Saw my old VHS of Recess at Goodwill the other day and realized I missed the simple plots

A buddy told me I was just watching for the nostalgia and not the actual writing, so I rewatched the first episode and yeah, the jokes were way simpler than I remembered, anyone else feel like 90s shows moved slower than today's cartoons?

3 comments

3 Comments

markm2718d ago

My buddy Dave actually taped over his entire collection of 90s Cartoon Network shows with some bad sci-fi movie he found on cable, he realized like three years later what he'd done and was so mad he didn't talk to me for a week. So I feel you on the slower pacing thing, I got a hold of a VHS of the first couple episodes of Batman the Animated Series and it felt like ten minutes of just characters staring at each other before anything happened. Not a bad thing necessarily, just a totally different rhythm from something like Teen Titans Go where jokes are coming at you every three seconds.

skyler_white9518d ago

Man I read somewhere that the pacing thing is actually because those older cartoons were made for a different kind of attention span, kids used to just sit and watch without needing constant action every few seconds. It's wild how much we've changed as viewers, like our brains got rewired by YouTube and TikTok or something. Your buddy Dave taping over his whole collection hurts my soul though, I can't imagine sitting through a bad sci-fi movie only to realize later what you lost. Makes you wonder what else is hiding on old VHS tapes that people forgot about.

price.tyler17d ago

I mean, I gotta push back on that a little, @skyler_white95. Kids today actually have a totally different kind of focus, it's just focused on different stuff. A kid watching a 15 minute cartoon with no cuts and slow pacing might zone out after 2 minutes, but that same kid can watch a 45 minute video of someone explaining how a game works without blinking. It's not that attention spans got worse, they just got more selective about what they give their time to. I got a nephew who can sit through a 90 minute documentary about deep sea fish because the pacing serves the subject, but he'll lose interest if a show drags a scene out just for atmosphere. The old cartoons had their own rhythm, sure, but calling it a better kind of attention is kind of romanticizing the past. Honestly, I think a lot of those slow Batman episodes would bore kids from back then too if they weren't already hyped up on the brand.