I think the issue with western cartoon is that Moral guardians in the west heavily restricted how they could be monetized, while the easterners don't give a fuck.
Look at the "golden age" of western action cartoons in the 80s. This came about due to shameless commercial ties in in order to advertise merchandise and toys. He man, Transformers, Thundercats, ALL OF THEM existed to sell toys.
However, this only occured because Ronald reagan, being about as rightwing as they come, had a complete hands off view of any business regulation, so the FTC did literally no oversight of advertising to kids. Once he left office, a shit ton of new regulations were enforced prohibiting the amount of marketing that could happen in cartoons (So the blatant shilling of new toys got hammered down hard), making it much harder to finance merchandise driven cartoons.
This meant western executives basically said "fuck it" for risking any capital for action cartoons anymore, leading to the downslide of the west since then.
anime wasn't any better than the west for action cartoons until the 90s when it began to finally edge ahead.
>>1078427382012 showed that. Fuck, I'm so pissed at the new one because the 2012 one had the literal best interpretation of splinter yet, hands down.
Loved the relationship between him and Shredder too, making them adopted brothers added a more emotional touch of tragedy to the situation.
T
