Cartoons in the eighties were terrible, they were elongated toy adverts cheaply animated by children in China and written by heavy-handed moralists from the Bible Belt.
WORDS: ROBERT FOSTER
You can bang on nostalgically as long as you want, but I will bet you my external hard drive and all its 102 Gigabytes of music that you can’t sit through more than three minutes of this or this without wanting to smash your computer monitor into the ground out of sheer frustrated boredom. Those shows were totally stupid and I should have spent the time I was watching them learning maths better or something.
BUT some good came from those shitty little animations – there’s a whole bunch of people who grew up on those shows and who like to draw who have made the aesthetic (could you sum up the look as brightly coloured, masculine, semi realistic and always a bit triumphant? I think you could. It’s what I’m going with) their own. Because let’s face it, the way those shows looked and felt was the only thing about them that was any good.
There are a few guys worth mentioning – the mighty Jiro Bevis (who currently has a show at Jaguar Shoes in Shoreditch) and our very own regular contributor Daniel David Freeman immediately spring to mind as people who clearly watched dumb heroes with big muscles and a strict moral code defeat a skeletal overlord with stupid minions and a spine chilling cackle, on the regular.
Another two guys who are amazing are Will Sweeney and Ferry Gouw (another Platform contributor, holla), who were able to take the aesthetic further by reanimating it for music videos (with Birdy Nam Nam and Major Lazer respectively). They’ve matured the look, twisted it, fried it and distorted it until they’ve become the best music videos I’ve seen for years, ever.
(Both these videos are so, so cool, but special extra credit goes to the Ferry for putting a toy advert in the middle of his one!)
Birdy Nam Nam – The Parachute Ending
Major Lazer – Hold The Line
