Calling slightly edgier cartoons "disrupting cable" seems like a stretch.
They subverted the tropes everyone had taken for granted since the 50's or so that TV was expected to have. They outraged parents and the extreme conservative groups that wielded fairly significant power at the time.
Shortly before that we had 'the Dungeons and Dragons' scares and it was the time of the violent video game and explicit music crackdowns. Those cartoons became targets for those same kinds of people.
Without those shows, we probably wouldn't have the kinds of cartoons we have today.
I would definitely include more than just the two cartoons in the article and MTV as the sole disruptors of cable.
But, the cartoons of that era were definitely disruptive in a way that's hard to appreciate without experiencing.
You're talking about shows up to twenty years removed from Bakshi cartoons like Fritz the Cat or his eighties Mighty Mouse show. The Simpsons and such definitely popularized the medium, but it didn't create it.
>Shortly before that we had 'the Dungeons and Dragons' scares and it was the time of the violent video game and explicit music crackdowns.
There is always content that is slightly edgier that conservatives freak out over. Some outraged people didn't disrupt cable, cable embraced the cartoons and pushed things further with things like the creation of Adult Swim.
There was a bit of separation between TV cartoons and feature length ones back then. You're correct, the precedent for adult oriented animation had been set years before, but I wouldn't really compare movies like that, or even the more adult oriented anime shows and films in Japan at the time to that era of western TV cartoons.
As far as western TV cartoons went, prior to those late 80's, early 90's shows, there wasn't really any like them.
Virtually all those shows creators credit Bakshi as an influence though. Hell, the asshole co-creator of Ren and Stimpy worked with him on Mighty Mouse.
They likely needed cable to be able to successfully move to television, but I don't see how they disrupted cable.
edit they changed the title to "upended animation." While I stil think it's a slight overstatement, that title at least represents what the article is about.
I'd bet a lot of early punk rockers credit the Beatles as an influence, doesn't mean they invented punk rock.
For comparison a list of pre-edgy 1980's cartoons recommended for adults
https://www.animationforadults.com/2015/05/afas-top-20-carto...
vs a 90's era list of cartoons recommended for adults. I think you'll find a very huge difference in the types of shows being recommended.
https://www.ranker.com/list/90s-adult-cartoons/ranker-tv
>Hell, the asshole co-creator of Ren and Stimpy worked with him on Mighty Mouse.
But it was him not Bakshi that pushed that adult style onto mainstream television. Don't get me wrong. I really enjoy Bakshi's work but he isn't really the one responsible for bringing edgy cartoons to home television.
We have vastly different memories of Mighty Mouse. Ren and Stimpy definitely took it a few steps further, but it's not like the asshole suddenly started making weird shit after working on Mighty Mouse.
And I've admitted several times that the nineties were more influential for adult cartoons on TV. I just think that has more to do with the growth in cable and the rise of outsourcing animation than any pioneers suddenly wanting to make adult cartoons.
At that same time the most immoral live action show was married with children, magnitudes less immoral than some of these cartoons. These animated shows really did open the door for making television something that didn’t always have to be family friendly.
And it spawned a whole genre of similar shows in the 90s/early 2000s that formed most of the original Adult Swim lineup.
Ren & Stimpy, Powerpuff Girls, Pinky & the Brain, Magic School Bus, Johnny Bravo, I Am Weasel, Freakazoid!, Eek! the Cat, Earthworm Jim, Dexter's Lab, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Captain Planet, Rocko's Modern Life, Talespin, Tiny Toon Adventures, VeggieTales, Captain Planet, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Bonkers, Animaniacs.
But then again, I'm not sure our current times even allow that kind of humor anymore.
Plus, like half of those have had/will have reboots.
The 90s "weird" (grunge? punk?) doesn't seem to be there anymore.
I mean, Christ, look at a still from Courage: http://mobiletvshows.net/imdb_epimages/242235.jpg
When you say "edgy", do you mean "novel/creative"? That would explain the confusion. Definitions 3, 7, and/or 8 at Wiktionary are what we're using: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/edgy You seem to be using definition 2, which is not the common meaning today.
The only shows on that list that are "edgy" by the everyday definition are Ren and Stimpy, I Am Weasel (a spinoff of Cow and Chicken, which was a straight ripoff of Ren and Stimpy's visual and writing style), and sometimes Animaniacs. The rest may have slipped an off-color joke under the radar from time to time, but it wasn't their main thing.
There's a lot of good shows on that list, yes, and they broke plenty of ground in terms of kids' animation quality, but only a few of them were pushing the envelope of "what you can get away with on TV."