Article on Harry Potter casting: The “only British” rule was so important that Robin Williams was turned down from playing Hagrid

Compare Batman, Gargoyles, Dragon Ball Z, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Death Note to the cartoons of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Look at Transformers, GI Joe, ThunderCats, and He-Man. These...don't hold up. They're campy, over-commercialized nonsense designed to sell toys.

Not that I don't agree with you about there being lots of great animated shows nowadays, but this is just a terrible, stupid, cherry-picked comparison. I could just as easily (as many people do) say "Hey, look at great shows from the 70s and 80s like Space Battleship Yamato, Dragon Ball, Mobile Suit Gundam, Ranma ½, and Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and compare that to stuff like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Teen Titans Go, the new Powerpuff Girls, Sword Art Online, and Love Live! and you'll see that cartoons died a long time ago"

There's always been great, interesting animated programming ever since they started putting cartoons on television. And there always will be stupid merchandise-commercial nonsense; that never went away, and never stopped being popular.

There are a lot of great animated shows now, and it's much easier to find them, but that's just because it got easier to make and distribute them so there's a lot more total shows now, not because there weren't good shows in the past or because the average quality of shows is better. The average quality has stayed the same, there's just more of it now, so there's more examples to point to to say "Look at these great shows!" just as there are also more examples to point to to say "look at all these garbage shows!"

/r/movies Thread Parent Link - huffingtonpost.com