Dated even before it was out

[TigerQuoll]

#11253

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?

[Evil Taco]

#11549

I think this is a good point of view. For one, the development took longer than they planned I believe, which wouldn’t really change what they took inspiration from, but the newer wave of cartoons would have been further away. Animaniacs is a good comparison point in the way it too was looking back to the classics.

[Evil Taco]

#11550

April’s game Sam & Max is maybe also a good comparison point! Sam & Max came out in 1993 and Toonstruck would’ve come out much closer to it than it did if the production had been smoother. But Sam & Max genuinely is coming from the underground/indie comics direction (through Purcells) and when you look at it from the way you framed for Toonstruck, it’s a big difference.

Of course, I think Sam and Max too is dated, but not really from the perspective of its release year!

Still thinking a bit more from Toonstruck’s Animaniacs comparison, classic WB cartoons were having a renaissance in the early 90s. Tiny Toons had ended by 1996, Animaniacs was still going, Space Jam was also out in 1996. (I remember playing a SNES Tiny Toons game at friends’..) I don’t think Toonstruck was completely out of sync, but it was a little bit behind the curve perhaps.