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> What RUINED Hanna-Barbera? Not really answered. They mention other cartoons came in based on merchandise, but don't say why Hanna-Barbera couldn't/didn't co

> What RUINED Hanna-Barbera? Not really answered. They mention other cartoons came in based on merchandise, but don't say why Hanna-Barbera couldn't/didn't compete.

pm90 8y ago
They did. It was that animated franchises came to dominate the scene. Then WB bought them, used them for a while and finally shuttered them. But... the ultimate reason does seem to be simply: there was a lot more competition.
lightedman 8y ago
Ted Turner trying to make the cartoons more family-oriented is what ruined HB. In the 90s, they just had put out SWAT Kats. That could've been hugely marketable, but Ted thought it too violent, along with many other HB properties in development at the time. He changed that, and HB began a painful decline.
sirmarksalot 8y ago
It's really just a clickbait title. If you look at his channel, he has an entire series called "What's RUINING/RUINED," all of which is basically him reading Wikipedia while playing cartoon footage.
- fenwick67 8y ago
  This is a very popular YouTube format and I hate it
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    I finally noticed that "Not Interested" is an option in the YouTube recommendations' qebab menus (vertical ellipsis ⋮) to immediately hide the suggestion, and since discovering that have been very happy to use that on all clickbait titles, including just about every usage of the word RUINED. It might mean that I'm slowly getting better recommendations, but it mostly means that at least for the periods of time that the recommendations are on screen I'm not staring at a bunch of dumb negative words and things that don't interest me. I'm still close to using a browser extension to disable the recommendations system entirely as useless garbage to me, but at least this one tool helps some.
jerf 8y ago
"but don't say why Hanna-Barbera couldn't/didn't compete." The answer is more a business answer than a creative one. When a business is highly, highly successful pursuing a certain strategy, that strategy becomes part of their internal cultural identity. The entire business is macroscopically and microscopically arranged around exploiting this particular opportunity. When the strategy stops working, such a culture will virtually inevitably double down on the strategy, which in a way makes things even worse, because that usually works for a little while. By the time it becomes undeniable the strategy is no longer functional, they've usually fallen too far behind to compete. And since usually the only way to see "the strategy is unsuccessful" is precisely that there is competition pursuing other strategies eating your lunch, the competition is always already there by the time the message finally gets through. From the outside it's so easy to see. Early in the process it's easy to say "Jeez, guys, you've got literally 10 times the resources of anyone else in this industry, why not 'just' pivot your strategy?" But it's not a matter of just pivoting; it's a matter of rewriting the entire company's culture and way of doing business. That's why even when a company tries to co-opt the new strategy, they almost always undercut themselves somehow, either by being unable to really commit, or if they are in the rare case where they succeed, they undercut themselves by trying to use this success to pivot back to the original strategies they know and love. It can literally be easier to found a brand new company and start from scratch than to reform an existing company. There's a lot of examples of a couple of creatives disgruntled about the cultural limitations of their employers going and forming a business that follows a strategy that does very well, exploiting a niche their original employer never could have. (I'm more familiar with the video game industry, where Activision is an example of that, but this sort of things happens a lot over there. Or at least it did, before video games required so many people.) Companies that develop cultures that can navigate this mess are rare. It doesn't seem that way, because of survivorship bias. For instance, you might say "But jerf, Disney seems to manage it OK", and, yeah, they do, and that's a non-trivial part of the reason why they are a decade-spanning behemoth of multiple industries, rather than a 1940s also-ran. And there's a lot of other companies you can name that can too. But those are precisely the rare survivors.

> What RUINED Hanna-Barbera? Not really answered. They mention other cartoons came in based on merchandise, but don't say why Hanna-Barbera couldn't/didn't compete.

pm90 8y ago

They did. It was that animated franchises came to dominate the scene. Then WB bought them, used them for a while and finally shuttered them. But... the ultimate reason does seem to be simply: there was a lot more competition.

lightedman 8y ago

Ted Turner trying to make the cartoons more family-oriented is what ruined HB. In the 90s, they just had put out SWAT Kats. That could've been hugely marketable, but Ted thought it too violent, along with many other HB properties in development at the time. He changed that, and HB began a painful decline.

sirmarksalot 8y ago

It's really just a clickbait title. If you look at his channel, he has an entire series called "What's RUINING/RUINED," all of which is basically him reading Wikipedia while playing cartoon footage.

fenwick67 8y ago
This is a very popular YouTube format and I hate it
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  I finally noticed that "Not Interested" is an option in the YouTube recommendations' qebab menus (vertical ellipsis ⋮) to immediately hide the suggestion, and since discovering that have been very happy to use that on all clickbait titles, including just about every usage of the word RUINED. It might mean that I'm slowly getting better recommendations, but it mostly means that at least for the periods of time that the recommendations are on screen I'm not staring at a bunch of dumb negative words and things that don't interest me. I'm still close to using a browser extension to disable the recommendations system entirely as useless garbage to me, but at least this one tool helps some.

jerf 8y ago

"but don't say why Hanna-Barbera couldn't/didn't compete." The answer is more a business answer than a creative one. When a business is highly, highly successful pursuing a certain strategy, that strategy becomes part of their internal cultural identity. The entire business is macroscopically and microscopically arranged around exploiting this particular opportunity. When the strategy stops working, such a culture will virtually inevitably double down on the strategy, which in a way makes things even worse, because that usually works for a little while. By the time it becomes undeniable the strategy is no longer functional, they've usually fallen too far behind to compete. And since usually the only way to see "the strategy is unsuccessful" is precisely that there is competition pursuing other strategies eating your lunch, the competition is always already there by the time the message finally gets through. From the outside it's so easy to see. Early in the process it's easy to say "Jeez, guys, you've got literally 10 times the resources of anyone else in this industry, why not 'just' pivot your strategy?" But it's not a matter of just pivoting; it's a matter of rewriting the entire company's culture and way of doing business. That's why even when a company tries to co-opt the new strategy, they almost always undercut themselves somehow, either by being unable to really commit, or if they are in the rare case where they succeed, they undercut themselves by trying to use this success to pivot back to the original strategies they know and love. It can literally be easier to found a brand new company and start from scratch than to reform an existing company. There's a lot of examples of a couple of creatives disgruntled about the cultural limitations of their employers going and forming a business that follows a strategy that does very well, exploiting a niche their original employer never could have. (I'm more familiar with the video game industry, where Activision is an example of that, but this sort of things happens a lot over there. Or at least it did, before video games required so many people.) Companies that develop cultures that can navigate this mess are rare. It doesn't seem that way, because of survivorship bias. For instance, you might say "But jerf, Disney seems to manage it OK", and, yeah, they do, and that's a non-trivial part of the reason why they are a decade-spanning behemoth of multiple industries, rather than a 1940s also-ran. And there's a lot of other companies you can name that can too. But those are precisely the rare survivors.