Austin "Oppo" Papageorge wrote to ask me what I thought 2009 would be like when I was breathing the air and walking the halls of 1979. Wow! An interesting question! Most of my predictions from that year had to do with animation and cartooning because '79 was the year I got my first animation job. Only about half my predictions came true, but maybe that's a higher average than some can claim.
BTW, the pictures I'm using to illustrate this are all from 1979...well, 1977 in the case of the "Saturday Night Fever" poster, but let's not quibble. None of them have to do with animation, but I thought they might make it easier for the reader to imagine himself back in the day, strutting down the street like Superfly, and and nurturing his mullet.
Actually I remember the predictions that failed more than I remember the ones that succeeded. I had no idea that anime would become as popular in this country as it did. I thought it would never appeal to more than a niche market. The early anime shows like Astro Boy were shot on 6's and it would have been inconceivable to me that something that jerky would sell.
Not only that but a lot of anime had to do with earnest and idealistic heroes, something that seemed out of sync with the anti-heroes and decadent irony that abounded in 1979. I'm earnest myself, and had no trouble relating to idealistic heroes, but I doubted whether the rest of America could be persuaded to feel the same way. I was wrong. Apparently there were a lot more earnest people than I thought, and anime swept the country. I learned two big lessons from that: 1) trust that people like and will always like stories and adventure, and 2) verve and imagination trump slick production values.
Musically what was going on that year was Punk, Disco and break dancing. Break dancing wasn't associated with racial politics, crime and drugs the way hip hop was later on. In 1979 it was fun and exciting and everybody wondered what would become of it. I predicted that black animators would bring a fresh, funny rap sensibility to animation, but it never happened. Most black animators I know prefer classical Disney, Marvel or Hanna Barbera.
Video tape recorders (above) began to appear around this 1979. They were expensive but everybody in the animation industry was chomping at the bit to get one. There wasn't much over-the-counter animation, we just taped cartoons off TV and endlessly still-framed them.
I thought that video tape recorders would usher in a new golden age of full animation. It was hard to work on the limited TV stuff after seeing in detail what full animation was capable of, and I thought everybody else felt the same way. What I didn't count on was that a lot of young animators grew up with Hanna Barbera, and didn't mind limited animation at all, VHS not withstanding.
I remember that most people in the industry weren't too bothered when ink and paint began to go overseas in this period. The feeling was that boring non-creative jobs were unsavable. Lots of older animators told me that we need never fear that the Asians would take away our creative jobs because they grew up in authoritarian societies where creativity was discouraged. They assured me that the outsourcing would stop with ink and paint. I accurately predicted that the outsourcing would go way beyond ink and paint, and I felt terrible for the painters.
In 1979 and the early 80s absolutely nobody I talked to foresaw the computer revolution that would usher in 3D animation and threaten the very existence of cartooning. Back then it was believed that computers would actually make the 2D industry healthier by lowering the outrageous cost of coloring the drawings. Some artists imagined that the American ink and painters would get their jobs back when it became cheaper to do coloring here on computers, rather than overseas, with manual labor. It never occurred to anyone that people overseas could buy computers too.
I also predicted wrongly that funny, cartoony animation would drive out the superhero stuff. It did for a while but anime gave superheroes new life, and retro design with a graphic emphasis drove out a lot of the looser, cartoony look. I thought late 70s cartoons like Get a Job, The Big Snit, and The Cat Came Back would usher in a new look but that revolution fizzled out for some reason that I still don't understand.
I was completely blindsided by the near collapse of funny cartooning starting in the 90s. In retrospect it's not hard to figure what caused it: young artists felt they were more likely to get a job with computing skills than with drawing skills, so cartoon drawing withered on the vine for a while. I say "for a while" because it's made, and is still making, a comeback. Study cartooning...if you're good, you definitely will be able to make a living from it! Thank God for John Kricfalusi, Ralph Bakshi, Gary Larsson and others who kept the torch burning during the lean years!
As an afterthought, I'll mention that art as a whole was beginning to suffer by 1979. Actually the rot had set in earlier but by 1979 the secret was out and there was no denying that something was wrong. It just wasn't fun to go to a museum anymore.
In '79 super-realism was still in the air. That's not a photograph of a car above, that's an oil painting.
Nice old buildings were routinely replaced by blank concrete slabs (above) and parking lots.
Galleries went in for cold, geometrical stuff. The art magazines and art schools were full of it.
Every museum had exhibitions of dirt and broken glass.
These abominations are still with us, but there's a feeling in the air that all this clutter is somehow out of step with the times. That's a good sign, a very good sign. My prediction for animation and cartooning in the next ten years: the big corporations will support safe and slick films, which will cause them to atrophy. It's beginning to look more and more like the future of really fun animation and cartooning lies with the independents. Gear up for it, sharpen your skills, and don't let anybody talk you out of ideas that are good and really mean something to you. The next ten years are going to be very interesting!
