Lightdasher wrote:I don't think it's just Super. Super is definitely the biggest offender to me though, and it upsets me at least a bit in that regard. Vegeta bringing back the Final Flash for the first time was nice, but even then I thought it was unlike Vegeta because, before Super, he'd always have a new attack as his big finisher unless we count non-canon events (Galick Gun, the attack dubbed "Atomic Blast" in the games that was meant to finish Majin Buu, Final Flash, and even Final Shine Attack, are good examples). I didn't even watch Super that much, but it got annoying how much he'd use the attack, as though the writers wanted him to have his own Kamehameha.
However, and especially concerning the topic as a whole, I do believe that we can see this same issue in Z and GT. A ton of characters used the Kamehameha in Z, even if only once, and GT's big attacks were flashy (Revenge Death Ball comes to mind first, then Shocking Death Ball), but they're also pretty samey. Not to mention that, despite a series where the main character is supposed to be a martial artist, the physical attacks barely ever show special distinction. It bugged me when Goku attacked Jiren for the first time and Krillin acknowledged Goku and Jiren both as martial artists, when all Goku was doing was spamming his closed fists to the guy at the time. I haven't had any training with that sort of thing, but that's an attack even I can do (even if I can't make it look as cool)!
Fair points all-round.
Puaru wrote:It would be nice if that was true, but I honestly dont think it is, especially not with kids. Remember, one of the single biggest cartoon crazes in history (speaking from a global perspective) was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And aside from the first few episodes, that show was honestly garbage. We all remember it as good, but going back and watching it now, it is painfully clear what a low-quality show it was. And yet, at the height of its popularity it was possibly the most popular kids cartoon of all time (and I say possibly mostly just because of Pokemon, which is by the way another show that wasnt any good but managed to trump all of its more well-written competition).
It isn't garbage.
It's definitely deeply flawed in ways that, looking back as an adult in the year 2018, makes it just fall completely flat in comparison to how you remember it when you saw it as a kid in the '80s, but ultimately, its animation was decent, its music was good, it had a good setup, and from what I remember, the writing wasn't bad.
Ultimately, it wasn't an all-time great show, but it was fine. There wasn't really anything like in on TV when it debuted, so while it wasn't a perfect execution of its premise, and it definitely suffers from all the same problems every other '80s cartoon suffered from(Most notably time constraints and low budgets), for what it was, it was a pretty good '80s cartoon.
I'm remind of Star Trek: The Original Series; it was a very unique show when it first aired, but looking back on it now, about half the episodes in the show are a bit crap, the special effects aren't convincing, the acting was often a bit too over the top, and the show overall was often quite campy and cheesy, but it was something people hadn't really seen before, and when it was good, it was
damn good. So, people stuck with it. Similar to TMNT, it did a decent job at doing something that no one had really done before, and while it's deeply flawed on reflection, and other shows have done it better, when it was on TV, it was doing new things, it was often doing them well, and it was generally an hour(Half for TMNT) of TV every week that was worth watching.
So, really, I don't think you gain any value in this argument by saying a show from the '80s doesn't hold up anymore, and using that to counter my argument that kids deserve better than some of the crap people think they'll just watch regardless is something that I don't think really works.
Today, we have shows like the original Steven Universe, Adventure Time, Avatar... Go back a few years(And given the nature of reruns, that's not a stretch) and you have Ben 10(The original one), Danny Phantom, Invader Zim, the 2011 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers Prime... I could keep going. The point is that nowadays, there's a plethora of great shows airing on TV, so in order to get to the top, you have to make shows on that standard. The animation has to be nice, the writing has to be sharp, etc.
Sure, sometimes you'll get the anomalous piece of crap show that gets popular; Teen Titans Go, for instance. But look at "Grown-up" TV too; Big Brother, X-Factor, Atlantis, and other crap somehow gets a big audience, but the fact still remains that those are just outliers. The real popular stuff is the actually good stuff. Usually.
In any case, my ultimate point isn't that only good shows will invariably get popular, or that popular shows will always be good, it's that something being "For kids" isn't a reason to put zero effort into it. Probably my favourite two shows when I was a kid were Animaniacs and Pinky And The Brain, both shows that my parents and my siblings consider to still be good shows that hold up to this day. Not every show is an Animaniacs or a Pinky And The Brain, but if you do make a show like that, and it doesn't fail the lottery of TV production/airing(Ratings, toy sales, etc.), you have a real winner.
And no, not every good kids' show is of that level, just like how not every grown-up show is a Star Trek: Next Generation, or a Breaking Bad, but if TNG and BB hadn't been good, they wouldn't have got anywhere near as popular as they are. And if Animaniacs hadn't been as good as it was, it wouldn't be popular enough for Hulu to be looking at reviving it.
The point of Dragon Ball is to enjoy it. Never lose sight of that.