, meanwhile President Kamala Harris chastises the remaining southern states for legalizing the stoning of anyone not white and baptist/evangelist.
Similar to the concept of anime adaptations of light novels getting greenlit exclusively as marketing without any intention of finishing the story.
It's funny because Powerpuff Girls has been rebooted multiple times already and every single attempt flopped, while CN's strongest performers for the past decade at least have all been relatively new shows.
Bazinga brains and :grillman: making the Ready Player One setting come true one lazy nostalgic IP stagnation at a time.
obviously Zaslav is a reactionary, a century earlier and he'd be in a room with Prescott Bush trying to woo Smedley Butler
that being said I see this as less of a culling of LGBT shows and more just a culling of new programing period. Anything that doesn't exist as a loss leader commercial/isn't Teen Titans Go reruns is going to vanish from the network. Look at Adult Swim's schedule tonight.
08:00 PM Bob's Burgers
08:30 PM Bob's Burgers
09:00 PM American Dad
09:30 PM American Dad
10:00 PM American Dad
10:30 PM Rick and Morty
11:00 PM Mike Tyson Mysteries
11:15 PM Mike Tyson Mysteries
11:30 PM Aqua Teen Hunger Force
11:45 PM Aqua Teen Hunger Force
12:00 AM The Boondocks
12:30 AM Rick and Morty
01:00 AM Futurama
01:30 AM Futurama
02:00 AM Lucy, The Daughter of the Devil
02:15 AM Mary Shelley's Frankenhole
02:30 AM The Shivering Truth
02:45 AM The Heart, She Holler
03:00 AM Bob's Burgers
03:30 AM Bob's Burgers
04:00 AM King of the Hill
04:30 AM King of the Hill
Mike Tyson Mysteries has been canceled for two years and Norm's dead. ATHF, despite a desire from the cast to continue, is dead. The Boondocks has been dead for almost a decade, the attempted revival was canned, and even if it wasn't season 4 was bad. Frankenhole's been gone for over a decade, and even when management was slightly more favorable to creators on the network, they're never giving Dino a blank check again (despite the fact that the last time they did, he made one of the best seasons of television ever). The other three have been off the air for at least a couple of years, and if you put a gun to my head I couldn't tell you a thing about them. The rest, making up a majority of the runtime, other than Rick and Morty (which prints money in a way will ensure it's continued airing, even if it ends up as a show that only exists to sell plastic garbage like The Simpsons) are syndicated shows. You're not getting anime dubs regularly airing again, you're certainly not getting Big O Season 2 on weeknights again (if at all). If they have something homegrown laying around to fill up the time slot, great, but otherwise there's enough content out there that they can rerun and probably get good enough ratings, especially for the cash they save.
To me, this is the encroachment of what we've seen from smaller cable channels in the past decade. As the costs of production get higher and rate of profit continues to decline, you're going to see the "G4ification" of what remains of cable. Original programing would need to pull in numbers that no show on cable could to survive, and even if it did, it'd still probably be less than reruns that the few remaining boomers who still use television tune in for out of habit. I don't think that they're going to start airing more Million Dollar Extremes or explicitly reactionary content (if that were the case, The History Channel would be airing the same wildly reactionary shit it did in 2005), I think it'll get to the point where channels have one or two new shows that still crank out merch money, and the rest is totally recycled. With how quickly we're seeing media contract and how these contractions (based off of 2008/late 70's) don't usually return to normal (the streaming service boom was a new revenue stream for capital and it's already dry to the point of dying itself), I could see new western animation stopping outright.
you’re certainly not getting Big O Season 2 on weeknights again
:yea:
And Cartoon Network produced the second season on its own dime back then, I think.
:agony-4horsemen:
Don't forget to watch Over the Garden Wall comrades. Ideally via piracy now that Zaslav continues to be a fuck.
T.T
Just did that this week, and I wanna re-watch it already lol
I decided to just start it up again even though I watched it once this season already.
0 regrets.
:doomer: I'm guessing [adult swim] will be next on the chopping block
On April 23, 2021, WarnerMedia announced that Adult Swim would merge with HBO Max's adult animation development teams, under the leadership of Suzanna Makkos.
Well I was wrong. RIP in peace Adult Swim I guess.
There’s never gonna be another pro LGBT cartoon made while he’s the CEO
queer representation is quite possibly past its high water mark for now, can't wait for the revival of shitty gay jokes from mid-2000s shlock movies :agony-minion:
Cishet actor comes out in drag with a loud lisp, wearing a dress "I'm COMING OUT OF THE CLOSTHET!"
eternal laughtrack :so-true: :so-true: :so-true: :so-true: :so-true: :so-true: :so-true: :so-true: :so-true: :so-true:
Instead of a full Season 3, they're only making three 44-minute specials, then it's over.
Yup and likely due to reactionaries in the upper levels of Disney not wanting main character LGBTQ representation
Libs kept arguing that because disney didn't list it as an 'official' reason, its probably something else
Libs believe that capitalists would never follow their prejudices when trying to make money or whatever (is legit a fucking plot point on Mad Men, another lib as fuck show).
I don't know that Mad Men is particularly lib. Our viewpoint character, Don Draper, enjoys a great deal of latitude and privilege in his personal and professional life, and is only ever shown to be dissatisfied and fundamentally unhappy. He's an asshole seeking meaning in climbing the ladder and pitching the next great ad, when the whole thing is a transient charade to make people unhappy so they'll buy whatever garbage.
We constantly see cis white men in positions of power getting away with odious acts and their lives all getting worse over time. The core message of the finale is that all these people will never change and will forever repeat their cycles of self destruction because the corporate world they live in is a husk that won't make their lives mean anything.
It's not leftist by any stretch but it definitely isn't lib.
Honestly never viewed the show as that, it most definitely doesn't have leftist tones, I always felt it had a more individualized microcosm of various individuals struggling with key aspects of themselves such as Pete Campbell finally getting self actualization at the end of his arduous journey of realizing how good his own life has ended up by finally deciding that settling is okay. In contrast Don I feel is more an allegory of finding out that there no "end point" in fulfillment and one must decide when they themselves are happy (him fucking off to join a commune though he still gets brought back into the advertising world at the end). The show is, at best a declaration against consumerism and those that manufacture it (consumption of goods, consumption of aspirations and that "ideal American life"), but it never truly comes to the core issues of why consumption has to exist within capital or that capital is the root problem behind issues of the characters (hell it discusses very little regarding the Korean War). It would be, at best, left adjacent media in some of its messaging.
You'll see plenty of new LGBT cartoon content. It just won't have the budget Cartoon Network enjoyed at its heyday. The demand is absolutely still there and someone is going to fill it.
I legitimately want that man to just spontaneously combust
:blob-on-fire:
Has no one doxed him yet? There have to be at least a few fans deranged enough to do something
I still don't quite understand how Discovery basically took over Warner. Wouldn't Warner have been the much bigger company of the two? And of course it had to be the shitty network's shitty CEO as the CEO of the merged company.
Warner was deep in debt, and Discovery had just closed out two years in the black thanks to Zaslav's (ahem) leadership. On Warner's end, he was the obvious choice to put on top over their previous executives.
Discovery has, for a long time, been about :grillman: pandering "pawn stars" slop that is very cheap to produce and very, very profitable.
All TV Entertainment converging on TLC content quality. Cool cool cool.
Here comes the revival of Destroy! Build! Destroy! but starring someone way less interesting than Andrew W.K.
Rip. This is digital book burning. New CEO is firing everyone who isn’t in line with “middle American cultural values”
The worst possible and least valuable of all cultural values
Green fuzzy rectangles of conformity grass loaded with chemicals and mowed at least once a day, two-car garages with at least two cars, spewing smoke into the air while grilling, spewing allergens into the air while leafblowing, wifebeating, child abusing, sanctimonious grandstanding about how everyone else is evil and out to get them. Yep, it's :grillman: time.
