Happy Starday!

Oooh this is so cool. Incredible find! Storyboards are so cool, I love seeing in-development work like this (animatics and alpha game builds similarly)

Wow, these are really good! Incredible thread from start to finish, great work

Does anyone remember that one guy who never did anything but post the most esoteric franchises in the crossover thread. Every single post, hundreds of them over years, that were all exactly like this:

Beyblade X LBT

Never any detail on how on earth it would work, or make any sense. Annoyed me at the time, but now I miss him sometimes

Thanks all! Busy as hell day at work, they did a wave of downsizes and a bunch of my teammates got let go which is really sad, but I wasn't one of them so I'm considering that my secret birthday present haha. Definitely gonna do something fun with my polycule after work, though I haven't decided what yet!

Hmm, interesting. My main concern is whether Disney direct-to-video sequels count, because they'd be able to coattail, say, Aladdin's theatrical gangbucks with the $4.50 or so they made off the sequels from Walmart bargain bins. If we don't count theatrical releases among the series box office, I will admit I can't find evidence of a longer-running animated film series from that era, stuff like Tinker Bell and Alpha & Omega hadn't hit their stride yet.

Possible counterpoints I'd check if I weren't at work: My Little Pony, GI Joe, Transformers, Pokemon. Perhaps those mostly made their dosh off their television series and not their films?

Happy Starday!

Did Gen 5 ever happen? I know that sounds like a dumb question, but there never seemed to be something they committed to that felt like the actual flagship show. I mean, let's walk through the various G5 deliveries:

*The Movie (2021): This one is unequivocally flagship, it spearheaded the whole generation. But it used celebrity VAs that didn't stick around, it never got a sequel, and it had a vastly different quality and execution to everything that came after. Still, if the generation had followed its lead, I wouldn't be asking this question. But we didn't get that, instead...

*Tell Your Tale (2022-2024): The closest thing to an regular ongoing show for G5, it came out before anything else and lasted the longest, but it was never marketed as such. It was a collection of random vignettes on YouTube, usually a few minutes long, with no major ongoing storyline and largely treated as a stocking stuffer to tide fans over while the "real show" was worked on. Which we eventually got...

*Make Your Mark (2022-2023): This was clearly intended to be the actual G5 show everything else was leading up to, and on paper it kinda succeeded? It had the movie's 3D artsyle and an actual ongoing storyline that furthered the plot, sure the quality and writing and animation were a huge step down from the movie, but those weren't developer intentions so I can't dock points for that. But I can point out how content-starved and irregular its production and releases were. The first episode was over half a year after the movie, and many later episodes had months in between their release, and we only got 27 episodes in total. The last episode ended on a cliffhanger of the sort suggesting there were gonna be more chapters if production hadn't stalled, and this is all in 2023, we got dead air for the rest of the generation after that. Tell Your Tale got so much more content and attention that it feels weird to treat this sparsely-populated and prematurely-canceled mess as the flagship over it.

*Some holiday specials (2022-2023): Counting these for completion sake, but a few specials does not a generation make. They did their job of supplementing the canon, but there's only three of them. The franchise still needs some sort of throughline product to tie everything too. And I don't think G5 ever got that.

Compare this checkered hodgepodge of content to G4 and it's like night and day. G4 had one flagship show, with a consistent artstyle and quality, which ran without fail for hundreds of episodes over a decade. I'm not saying G5 had to do that, but I feel like they never even got off the ground with whatever they were actually trying to do.

To be honest, when I clicked I was expecting one of those comedic "silly statement remixes", or even a mashup compilation like that Placeboing Breaking Bad song, didn't expect a wholly earnest feelgood pop song. But because of that it exceeded my expectations! Thanks for alerting me to this dude's channel, I'm checking out his other songs and they're all really good

...Did Chili die?? (I didn't see the episode, but that imagery is concerning. If so, goddamn)