It's remarkable just how disproportionate their influence has been on Western animation. Their DNA has been embedded in the medium for the past 40 years or so, for better or for worse.
>>154857874We must go back in time and kill Robert Crumb!
>>154857920You're going to have to kill a lot more people than just him. It wasn't the work of one person. it was part of a larger cultural trend. Between the backlash against the Comics Code, the rise of the 1960s counterculture and the popularity of magazines at the time, an entire artistic movement emerged. Its defining characteristic was a disdain for anything seen as normal, beautiful, or traditionally moral in American societyA lot of the artists and writers from that scene eventually found their way to MAD and National Lampoon, where those sensibilities became increasingly mainstream. By the 1990s and 2000s, that influence had fully worked its way into Western animation. Many of the gross-out cartoons from that era, with their deliberately ugly character designs and gross out humor and anti-establishment attitude, can trace their roots back to the late underground comix movement.
>>154857874>>154857920You'd have to blame the mainstream for not doing enough.
>>154858741I don't think much could have been done. The Reagan administration deregulated material targeted at children. Before that, there were very strict regulations governing how companies could market to kids and what kind of content could be created to target them. Once those rules were largely stripped away, children became a feeding frenzy for corporations.That's why 80's kids had far more children's TV shows, toys, and junk food made and marketed to them than any previous generation of American children. Obviously, this wasn't sustainable in the long term, and when it came to an end, guys from the underground comix scene were in the best position to take the reins.
>>154857874Was Ren & Stimpy inspired by underground comix?
