Making sense of bad cartoons with modern technology.

[vakkotaur]

Even as a kid some things bugged me about some of the Saturday morning cartoons. The big, obvious departures from reality weren't a problem. Hey, these were cartoons and like Bugs Bunny says, "You can get away with nearly anything-- in an animated cartoon." It was the cartoons that tried to emulate reality that ran into trouble. One example was the Flintstones which I mentioned a few years ago. (Short version: Why didn't the rear axle fall out?) But recently I realized that a couple other dumb things I'd seen in some cartoons can now be explained.

One annoyance was that a tiny radio transmitter could be placed on a vehicle and and the vehicle then tracked. Tiny transmitter, sure. Tracking, sure. But at the time it would have required triangulation from at least two receiving sites, if conditions were ideal. But the cartoon (it was probably one of the many incarnation of Scooby Doo but I cannot say for sure) showed a single receiver, with a big display and showing a dot to follow. It might have even showed the local streets - clearly nonsense... at the time. Today it can be and is done. The tiny transmitter has a GPS receiver and the tracking receiver might as well have the data that a GPS navigation has.

Another annoyance was the home computer or terminal that a kid had (this was likely Clue Club or another, similar cartoon) or had ready access to, that could be used to look up nearly anything, and quickly. Sure, like the kid would even have outside access - that would tie up a phone line, if it happened at all, and then it'd just be to a BBS. And maybe 1200 baud. Maybe. This might have been the days of 300 baud (it's faster than 110, yay!) for the typical home/hobbyist modem. Of course we know that that changed. CPU speeds went up. Modem speeds went up, and then came broadband with DSL and cable. And then add real internet access, the web, search engines, and now "Google is your friend." The problem now is not getting access to information, but sorting it down to the useful pieces.

I'm sure there are other examples of modern technology making simplistic nonsense in old cartoons now an explicable or even expected thing. Those are just the two I recall bothering me, that can now be explained away as "being ahead of their time" rather than just being plot devices.

Comments

[electronin.livejournal.com]

Star Trek is just as guilty.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Ah, but Star Trek was set hundreds of years in the future, so it was expected that there would be stuff that just didn't exist.. yet.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

Star Trek is also inspiring technology today. We may not have a transporter yet (doggone it; we wouldn't need the TSA any more!), but we do, for example, have the communicator...

[thecanuckguy.livejournal.com]

Eh, that's TOS/Enterprise style - glorified cell-phones really (which, for TOS, was saying something, to go with Vakko's original). The kind of communicator *I* want is the TNG/DS9/VOY style where you touch your comm badge and you're connected with the person. (I remember as a kid I saw a cheap doo-dad that was shaped like a Starfleet badge, and it made the chirping sound when you pressed it!! I didn't even work like a communicator, but just the chirping sound made me *really* want it. Didn't have the money on hand, never bought it, and am still regretting it.)

Which also reminds me of a plot device that Star Trek glosses over and can't really be explained by "future technology" - when you touch the comm badge, it seems to know who you're wanting when you press it:

Picard: Meet me in my ready room, Number One.
Riker: On my way, captain.

Now, how did it know to send it to Riker ("Number One") right away? You can bet he heard the whole thing as Picard was saying it too!

(And, for that matter, how does the Universal Translator not only translate almost all alienese instantly *and* make their lips match up with the translated words?)

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Voice recognition as how it was supposedly done. Recall that before the "call" was connected that the sender identified himself (I'll assume that was a courtesy to the recipient rather than a lack of caller ID) and the recipient, "Picard to Riker..." If that didn't happen, someone was being sloppy in production.

[sheryl67.livejournal.com]

Good post. Yeah, I really like that almost surreal like things that happen in cartoons of the funny nature. Anvils, Daffy Duck's bill spinning around his head, falling from a huge cliff and walking away, fire that burns underwater, etc. The things that are totally unrealistic work for me better then the "almost" real things in some of the more realistic shows.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it's an "uncanny valley" thing. If something is almost real, it doesn't work, as it it's just almost. Almost just isn't good enough. But not at all real works because we don't expect things to behave perfectly realistically. Such as, it's fine for a character to walk over the edge of a cliff or such... so long doesn't realize don't realize he's done that.

Real has to be perfectly real. Unreal doesn't have to worry about it.

[nefaria.livejournal.com]

Clue Club was one of my favorite HB cartoons, it actually had mysteries you might be able to work out on your own. The cast had more interesting personalities than Scooby Doo too.

Scary how all the HB characters wore the same clothes every day though.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I understand that from an animation standpoint. It's just easier to always have the same thing drawn the same color. And it means that continuity is easier as it's one less thing to keep track of. Also, it means that footage can be re-used across a series rather than re-doing a similar (or identical) scene just to get the clothing. And since limited animation of the likes of HB and Filmation relied heavily on such re-use, it was cost-savings. It still looks odd, but there are real world reasons for it.

The thing that bugged me (I forget in which cartoon) was that sometimes there would be plaid (a pain to animate right) but it wouldn't move right. I figure it was done by leaving that part of the cel uncolored and having a plaid background or insert for that character. Perhaps one day wearable displays could be programmed to have that strange behavior of unmoving plaid.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

TV Tropes calls it Unmoving Plaid.