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Hannah Montana
2006 · TV series · 23 min episodes · 4 seasons
Created by Barry O'Brien, Richard Correll, Michael Poryes
At home and school, she's Miley Stewart, a typical teenager, but when the lights go down and the curtain goes up, she emerges as the glamorous and talented Hannah Montana. Having the "Best of Both Worlds" is a complicated proposition, and keeping her identity under wraps leads Miley and her friends into some hilarious capers as she tries to balance her normal life with her rock star persona.
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2 comments on Hacker News
The thing with tropes is that they weren't always tropes.
This reminds me of the Seinfeld effect.
Seinfeld was arguably brilliant, but even if you disagree with its brilliance, enough people thought it was brilliant that practically every bit in its entire run has been ripped off so many times that they've all become boring clichés.
So pervasive has the ripoff been, that watching Nickelodeon episodes of Hannah Montana and Sweet Life of Zack and Cody have ripped off (and watered down) Seinfeld plots to the extent that trying to watch Seinfeld now is burdensome. Despite the bits in Seinfeld having been mostly original and novel at the time they were made, they have become tropey enough that it feels unoriginal through the slow attrition of time.
People trying to get into the show at this point would likely see it as tropey, and those who still adore it as doing so more through fond remembrance than appreciation of its originality.
I babysit a lot of my friend's kids (lacking kids of my own, I'm available for this) so I get to watch A LOT of children's TV. Perhaps its just an "in my day..." sort of bias but I do feel like the 90s were of higher quality than content of today.
Most hit shows of the '00s till today are invariantly tied up in trying to peddle toys of some kind. Certainly older shows were used for merchandizing but it seems like today the toy comes first and the show is developed around it. Plot development is optional and stories need not build off one another or refer back to past episodes. Out of those the early seasons of Pokemon and Digimon weren't bad and there are certainly a few neat shows on Disney & Nickelodeon (The Fairly Odd Parents and Sponge Bob come to mind).
Aside from that it seems like a lot of shows lack the complex story telling of shows like Batman: TAS, Superman: TAS, Spiderman, Beastwars, Reboot, XMen, and the others mentioned in the article. While not really a kids show (seriously - watch this as an adult and its 10 times funnier), Freakazoid outdoes most content peddled to adult audiences.
Another thing I've observed that seems to be detrimental to animated shows is the rise of cheap soap opera style live animation in place of cartoons. Probably the biggest example is Miley Cyrus' early career (Hannah Montana, etc). These shows let companies monetize in more ways since you can create concert movies and albums and the fanbase will follow the actor/actress to multiple shows. Benda Song[1] has spent nearly a decade jumping between various TV shows on the Disney channel (and playing a pretty good 'crazy girlfriend' in the Social Network IMO). I'm sure there are many other examples (all the faces seem to look the same between Disney's shows) but she stands out to me since she's seemingly the only cast member my age in shows filled with 12-16 year olds.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Song