Err.. you seem to have missed all my "I'm talking only about the 80's" (and for tv and apart from Disney).
No wait, maybe you didn't even read my post, because I said that the quality was so-so even for anime..

I read your post, no need to be an ass. Even during the '80s there were plenty of good cartoons being produced. Disney was the biggest, but they were hardly the only ones.

Sorry but.. that was an ass reply to an ass post :P
Anyway, can you add some examples? It would be good to remember\discover good ones.

I say Anime as of now finally got more sophisticated animation. One Piece as of now certainly does not look cheap.

But yeah name one japanese animation of the 40s and 30s that looks even close to the quality of American animation, and this example I am posting was for Propganda:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l14WDZCnz-w

see ?
other cartoons started to ape batman tas's animation style barely a year later
it made a huge impact on cartoons

the 80's were less kind to batman cartoons though the burton movies especially the 89 movie TAs went in to production before returns had an equally huge ( and obvious ) influence on TAS



i do have experience with the G1 comics
and i can make blanket statements

and actually the first 12 or so US tf comics started of storngly if a bit stilted and it lead in to a 12 part storyline that is still one fo the best
where the decepticons effectivley won
optimus prime was reduced to a head
the autobots were dead
megatron was dethroned by shockwave
and there was only 1 autobot left ( ratchet )

the whole status quo was onyl just introduced and was already uprooted
its only after those issues where bob budiasky was starting to falter
he was the main architect of the transformers franchise
hasbro required him to come up with names and bio's and tech specs to form the backbone fiction of their transformers
but they also tossed quite a lot of toys each month at him which he had to introduce in the comics
and that made it hard for him to keep a narration going
most of the time he didnt even try

and after 2 years he already showed signs of burnout but they ( marvel and hasbro ) wouldnt let him go untill 1988 and issue 53 of the american series

in between issues 12 and 53 budiansky had occasional flashes of brilliance ( issues 25 26 the headmasters mini series )
but on the whole his output started to falter when it was bad it was really really bad

the tf US comics you probably read were the later issues written by simon furman budiansky's replacement ( budiansky recommended furman himself )
who was the tf UK series writer and already quite familar with transformers ( and now 25 years later he is still writing tf fiction and finished his run on marvel us with issue 100 but thats for another time )
furman tended not to talk down to his audiance and treat transformers as a space opera

transformers UK is the comic series most people refer to when they say that the G1 comic was good
and thats because it was a weekly series and the main comic was 11 pages at that so half a us comic
half of the 332 issues of the comics were reprints of the main US series

but that still leaves more then 160 issues with home grown material which are woven in and out of the Us stories and form a completer seperate counter narrative with characters that arent even seen in the Us material
and these two narratives rarely if ever clash amazingly enough

when they do however its because furman messed up ( two megatrons ...dont ask ) but on the whole tf UK still holds together quite well

Which I am glad Batman TAS was copied. Because quality animation wise Batman was groundbreaking, The DCAU, along side Disney's Renissance brought back Quality animation that has not been seen since the 1950s.

Both for TV and Film.

there was no "anime" of the 30's and 40's
what we call anime today was started in the 1950's and 60's when tezuma osaku started to ape disney animated styles as well as other wesytern animated styles

the big anime eyes were pioneerd by osaku and inspired by the likes of betty boop

in other words you could say anime has come full circle
it has been influence in its earliest days by western animation and now western animation is influenced by its offspring

the first wave of anime were astro boy gigantor and kimba the white lion
as i said batman TAS changed the landscape of animation ;p
it was dark
gloomy
had an art deco art direction
was one of the first animated series to depict realistic fire arms again
and showed that cartoon did not have to be dumbed down to be enjoyable

later animated series picked up on that and became heavily serialised and character driven ( beast wars was both due to the constraints of CGI animation of the time they could only have a handfull of characters at all time
it took too long and was too expensive t o continue to create new models and render them so they had to make do with what they had the result was one of the best transformers series now and then )

But Beast Wars for a television show was pretty ahead of it's time. And the show more than made up for decent writing.

You would say that with the advent of Cartoon Network Animation in TV sort of declined a bit, but at least the likes of Dexter's Lab, Powerpuff Girlsm and Samurai Jack has much more animation than the shit that was spawned in the 60s and 70s.

Seriously fuck Hanna-Barbara. Fuck Yogi Bear, Flinstones, and Scooby Doo.

Heck Scooby Doo got better in the 90s I argue. The animation in Scooby Doo on Zombie Island was Quality.

Snowkatt, I never said that I didn't consider those batman series groundbreaking :P
I already knew that, but they were simply out of the discussion scope.

^ i hate scooby doo in any and all iterations lets leave it at that

but even in the 90's HB already started to move to quality
ie swat kats the new adventures of johnny quest and the like

the writing part is the strongest suit of beast wars especially since the CGI is a bit ropey nowadays
and i dragged them in ;p

especially since we are now talking about animation from the 60's to 90's

Ugh.. even if funny, those cartoons' quality was quite terrible :\
And I noticed it back then, not now.

Still did not look as cheap as Hanna Barbara cheapness.

And screw you man Genndy Tartakovsky is god.

easy and quick to produce
the quality of star wars clone wars ( the 2005 series ) was actually pretty damn good
but that was an awesome series ( much better then the movies it supported )
ie top cat the flint stones the jetsons
yogi bear
and more of that "ilk"

Oh come on, I think the first twelve episodes of the original Scooby Doo were great, their addition of "Scrappy" to the later shows ran its nails on the chalkboard only second to the introduction of Jar-Jar to the Star Wars franchise.

FINALLY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF THE 2003 MINI SERIES :D