Why was society less open minded about medieval fantasy themed TV shows and adult oriented animation that wasn't comedy back during the 2000s?

[AstroV69]

Back during the 2000s it seemed like medieval fantasy shows and "Battlestar Galactica" were seen as shows only "People who live in basements" watched.

Animation was seen as something that should either be a "kids thing" or raunchy adult comedy.

Now we are getting stuff like this!

 

 

Why wasn't society open minded about TV back then? Was it because CGI was less advanced? Was society more obsessed with Hollywood style materialism?

 

[DDE]

I don't think the premise of your question is valid. BSG wasn't a niche thing. Sure, it was a sci-fi nerd thing, but by the 2000s "sci-fi nerd" wasn't a marginal identity. I mean, you probably wouldn't get references to BSG in the Big Bang Theory of the viewers of the latter didn't know what the former was.

Spoiler

Granted, the references didn't require that much context 

I do think the low budgets and expensive, laborious CGI meant that the fantasy shows of the late 1990s-2000s were quite barebones and had to embrace the camp. BSG broke ground by having a lot of decent CGI in every episode, but that was for space-based action, it took quite a bit more time for it to become available for everything else, and it is still more labor-intensive.

All that said, you're talking about animation, a whole separate topic that I can't comment on due to aversion to anime.

[AlamoVampire]

This really wont be a satisfying answer but its the truth. Different time and place now than it was 10-20-30 years ago.

012409282022

[SunlitZelkova]

I don’t think it has to do with “society” at all. Effectively everywhere outside of Japan, people just couldn’t, and often still can’t really accept animation as being a medium to tell a story rather than “lowly” children’s entertainment. That’s a problem with the audience, not “society”.

Understandably, the raunchiness prevalent throughout Japanese pop culture is a turn off to Japanese animation and that may trickle down to animation as a whole (although IMO I don’t find most of it any worse than the types of things often seen in Western live action works). So that doesn’t help either.

There’s not much of a “solution” to this, because it is a valid opinion. I find reality television pretty ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean it is wrong. No one is going to convince me that Keeping Up With the Kardashians is good entertainment and likewise no one is going to convince someone uninterested in animation that animation is good entertainment (for adults). But that’s ok. We can like what we want to and dislike want we want to.

[kerbiloid]

Because serious cartoons were always been made by French, the 3d animation was poor, and there was no Netflix to run the "Love, Death, and Robots".

[Nuke]

never really liked fantasy. the only reason i watched got was that there seemed to be a scifi drought post bsg (and a lot of shows trying to be bsg and failing as a result, im looking at you sgu). and the only reason i watched the lotr movies was because they were great movies.

but i remember watching the first episode of the simpsons,  the batman animated series (after watching reruns of adam west batman). me and my sister both liked things like gargoyles (mostly because it had st:tng alumni in its voice cast), futurama, and dbz. the dbz got us into anime, though i got bored with it by the 2010s. adult comedy shows like family guy and others did not interest me, but ive seen alot of the episodes with my sister's family. i did watch metalocalypes for being a metal head. i prefer live action shows over animation. though i did recently binge love death and robots and was not disappointed (after being recommended by ty and that guy). 

Edited September 30, 2022 by Nuke

[tater]

I don't think the premise is correct, BSG was pretty popular.

 

 

[Bej Kerman]

On 9/28/2022 at 12:02 AM, AstroV69 said:

Why was society less open minded about medieval fantasy themed TV shows and adult oriented animation that wasn't comedy back during the 2000s?

Just because you were a kid during the 2000s and were too young to keep up with events, doesn't mean said events didn't happen. A lot of people seem to be biased this way and let themselves become tricked into thinking x or y thing they like were marginalized back then.

[magnemoe]

On 9/28/2022 at 11:39 AM, kerbiloid said:

Because serious cartoons were always been made by French, the 3d animation was poor, and there was no Netflix to run the "Love, Death, and Robots".

Think you are pretty correct,  animation has gotten cheaper, same with special effects and we have much more high end content now with streaming. 
So its higher chance a show get picked up. 
As for genre its something who comes and goes in waves, for a long time nobody will touch it after an series of flops, they you get an success and everybody tried to copy it. 

[SunlitZelkova]

3 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Think you are pretty correct,  animation has gotten cheaper, same with special effects and we have much more high end content now with streaming. 
So its higher chance a show get picked up. 
As for genre its something who comes and goes in waves, for a long time nobody will touch it after an series of flops, they you get an success and everybody tried to copy it. 

Source? I checked into costs in 2021 and CGI often is more expensive than live action effects. This is why in Tenet they crashed a real 747 into a hangar instead of animating it.

I think the reason we see more CGI is because studios throw more money at the content they produce, rather than CGI being cheaper.

Like how Germany is going to be getting lots more goodies for the Bundeswehr because they want them, not because they are cheaper.

[magnemoe]

19 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Source? I checked into costs in 2021 and CGI often is more expensive than live action effects. This is why in Tenet they crashed a real 747 into a hangar instead of animating it.

I think the reason we see more CGI is because studios throw more money at the content they produce, rather than CGI being cheaper.

Like how Germany is going to be getting lots more goodies for the Bundeswehr because they want them, not because they are cheaper.

Yes standards has also increased a lot lots of current TV shows trying to pull people to the service has movie level budgets.
On the other hand something like the clone war animated series should be pretty cheap to produce.
A lots like military stuff has become twice as expensive but 10 times as effective if you pick from the top shelf. 

[Nuke]

last episode of star trek lower decks was awesome. must see for ds9 fans. glad to see quark still being quark. 

On 10/2/2022 at 11:46 AM, tater said:

I don't think the premise is correct, BSG was pretty popular.

 

 

bsg was good, but when all the other shows started playing copycat, they not only lost the charm they had, but ended up feeling like a lame cash grab. 

[Superfluous J]

On 9/28/2022 at 3:09 AM, SunlitZelkova said:

That’s a problem with the audience, not “society”.

Seems to me that those 2 groups have the same members.

I too don't recall BSG being all that marginalized, though my entertainment opinions tend to be marginal so anything more popular than the stuff I like looks mainstream to me

That said, I don't tend to like "serious" animated things. They seem to tend to go overboard with the "we're not for kids!" themes and that gets boring for me quickly.

[SunlitZelkova]

18 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

Seems to me that those 2 groups have the same members.

The number of people who watch a thing and then complain about it or shun it is vastly lower than the number of people that make up “society”.

[Nuke]

i can only watch the shows they make. if they dont make my preferred thing, il find something else. ive watched a lot of shows i wouldnt have watched for want of my usual genres. as much as id like to see a serious attempt at a battletech tv series (live action this time pls, your audience is in their 40s and 50s now), more dune stuffs, or any adaptation of various classic scifi books that im never going to have the time to read. but im going to be stuck with the mediocre star trek/wars derived shows or whatever the next big thing is. 

Edited October 5, 2022 by Nuke