This is something I thought about while listening to the pod.
Part of the reason Toonstruck didn’t do so well might be that it was looking too much at older cartoons. This type of game really needs to have its finger right on the pulse of popular culture.
Obviously they didn’t have the rights to any familiar IPs, but I was getting way more vibes of Hanna-Barbera, Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons that were already a decade or two old. There were hints of Animaniacs (itself explicitly backward-looking), Ren and Stimpy and Rocko’s Modern Life. But even Zanydu feels like it owes as much to Loony Tunes as any of those.
Think about shows like Earthworm Jim, Powerpuff Girls, Catdog, Dexter’s Laboratory, Pinky and the Brain, Angry Beavers, Bonkers… I’ve got way more, but I’ll stop there. They totally represented the zeitgeist of mid 90s kids cartoons, but I didn’t really see much in Toonstruck that felt like those shows.
I wonder if they should have used their budget for well-known voice actors for acquiring the rights to newer IPs instead?
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