This is the major reason I'm hesitant to rewatch anything nostalgic. It's not helped that these days I find most dialog used in movies/shows intolerable.

 

GOTTA CATCH 'EM ALL

Digimon.

I tried re-watching it not too long ago, and holy shit was it annoying. There's a habit among dubbed animated shows in the 90s of trying to match the rapid-fire jabber of Japanese in the English translation - which means 1000 words compressed into a single breathless second with no subtlety or nuance or even a pause for punctuation or between speakers.

Watching it gave me asthma.

 

Digimon was my first thought, too. Don't ever try to rewatch it. The voice acting is considerably worse than nails on a chalkboard (looking at you, Mimi), the pacing and story progression are absolute dogshit and the characters are unbearable.

...But that theme song, tho. Mmf. Perfection.

 

Ruined is perhaps a bit harsh, but I rewatched a lot of the Eccleston and Tennant eras of Doctor Who last year, and was surprised by how naff a lot of it felt now. There's still some great stuff in them - and of course, stuff that was always terrible - but episodes that I'd remembered as fine looked cheap and cheesy on second viewing.

 

Agreed. Eccleston in particular is a very good actor (he’s a great Macbeth in the current RSC production), but I felt he was let down by both the material & the effects quite a bit.


As for my own "ruined" show, I recently re-watched the first two seasons of Clone Wars. It‘s quite incredible how terrible it looks compared to the later seasons & even Rebels, with its distinctly different visual style. Paired with dubious pacing and some extremely cheesy and expositional dialogue… I‘d much rather have my previous impressions back.

 

Uh, isn't that the whole point? Doctor Who has always been camp sci-fi with people in rubber suits and the same quarry reused for every alien planet.

 

Batman: The Animated Series - I've sure forgotten (and it seems like most of the people did) that the good, standout episodes were surrounded by many that were bad to average.

I plan to rewatch SM myself. Have you reached

the Ikuhara-directed part? If so, would you say that there was a quality jump there?

There is always Tamers, which still holds up.

 

Just started rewatching the old episodes of Limmy's Show from the beginning.

Limmy's new show just isn't held at the same standard the old one was.

I guess the old show isn't ruined but damn the new show certainly is.

 

I actually had the complete opposite reaction when I rewatched the digimon series recently. Although fair play I did watch it subbed. There’s this feeling of hollowness at the core of the series that doesn’t really go away which I liked a lot. Also the subbed evolution soundtrack is so good.

Yeh some of the eccleston tennant era stuff was really campy, fucking love and monsters was far into the so bad its good territory though.

Something that’s ruined for me definitely is the original Pokémon series, so goddamn flat and repetitive.

 

The original Pokemon, along with a lot of the 4kids-produced shows (or similar in tone) like YuGiOh or Digimon. Part of it is the censorship or Americanization, part of it is the friendship speeches, and part of it is just how a show that is targeted at younger audiences has some real head-scratchers. "Oh boy, I just turned 10! I can run off into the monster-infested wilderness with no adult supervision, because I am a mature adult in this society!"

I get that kind of feeling more than once watching older shows, as well as some older fanfiction. As though the show/story was written by or for someone who didn't understand how the world actually works. Like this NaruHina fanfic where the couple has sex once on their wedding night, the pregnancy test the next morning works, and Naruto thinks "Oh, she's pregnant now. Too bad, I wanted more sex." Or this Naruto/Bleach crossover where Naruto and Sasuke die in their late twenties but decide to de-age themselves to fifteen again. Nobody wants to be fifteen again.

Beyond that, there's shows like Dexter's Lab or Samurai Jack that have a lot of padding in their animation in order to stretch out an episode.

Also, I never got to see Batman the Animated Series (only JL/JLU sporadically), but for all the hype surrounding it and the quality of the later DC Animated Universe shows, they were kind of bad. Batman is less the master detective and kung-fu master and more just a rich guy in a batsuit that gets taken down by a guy in a bar with a chair leg.

 

Never really happened to me. If I like something, I like it still.