Remembering '90s-Era American Animation

When we look at '80s nostalgia it seems that the things of childhood loom large here--not least, certain cartoons of the Saturday morning/weekday afternoon type, as the legacy of G.I. Joe, He-Man, the Transformers and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shows. By contrast nothing I know of from the '90s has quite that cachet.

In fairness the reasons for the change have been talked about quite a bit. There is the way that, exceptional in an age of telecommunications deregulation, the regulatory climate became less hospitable to the basis for those '80s-era hits, the making of cartoons that were basically half-hour commercials for toys and candy, Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour-style. There is the broader decline of the Saturday morning/weekday afternoon time slots associated with that fare--as the proliferation of home video and cable offered more viewing options in different hours, and increasingly accessible, immersive, absorbing video games competed with cartoons for children's attention. And there was the broader fragmentation of popular culture in the digital age that, if a far cry from what it has become in 2025, was already clearly underway in 1995 as the numbers of channels rose, and the Internet began to enter the lives of the broader public.

Still, the fact that it was appearing in a market less conducive to hits of the kind so prominent in the '80s does not change the fact that it was an interesting time for American animation, not just including the revival of animation as a prime time staple intended to entertain more mature viewers (this the decade of The Simpsons, The Critic, Family Guy--as well as darker stuff like Aeon Flux), but even the stuff of the kids' time slots. Both pressed and inspired by the successes of Japanese animation not just globally but in the American market itself (where, for example, Beast King GoLion was a hit as Voltron), this saw animators get more ambitious. The results were not always spectacular, with part of the legacy of '90s animation what were for many visually and narratively disappointing reworkings of shows like the post-movie continuation of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero or The New Adventures of He-Man (attitudes toward which have not warmed with the passing of the years, such that for fans the '80s versions remain the principle objects of interest and nostalgia). But along with the clinkers there were shows that won enthusiastic followings, from Batman: The Animated Series (something of a watershed for the American market, such that it even scored a brief shot at prime time on the FOX network), to the FOX Kids take on the X-Men, to the space opera Exo Squad, to Phantom 2040--the last of which, if somewhat more obscure than the others, also exemplifies just how different the material of the '90s could be from that of the '80s. Created by Batman: The Animated Series veterans Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, with character designs by Aeon Flux's Peter Chung, and Big Name voice talent supplied by Scott Valentine, Leah Remini, Margot Kidder, Ron Perlman, Richard Lynch and Mark Hamill, the series took Lee Falk's classic comic strip character The Phantom, and imagining the young man who is the twenty-fourth in the line started by the original Phantom taking up the hero's mantle in a cyberpunk version of the then-distant-seeming year of 2040 fighting to save a world on the verge of ecological collapse from the villainy of the dynasts of the world-straddling Maximum Inc.. A perhaps unlikely-seeming blend, it worked, all as, in spite of the constraints of children's television, the arcs of not just an overarching story but subplots inside it (including smaller mysteries that connect back to the bigger one), the world-building (we got city-states, cyberspace, posthumanism--the whole cyberpunk package, developed in detail), the characterizations (as with the tragedy and contradictions of the life of Hubert Graft, now reduced to an unwilling henchman of those he once fought), making for a show rather far removed from the '80s-era series' with their plots typically wrapped up in a single episode, simplistic premises, one-dimensional characters, and shallow treatment of their themes (with the ecology-mindedness so fashionable in '90s-era cartoons, when Captain Planet was on the air and even the Joes assigned Flint to a special environmental crime-fighting unit, in this case going beyond a mere gesture toward "education" in its vision of the "Maximum Era"). All the same, if fans, critics and historians of the form have given credit where credit was due, it did mean that success was more of the cult than the major breakout type, with the endurance of a sufficient fan base for the '90s-era X-Men series to interest Disney Plus in a belated continuation an exception rather than the rule.