Oh yes, when I said "bring back Bagpuss" - I meant, re-show it for the younger generation. This won't happen though (unless it's revamped) and I've thought about it quite a lot. It seems that all kids shows nowadays have to extremely bright, fast-paced and with loud thumping highly-compressed audio. Why? Well, 'they' will say it's to engage the kids (hmmm, I was _very_ engaged with the likes of Bagpuss, Fingerbobs etc. when I was a wee-one - so no, that doesn't wash).
Agreed, agreed... You will find that kids these days will be equally engaged by the old stuff, so those excuses really don't hold water.
I think it's basically to compete with what has become the 'norm'. I find this so very sad as it's not relaxing viewing. The thing about many kids shows from the Bagpuss era is that they were extremely relaxing. From the colours/hues chosen (pastel shades, not really bright - almost black and white!) to the lovely relaxing acoustic guitar, folk sound. It was the stuff of dreams - row row row your boat. Truly beautiful. Now is it THUMP THUMP THUMP BANG BANG horrible horrible horrible.
Meh, I could be doing the 'Rose tinted glasses' things or the "things were better back then" cliches. Please, I would love to be convinced otherwise. Heck, even the 'newer' 'old' stuff was better IMO - Pigeon Street is lovely too, relaxing sounds and some lovely music.
I'm obviously getting too old...
It's not rose-tinted-glasses, it's really not. A lot of apologists for low-quality modern stuff will claim "It's just nostalgia", but generally you can often see the higher quality of the older shows (and games, and films, and so on), and, indeed, of high-quality modern productions as well, when placed alongside low-quality modern productions.
I mean, sometimes it really is that literal - a comparison between unprofessional scribbles that make crude "jokes" about body parts and crude noises, and well-made visuals with well-thought-out dialogue.
Of course, sometimes there were, and are, fringe-cases where the animation budget wasn't up to much but the writing quality and imaginativeness, as well as the overall design (even if the animation itself wasn't that great), made up for it, but even with those it's obvious that there is a measure of quality present.
EDIT: oh, regarding CGI being more expensive - is that really true? I had always thought that was the reason for it's recent over-use.
To cite a very recent example (I'm using Disney ones because they're very easy to find
), the recent Winnie the Pooh movie that Disney produced had a modest budget of $30 million. The traditionally-animated movie they made before that, The Princess and the Frog, had a budget of $105 million, which is quite a bit more, but it's less than half of Tangled's $260 million, and just over half of Toy Story 3's $200 million. It's worth noting that Tangled was in development hell for quite a while and that this is sometimes cited for its budget being so high, but Toy Story 3 was not, and yet its budget is similarly high.
A curious aside is that CGI did have budgets as low as Pooh's around the release of the first Toy Story - that movie also had a budget of around $30 million, but by the time of A Bug's Life, this had doubled. It's seemingly only gone up since then, with Toy Story 2 being $90 million (noteworthy partly because it was origially intended to be straight-to-video!), Monsters, Inc. being $115 million, and so on.
That said, having grabbed some examples for this post, I can see that there are plenty of examples of both types of animation where the budgets are all over the place. Perhaps there's less of a difference than there seemed to be, and it really is a case of trying to be like everything else for whatever reason...
The creators of Bagpuss (and so much else) always had a very tight grip on their stuff, I think they may well have turned down numerous approaches from companies looking to 'rejuvenate' their classics, but no dice.
Really? Good for them, seriously!
There was a very good BBC documentary a couple of years ago "a life in small films" (easily found) well worth a look. Some funny anecdotes, and a look at the (literal) garden shed where most of their stuff was made.
I have all their stuff on DVD! Just too much nostalgia, the muzak, the pacifying voiceover, the dreamlike atmosphere - magic.
There's something that's notably missing from animation these days. I won't say it should be in all animation, as I always appreciated the wide variety of styles* that were broadcast (and often released on VHS, as well) when I was a young'un, but it doesn't really seem to be well-represented these days...
*(From Alvin and the Chipmunks, to Towser, to Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, to Aubrey, to Bertha, to SuperTed, to Bagpuss, to Bucky O'Hare, to The Mysterious Cities of Gold, to Roobarb, to Ulysses 31, to more obscure imports like Spiff & Hercules, and The Diplodos, and a whole host of eclectic stuff in between. I know most folks will remember at least some of these, perhaps even a lot of them, but how many of you recall the more obscure ones?)
It is, however, criminal that a point n click adventure was never made of Noggin The Nog!
I must confess that I never liked Noggin the Nog! :lol:
I watched a fair bit of Rastamouse, at first for the jokes, then its just on and i leave it playing while im on my phone browsing or whatever - Cpt Wensleydale and the easy cru, its pretty funny.
I will admit to liking some of the punny names, like Wensley's.
The accent soon wore off though and now its all about TINGA TINGA TALES.
Watch an episode of that if you got HD and embrace the beautiful artwork, the detail of patterns on the animals coats is really good i thought
can see here, but the detail is lost seriously, unless you got an HD computer maybe..
http://www.tingating....com/watch.aspx
Oh, wow. How refreshing to see something that's not blatantly animated in Adobe Flash, that isn't unprofessionally drawn and isn't aping the style of every other badly-drawn programme out there, and that clearly isn't using dumbed-down speech (or, worse, just gibberish at an age when kids need to be picking up as many new words as possible!).
