No love for Venture Brothers? Doctor Orpheus is probably my favorite contemporary animated character, even if he’s just a Dr. Strange parody. I love that orchestral pulp drama music that queues up whenever he goes off on a weird rant about existential horrors beyond the cosmos, usually as a means to avoid talking to his teen daughter about the facts of life.
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I’ve been meaning to watch it, but there’s so much there right now, its very daunting. It’s the same reason I haven’t watched Game of Thrones.
Venture Bros. is also a favorite, even if it has the most tortured waiting period between seasons
Since we mentioned Samurai Jack we might as well post the season 5 trailer:
I’ve been marathoning Transformer cartoons and finished G1, Beast Wars and Beast Machines.
G1 is a really dumb, rushed and at times weird, but it has a strange charm with some really great voices and some of the stuff in the show is hilarious out of context (sometimes even in-context). The movie was surprisingly enjoyable for being basically a pretty toy commercial, but goddamn it’s a PRETTY toy commercial. Sadly the show lost a lot of its charm after the movie and most of the better parts of the show focused on earlier characters or were bizarre even by the shows standards (the episode where Galvatron is tricked into going to therapy comes to mind).
Beast Wars had a rough start with the outdated CGI that you thankfully get used to, and with a smaller cast it focused more on the characterization, making most of the cast far more memorable than the G1 characters in my opinon (Dinobot, Waspinator and Megatron comes to mind, yeeesssss). As far as I understand it’s (one of) the most beloved Transformers cartoon and I can understand that.
Beast Machines was… eh. The CG definitely improved but they made some really, really bizarre decisions with the character designs and a lot of their personalities were altered for the worse. It does have a strong commitment to its central themes and as a continuity-heavy series, almost every episode feel as it contributes to something on the whole, even if a lot of the time is spent on the good guys being chased.
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As someone once described it to me, Class of 3000 is "if Andre 3000 was Ms. Frizzle from the Magic Schoolbus"
Nobody mentioned Over The Garden Wall yet? Its very short, just one single miniseries but its absolutely phenomenal! Weird, funny, vaguely melancholy, and exceedingly well written!
Im thinking i should catch up on adventure time. Ive barely seen any of it since the stakes miniseries
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The new miniseries is great, but yeah Over The Garden Wall is a god damn masterpiece.
One that no one’s mentioned yet: Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated. Take the cast of the long-running series, then give them an actual ongoing plot, several extremely dangerous arch-villains(including a talking parrot voiced by Udo Kier), genuine character development, and a dash of cosmic horror.
The result is a pretty damned good show that actually succeeds at appealing to fans of the franchise and people who hate it. There are enough references to other Scooby series to show that the creative team really cared about the franchise and Hanna-Barbera mystery cartoons in general. At the same time, it avoids the main pitfall of the franchise by making the characters more than their typical one-note archetypes. I can’t recommend it enough.
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One cartoon that came out a few years ago that sadly got axed way too early was Motorcity. Made by the same people as Megas XLR. Just a damn fun show and had some drop-dead gorgeous art that oozes style.
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Mystery Inc was a huge surprise for me and my friends. Fred’s characterizatuon is absolutely i ncredible in it.
The new scooby doo show is pretty good as well. It’s a stright comedy ( like every other cartoonnetwork show these days) amd the aet style isnt great, but it’s got some great writing.
Just gonna put this brilliant western cartoon’s intro right there, because it owns.
Once Upon a Time… was so good. So good.
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Ahhh, the nostalgia! As a follow-up to this, here’s the intro of one of the sequel series all about how the body works, represented by little humanoid things living inside us.
Mildly NSFW: slight cartoon nudity and, uh, fusing human bodies as a visual metaphor for sex?
The new episode of Star vs The Forces of Evil was really good. I like the way the show handles the monsters, if this show was made in the 90’s I feel like they would just be unambiguously evil all the time, instead of being an impoverished lower class analog.
Adventure Time has gotten frickin weird in the last few seasons, and I love it. Dungeon Train and Hall of Egress are super cool, and that’s weird to me since I always preferred the eps that didn’t focus on finn and jake.
SU is gay as heck and has the kind of role model young boys have needed all along- none of that macho asshole shit.
I watch nothing else, cuz I’m surface level as hell. Like those two a lot
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If you’re only gonna watch two, those aren’t bad choices. This Star show I’m constantly evangelizing is very similar, if you find yourself still itching for more.
I really liked that last AT mini series though, I might go back and rewatch that.
As a nonbinary person, I can’t state how important the episode “Sadie’s Song” is to me. Steven gets on that stage in a dress and make-up and sings his heart out, everyone accepts him and applauds, and it’s great. SU is a fantastically gay show and I’m so happy it exists.
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Yeah, the ending of that episode was really unexpected in a good way. Instead of asking why Steven is dressed the way he is, they go, “ha ha, yeah, that’s Steven for you, always dancing on stage and stuff.”
As a matter of fact, SU always surprises me with the way it handles its secondary characters’ reaction to things. This is especially true for the “cool kids”, who you’d expect to be snobbish and mean, but are in fact really laid back and open minded.
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I think my favourite gay moment was Lars and Sadie first meeting Stevonnie and not being able to maintain their chill for a second.
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My favorite gay moment was the character who is a gay couple.
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Mine is probably anytime Peridot and Lapis are on screen together. I cry a lot over Lapidot as a ship because my girlfriend is a lot like Peridot, short and salty (though she wishes she was actually as short as Peridot) and much like Lapis, I love water and I tend to be pretty blunt because of my autism. Unlike her I have a pretty good sense of humor, I like to think :V I’m also closer to Pearl’s height actually, considering I’m 6’3"