Does anybody else here feel left out of "nerd culture"?

Anonus

I don't know if that's the right term but like, sometimes I feel like I had the wrong childhood or the wrong hobbies.

I'm into a lot of western cartoons and graphic/type design. Even when I was a kid I preferred Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry and the stuff on Boomerang to most of the Cartoon Cartoons. Until recently, caring about type attracted mockery and derision from people who didn't. And of course you can't have anything centering on talking animals that doesn't invite jeers of "furry!"

I know there's lots of people who are into this stuff, but they aren't as loud as Big Two superheroes, or big-ticket sci-fi franchises, or '80s toylines aimed at boys, or what have you.

I hope this made sense...

Tanya

It does make sense, but your biggest problem here is you're positioning common interests as some sort of moral highroad, and your uncommon niche interests as some sort of failure of your person.

"Wrong childhood, Wrong hobbies" Like, unless we're talking about murder-kids or some equally detestable actual crimes with malice intent against other people, there is no such thing.

Imipolex G

See, I have this kind of thing too, except it doesn't bother me. At all.

MetaFour

I can definitely understand the feeling of being an outsider because people around you have interests you don't share, and they don't care about your interests at all. I feel that way myself a lot of times.

You just gotta remember that it isn't a failing, moral or otherwise, on your part. (Especially if you made a good-faith effort to get into whatever everyone else loves, and it just didn't click with you.) And anyone who tells you otherwise is dead wrong.

Anonus

I've tried to get into stuff like Doctor Who and superheroes with mixed success

Some things I liked, some I didn't

I've never been too into the fantasy genre, the prominent examples feel like a lot of forced, Eurocentric wonder to me

Anonus

The superheroes I do like have an element of humor to them or are out-there and don't fit the popular mold, like Plastic Man

Imipolex G

Thomas Pynchon likes Plastic Man, so you are in good company.

Anonus

Cool!

Anonus

Actually this brings me to two cartoon properties that seem to be widely beloved, to the near-exclusion of older things I do like: The Disney Animated Canon and Scooby-Doo.

I'm not super-fond of Walt's sensibility, like, at all. The one movie of Disney's I do like from when he was alive is, well, One Hundred and One Dalmatians. I much prefer the world that Dodie Smith created, and how it was interpreted by Walt's crew, than anything conveying the Magic of Walt Disney® about it. It feels alien but familiar at the same time. Walt's ethos is too moralistic and stick-up-the-ass for me, and there is too much emphasis on the Ideal Aesthetic for me. It doesn't help that to a lot of people, the Disney brand means fairy tales/princesses, a genre that holds little appeal to me, because - again - the feeling of forced wonder and formula.

Scooby-Doo is basically, at this point, the crown jewel of Hanna-Barbera's output, because Time Warner has choked all their other properties half to death (including their former crown jewel, The Flintstones). It contains few of the qualities that inspire me about the studio's earlier work. It gets a lot of blame for more or less ushering in the '70s dark age of cartoons - indeed, the whole premise was designed to be censor-friendly but still appealing to children. Basically all of the reason the original show worked was because of the rapport between Shaggy/Casey Kasem and Scooby/Don Messick, and I feel like anybody else who ever has done those characters has never lived up to those two (not even Mr. Welker).

But it feels like this cheesy old cartoon is held up with a bizarre level of reverence, as some sort of Timeless Classic because it lucked into being Cartoon Network's favorite thing to rerun and re-re-rerun for a decade. You aren't allowed to fuck with The Formula. It's "fun" with a very specific, constraining set of rules. A lot of the newer iterations of the franchise (excepting Mystery Incorporated) are basically familiarity/mediocrity held up as greatness. There isn't the whole "toy box" appeal that characters like Huckleberry Hound or Quick Draw McGraw or Snagglepuss bring to the table.

eriophora zia

I really liked Scooby Doo as a kid, but I honestly don't really know why. I think I just liked solving mysteries with a slightly quirky duo? When you're a kid something being formulaic is sort of a bonus, since it makes it easier to understand, categorize, and computer. When you're a kid, your entire life is trying new things and then repeating them ad infinitum until they make sense. It makes sense to like these things that are formulaic and make sense to you because of it. 

The things that are good for kids don't necessarily hold up into adulthood once you're familiar with the tropes they're based on. That's okay. However, most people who love Scooby Doo love it because it clicked with them as a child, not because they think it's actually original. I mean, hell, I liked freaking Eragon by Christopher Paolini when I was young, because I was young, had shit taste, and hadn't already encountered all the other books that were basically just smooshed into it before. 

It's also kind of an "it's popular because it's popular" loop. Song is played all the time on the radio -> song becomes popular because of this -> song gets played more because it's popular through familiarity. 

Also most people don't really put all that much thought into Scooby, they just remember that the show was part of their childhood and just look at it through rose tinted glasses. 

This has been A Ramble, make of it what you will.  

Anonus

See I got sucked into the Boomerang Gang when I was like five.

The characters I named - Huck has a down-to-earth, kindly charm, Quick Draw McGraw was a blustering idiot in the Warners vein (Michael Maltese basically built him), and Snagglepuss is, well, him.

They were all very beautiful cartoons (take or leave the way they move, just look at the designs and backgrounds), Daws Butler was a brilliant voice actor and human being (so was Messick who voiced a lot of his sidekicks like Ruff and Boo Boo), and they were fun. The only one of H-B's "marquee properties" that did much for me at that age is The Jetsons, for its bright, wondrous future. The Flintstones was a sour, grown-up world (though it did have all the makeshift contraptions) and Scooby-Doo mostly bored me. I honestly liked Scrappy because he felt ALIVE to me. And A Pup Named Scooby-Doo was always a treat. It did not revere The Formula. It was fun.

Imipolex G

They had a cool van

Anonus

I just dislike how Scooby is widely considered the Only Good Hanna-Barbera Property, which is as agitating as "DC is worthless except for Batman"

Crystal

Anonus said:

I just dislike how Scooby is widely considered the Only Good Hanna-Barbera Property, which is as agitating as "DC is worthless except for Batman"

That's fair.

Anonus

Imipolex G said:

They had a cool van

It's why I had to give Yogi, Huck and pals a tour bus in my fics

They have to keep up with the H-B Joneses

Anonus

I tried not to post my 1958th treatise about this stuff but I failed

glennmagusharvey

I have at times felt left out of the anime fandom, but it might be more accurately described as "the anime fandom never seemed to fit me".

I don't think "nerd culture" is really something you should care so much about being a part of.  Instead you should be proud that you're one of the few people who can speak on the things you like, because they're not stuff that people a dime a dozen know much about.  That makes you distinctive and gives you a niche.

Viani

I think generally, you lack anyone who thinks the same way as you, and that is what the feeling of botheredness and discomfort comes from.

You are emotionally invested in many things people are not.

Anonus

I have friends who care about this stuff. Just not a lot.

And among the people who are interested, their enthusiasm is more measured and, well, adult, than screechy Tumblr posts or whatever

Anonus

But there are those people too

Anonus

I always felt weird for preferring things Baby Boomers hold dear to things Gen X holds dear

It also took me until my teen years for Dexter's Lab to click with me beyond "The Muffin King" (indeed, it and EEnE are among the Cartoon Cartoons I didn't prefer to the classics - the CCs I did like were Cow and Chicken, Courage, and Grim & Evil)

Anonus

yeah I feel like you're supposed to like '80s nostalgia more than '50s-'60s nostalgia

no offense to Imi or Lee, but there are a lot of things about the '80s I can't really get into

one of those being the political climate of the era, but that doesn't hold water when in the '50s you had rampant McCarthyism and the institutional sexism and racism that touched off the feminist and Civil Rights Movements

Salix Babylonika

wuh?

Imipolex G

"no offense to Imi or Lee, but there are a lot of things about the '80s I can't really get into"

that's it, you're dead to me

honestly I think it was a crappy decade in many ways. I just have nostalgic liking for certain popcultural aspects of it.

Anonus

Jane said:

wuh?

what do you mean "wuh?"

Imipolex G said:

"no offense to Imi or Lee, but there are a lot of things about the '80s I can't really get into"

that's it, you're dead to me

honestly I think it was a crappy decade in many ways. I just have nostalgic liking for certain popcultural aspects of it.

what don't you like about the '80s?

Odradek

The 80s had a lot of great things, but it also had a lot of negative trends

Imipolex G

Good things in the 80s:
some music (post-punk, synthpop, metal)
some movies
Nintendo
I was little and innocent

Bad things in the 80s:
mass commercialism
Reaganomics
merch-driven cartoons
big hair

Epitome

Imipolex G said:

Bad things in the 80s:  big hair

>:O

glennmagusharvey

You just caused me to watch this video while looking for a certain Mickey Mouse cartoon.



It's not here though.

I'm looking for a Mickey Mouse Cartoon that involves some sort of performance on stage, and in the end, either Goofy or Donald (I can't remember which, but I think it's Donald) gets totally humiliated for a poor performance, with a rhythmically-timed series of things dropped on him from balloons that get popped above his head.

Do you remember this toon?

Imipolex G

Epitome said:

Imipolex G said:

Bad things in the 80s:  big hair

>:O

it's just my opinion is all

Anonus

also on the subject of Scooby-Doo, read this

"But we know who you really love: Scooby Doo!"

Anonus

it doesn't help that none of the Mystery Inc. designs translate well to POP!s

Anonus

wrong thread

glennmagusharvey

I found the name of the toon I was looking for -- it's "Orphan's Benefit".

Anonus

if I'm honest, I feel like people who actually liked Scooby-Doo as kids lucked out

I feel like it's the lone survivor of Time Warner's massacre of H-B (the studio itself was basically choked to death by corporate infighting, and basically their whole library got shoved over to a cable channel they never much cared about), and no one really cares about said massacre

eriophora zia

To be fair, I don't think the people who liked Scooby Doo as kids much care that it's still around. If anything, I tend to hear them all saying that it's not as good as what they remembered as children (wholly due to some rose-tinted glasses, but you get the picture). 

Viani

A lot of people don't know about said massacre. When they think cartoons, they think characters and episodes, not "the men behind the curtain" and corporate in-fights.

Anonus

eriophora zia said:

To be fair, I don't think the people who liked Scooby Doo as kids much care that it's still around. If anything, I tend to hear them all saying that it's not as good as what they remembered as children (wholly due to some rose-tinted glasses, but you get the picture). 

Honestly I tried to watch Be Cool and hated it

Nobody has much praise for the animation of the older incarnations, but the second season of the original series has much better, more natural animation, because it was done right in the studio before H-B started shipping things offshore/their standards seriously dropped

It's not exactly Hey There, It's Yogi Bear!-quality but still

Viani said:

A lot of people don't know about said massacre. When they think cartoons, they think characters and episodes, not "the men behind the curtain" and corporate in-fights.

I guess cartoon enthusiasts like myself are fewer in number than I often assume

Anonus

I know almost all of what I know about the death of H-B from reading Fred Seibert's blog so

Anonus

God I wish they did TV animation in the States again

I wish we had 2D animation jobs, and that there were more people who wanted them who wanted to do something other than ape '90s Disney movies

Imipolex G

I liked Scooby as a kid, but when I tried watching it a few years ago I found it almost unbearable.

I might've said this before

Anonus

which incarnation did you watch

glennmagusharvey

edit: never mind

edit: basically i was just saying that it's okay that there aren't that many people into western cartoons like this but so it helps to give context when talking about them just in case, though i think most of us here are already used enough to it? i dunno where i'm going with this and it's 3 am and i should not be giving advice

Imipolex G

Anonus said:

which incarnation did you watch

I don't know exactly, but it was the old stuff

Anonus

see now I'm thinking

I wish CBS's standards and practices hadn't neutered the New Movies so badly

They seem like they should have been FUN - having the fucking Addams Family in their intro and all - but they weren't, they were interminable

I don't know why WB won't make more of those

And for that matter, H-B's early '90s Addams Family is the first and only good Addams Family cartoon

How?

glennmagusharvey

It occurs to me that you're basically discussing western animation the way hardcore anime fans discuss anime.

Anonus

I am?

Anonus

also I do wonder what people here think of the Disney Animated Canon, on that note

TitleName

I like it for the most part. Wreck-It Ralph still one of my favorite of the bunch.

lee4hmz

Regarding "nerd culture": I've never really felt comfortable in Fandom(TM) past the few backwaters I've managed to wander into (A! fandom as well hovering around the peripheries of furry and anime fandom). This is due to a lot of things, but a big part of it is that I never really *got* roleplaying (which used to be a huge deal in furry, don't know if it still is), and after some mishaps with obsessive behavior, I ended up being afraid to socialize much.

As for Scooby-Doo, no, I don't get the reason why WB is so hype about it now. I *do* remember the New Scooby-Doo Movies fondly, though.

glennmagusharvey

Anonus said:

I am?

Yeah, the really dedicated and well-versed fans have lots of opinions on specific animation studios, directors, writers, artists, voice actors, and so on. As opposed to simply talking about the show and its characters, setting, story, etc..

Basically, focusing on people, the way Hollywood and celebrity mags focus on their movie stars.

Part of the reason is that anime tends to have many smaller series rather than long ones, so if one watches a ton of anime series it becomes more likely for a person to develop a familiarity with different production people/teams over a variety of series, especially when other fans around them are talking about these things, and then they end up paying attention to these things more and more.