>>120114275If you really want to figure this out empirically you can dig up info on the networks investments vs viewer feedback surveys. There were a few financial phases of kids TV, and those funding structures fueled all other aspects to some amount. The cycle actually seems very simple, although the exact dates are hard to pinpoint. Then toss in the level of fun vs seriousness, as that reflects the times and age target as that has a big impact on how it is received.
Basically companies go back and forth with the idea of how much to invest in a show and what tone to take. A perfect example of the funding and tone I am sure you all know is Teen Titans and Teen Titans: Go. Teen Titans cost relatively a lot of money to make, but people were willing to put in that time and money because they thought that a bigger and better show would give bigger returns. Tone was also on the more seriousness which people really wanted at the time. Later they started questioning why the heck they were spending so much money on shows and looked at how much they could cut while still truing a profit. So Teen Titans: Go was created as one of the new ideal shows of cost effectiveness, as cheap as they could go while still pushing respectable profits. Tone was flipped to be more fun as many other shows that did well at the time were fun shows.
I would think Teen Titans: Go a textbook case of what not to do, as the cutting funding to the bone and trying to copy everything else on the emerging market, is thus the formula of a cheap knock off. However Teen Titans: Go was very successfully. I blame this on a third element which rarely get covered. Availability and saturation. If you make it one of only a few shows available and blast it everywhere it can gain a critical mass of followers be virtue of the viewers being starved for content. This is rapidly changing with new streaming that breaks old models.
I wonder when we can just crowd source our own IP cartoons to get what we want.
