Yogi Bear as metaphor for what happened to the world
John Kricfalusi provides examples that show how the quality of Yogi Bear depictions has kept pace with a general decline in the quality of Western culture over the years. (From left to right: 1960s, 1990s, 2000s) Link
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Apparently I'm lacking in comprehension skills -- how is this a metaphor? They all look the same to me.
I've read some of John's work where he mates the "decline" of culture from the 60s forward to the women's movement.
I don't see a decline in culture as a whole. Music had high points in 1966, 1977, 1989-91, etc. Computer-related culture is growing positively and exponentially forward. Movies had a renaissance in the mid 1990s. Starting in 2003 or so Television entered into a "copper age" with insanely well-written shows such as Arrested Development, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, The Daily Show, etc. He has no evidence to back up any steady decline and his blog posting, while artsy, says nothing.
John K is confusing nostalgia and kitsch with quality.... Yogi Bear was never quality.
If Yogi Bear (or most Hanna Barbara) the height of quality as far as western culture goes then we were in trouble to begin with.
gee, his voluminous and insightful commentary really gets his point across.
seriously though i have plenty of respect for John K. but when did he turn into such a fuddy-duddy? as if the "decline of culture" argument hasn't been attempted a million times, with better argumentation (and as if you can even call what's essentially a slideshow an argument). completely unconvincing. "oh my god, look how low kids wear their pants these days! and there are cheap toy factories too! surely the world is ending!" right.
in fact, one of the pictures he shows of '90s yogi looks very much like his own style... so if we're to believe his point, we're also to believe that he's partly to blame?
...I'm surprised he didn't include his own Ren and Stimpy in the list of decline causes. If any one cartoon took the animation industry's sense of style and threw it down the toilet with a Woodstock-class Brown Acid chaser, it was John K's offensive misuse of cel stock.
...As for John K being such a "fuddy-duddy", well, I guess if I couldn't get a new show sold to a network to save my life for about ten years now because I couldn't comprehend that my style was total crap that nobody wanted anymore, I'd be trying to find a scapegoat too. Or, to put it another way, he's still all butthurt about the Network that used to show Cartoons rejecting his Goddamn George Liquor pilot all those years ago.
This, from the man responsible for the following:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSJ-uFvlkMY
Just sayin'.
I'd say, given the last few pictures in "now", it's more than vaguely racist.
Does he ever make any posts that can't be accurately summarized as, "These damn kids these days!"? It certainly seems like every time one of his posts is featured on Boingboing that is what is is really about.
I don't even get what this post is about. A couple of the 90s posts are his own designs, aren't they?
Uuuuh... Right. This coming from the guy with more than a slight obsessed with drawing butts.
I don't get it.
Yet again John K proves that he not only can't remain relevant, but he also can't seem to make any sense, ever. The guy is such a tired hack and curmudgeon.
...if there was a point to that, I totally missed it. :/
I love Ren and Stimpy. But what made it fun was the way it sent up the utter crap cartoons like Yogi Bear. Y'all don't remember the dry spell, the dark ages of animation when the HannaBarbarians were all there was. It wasn't charmingly quirky, it was just cheap and shitty. And if some of the artists infused the low budget rubbish with a bit of a design edge, it still didn't make it good.
Who was it who said, when Jack Hanna complained that there were no new animators coming along, that it was like a kid who'd killed his parents throwing himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.
You just just don't remember how horribly bad it was.
There was a terrible dark age of animation and Hanna Barbara kept things alive but at a serious cost.
There are many people(Like John K)that seem to have the attitude of "Wasn’t animation great" as if the height of all animation was Betty Boop.
Shame they miss out on the great things that have been made over the years and it is only getting better.
the horror of Sinbad Jr.
Grue,
The hell they kept things alive. HB kept animation alive like McDonalds keeps the slow food movement alive. HB was the enemy.
The Canadian Film Board kept animation alive during the dark ages and that's a fact. If you were an animator, and you lived in a country that allowed you to up and move, you went to Canada.
Then the Kit Laybourne/MTV connection ignited that little stronghold of talent and between the cable networks and the internet, animation exploded into life again.
HB sucks ass.
A metaphor for the decline of Western Culture? No. It only represents the decline of Yogi Bear. A metaphor for Western culture's progression, using cartoons, would be a comparison of Disney movies of the 60s with Pixar movies of today. I think we're holding up alright.
Hating aside, I'm curious what the 4 Yogi Bear Knitting Patterns are - a knitted tie, collar, hat, and bowtie? Apart from that, these bears are glaringly nude.
There's a game called "Yo! Yogi!"?
I wonder if you can buy it in a certain neighborhood of Tokyo?