13 ms·

HBO Max is failing the classic Tom and Jerry

85 points by georgecmu 6y ago

hedora 6y ago
Similar shenanigans are the reason I cancelled Disney+. I’ll pay a monthly fee for your entire back library. Otherwise, no thanks. Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale? I’d love to see a copyright overhaul that formalized abandonware and extended it to back catalogs of film and music. That way, people could legally torrent everything currently missing from these streaming platforms. (Offline-only distribution would count as “abandoned” in this regime.)
- Lammy 6y ago
  > Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale? There isn't one and never has been :)
- jayrot 6y ago
  Purely devil's advocate would be someone along the lines of -- just because it isn't for sale now doesn't mean it might never be. Pirating it now deprives the owner of some amount of ability to make money from it in the future. Pretty flimsy, imo.
  - UI_at_80x24 6y ago
    I've upvoted you because this point needs to be countered and stopped. Something that was pirated does NOT equal a lost sale. I might enjoy Charlie Chaplin films, I would never pay for the ability to watch them. I don't feel it is worth my money. It doesn't matter if it becomes available at some-point in the future, I won't ever pay for it. If anti-piracy measures were 100% effective and reasonable and I couldn't get a copy of his material without paying for it. I will never pay for it. There are a lot of reasons that pirates use to justify their actions; some can be agreed with, others are self-serving rhetoric. Another good example of this "Piracy does not equal lost revenue"; music. Terrestrial radio stations do not pay for the music that they play (unlike internet based streaming services). *[edit: Another HN'er has corrected me, but they do pay a fee to the songwriter] So if I had the ability to hear the song on the radio, the artist did not receive a penny from my listening. They can continue to not receive any money if I play an .mp3 of the same song.
    - apocalypstyx 6y ago
      Radio broadcasts in US territories do not pay the performer, but they do pay a fee to the songwriter.
    - fedorareis 6y ago
      All radio stations do pay for the music they play. They are required to acquire public performance licenses and report the songs they played to the licensing groups so the licensing groups can collect the correct royalties from them and distribute them correctly. IIRC this is actually why Spotify’s T&Cs don’t allow usage for businesses or public gatherings because they don’t pay out at the public performance licensing rate.
    - jfk13 6y ago
      If certain media is "not worth your money", why do you feel you're entitled to enjoy it anyway?
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      > Something that was pirated does NOT equal a lost sale. This is a common argument, but I think it's more complicated than a blanket yes or no. If I sell 1000 copies of a novel (or a CD or a movie or whatever), then strictly speaking, my revenue isn't affected by how many pirated copies exist. I get paid for 1000 copies whether there are zero pirated copies or a million. However, that doesn't mean pirated copies aren't lost revenue in a real sense; it just means it's effectively impossible to measure that lost revenue. Some of those people would never have paid for their copy at all; some might not have even been able to find it legally. Some, though, undoubtedly did have the money and did enjoy the work, they just decided it was cheaper not to pay for it. If enough people take that route, it does affect my revenue, in that I am making less than I would if those people were paying. And it's easy to talk ourselves into believing that's always okay, with what you called self-serving rhetoric: "really, this just hurts big companies, not little ones or individual creators"; "oh, there are enough other people paying for it, we can afford it"; "I enjoy this, just not enough to pay for it." When we're talking specifically about Charlie Chaplin, that latter seems like a pretty easy call, since the vast majority of his filmography is over 70 years old and much of it is in the public domain. If, however, we say "I might enjoy Robert Downey Jr. films, but I would never pay for the ability to watch them," this may not seem so cut and tried. I wish we had a better term than "intellectual property", because I genuinely think "property" makes people focus on physical representation as the thing they are paying for: shoplifting a DVD and pirating a movie are obviously different, and many people who've done the latter would never think of doing the former. But in both cases, what you're really interested in, what you're actually paying for, is the content. I get that there's lots of gray areas: the content may not be available legally in your area; it may not legally be available at all; you may already own the movie on Blu-Ray and find it easier to download a torrent of it to make a good digital copy than to go through the hassle of ripping it. But any argument which, at the end of the day, reduces to "I wanna have this content, I just don't wanna pay for it" is, well... pretty weak.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    This is hard to get into without context. Copyright (and patents) exist "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The purpose is to promote the progress of science and useful arts for the public's benefit, the means is a limited time monopoly. The limited time rights are intended to be the minimum necessary to incentivize people to create for the public's benefit. Originally this was 14yrs, required registration, and could be renewed once. The intent has been twisted by those with an interest in perpetuating copyright indefinitely (rights holders). Now copyright is 70yrs after the death of the creator or 95yrs after publication for contract work. [0] Why does someone need to be incentivized to create after they're dead? Why were these extensions retroactive since you can't incentivize someone to create something they've already created? This has been argued in the US courts, the end result of these extensions was because each one is still for a 'limited time' they're okay - even if they're repeatedly extended at each expiration. This isn't the original intent or spirit of copyright law. > "Pirating it now deprives the owner of some amount of ability to make money from it in the future." The rights holders have lobbied to twist the law for their own self-interest and then play victim - I have little sympathy for that. I think if we had something sane (5yrs, maybe special protections around certain types of adaptations, maybe longer time frame to reward authors specifically up to some dollar amount if adapted for-profit, restrictions on for-profit distribution by third parties?) the law would be more aligned with its original goals and there would be fewer issues. Today you can't even declare something 'public domain' if you want to since copyright is reserved by default. The best you can do is license it permissively. [0]: An aside, at one point it was until the author's death. This gave me an idea for a B-movie where a serial killer goes around taking out pop groups so their music goes into the public domain.
    - sputr 6y ago
      A very good comment. I would like to point out to everyone that the correct expression to use in these discussions is rights holder NOT author. Anyone still imagining this as a fight between pirate and "author" is strongly misled. Most people will happily support the author - just look at youtube/patreon. But most are also aware that buying or pirating a book ... has very little to do with the author in either case.
- chadash 6y ago
  > Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale?... (Offline-only distribution would count as “abandoned” in this regime.) Let's say I author a book and sell it as a paperback, but decide for whatever reason that I don't want to sell an e-book. Would you apply the same reasoning there? Is it ethical for you to torrent an unpaid for e-book copy because you've decided that's more convenient for you? I'd personally argue that it's not. However if you previously paid for the book and you want to read it on your kindle and i don't offer an ebook, that would be different in my mind. Same thing if you purchased the Tom and Jerry's DVDs and decided you prefer to stream.
  - mynameisvlad 6y ago
    Some of the content actually isn't available for sale in any format. From the article: > While there has never been a complete Hanna-Barbera DVD collection courtesy of Warner Bros. in the US, both the Gene Deitch and Chuck Jones shorts have had complete DVD releases. In addition, the whole Deitch collection shows up on the other Warner streaming app, Boomerang. Because of this, it is baffling that HBO Max does not provide a complete collection of any one era, despite drawing on all three. (emphasis mine)
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    I’ll pirate book if it’s not available in DRM-free format for reasonable price.
    - yters 6y ago
      Do you have a right to everyone's IP who doesn't fit your expectations for reasonable access and price?
      - arrosenberg 6y ago
        Legally, no. Ethically...maybe? The United States does have a long tradition of allowing grey areas when rightsholders become unreasonable. Oftentimes these wind up being formalized as right-of-ways, easements, or other access rights. In the case of online streaming, its clear that the rightsholders are consolidated and engaged in monopolistic, anti-consumer behavior. Piracy is a natural response to that type of behavior, so is it really wrong for consumers to fight back?
- realityking 6y ago
  A lot of content is not available as streaming flat rates but via various rental or purchase platforms (iTunes, Amazon Video, etc.) There’s no (and there should be no) obligation to make things available for bargain dollars. If the publisher things the movie is worth a $15 dollar purchase or $8 rental, they can charge that. It’s our right not to watch it if we don’t think it’s worth that.
  - pavel_lishin 6y ago
    Arguably, there's no obligation to make things available at all.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      But there is demand, and in many times, social interest. I'very much in favor of some ruleset that compells the rights owner to either distribute something for reasonable prices[0], or make it available for redistribution and relinquish any distribution rights to it. This should apply to physical products as well - either sell it, or give blueprints to others. -- [0] - reasonable meaning commensurate with other products in its category, and not e.g. $1,000,000 for a movie they want to suppress.
      - realityking 6y ago
        I disagree. I think copyright lasts too long today but I think it’s completely fair if, for example, a photographer wants to not sell a certain picture until the copyright has expired.
  - ThrustVectoring 6y ago
    You're implicitly accepting the frame that copyright is an inherent right that should be granted, rather than a privilege extended to copyright holders on public policy grounds. If copyright owners do more rent-seeking and offer evermore complicated and user-hostile deals, it's well within the purview of our government to alter the terms of copyright extension for public policy purposes. In other words, there's an implicit obligation to offer consumers deals that are better than the counterfactual in which copyrights are not enforced whatsoever. Otherwise, why should we have laws that make things worse for us just so that various copyright holders can maximize the rents they extract from us via intellectual property?
- aequitas 6y ago
  > Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content... I'd first like to have the discussion about the ethics of the current decades long copyright laws that are creating artificial monopolies and a really crooked supply and demand market.
- bitwize 6y ago
  > Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale? I’d love to see a copyright overhaul that formalized abandonware and extended it to back catalogs of film and music. Copyright is often closely tied with the broader concept of authors' rights in European law. An author's work is closely tied to their reputation. Therefore, the author has an inherent right to some degree of control over how their work is exhibited or distributed, because their reputation could be harmed if the work was presented in the wrong way. Just because these rights are not explicitly recognized by U.S. law doesn't mean they're not moral rights.
- wahern 6y ago
  > Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale? The ethical issue with piracy is that you can't expect to change behaviors or the laws if you merely circumvent them, and circumvent them without substantial risk of punishment. Take the Civil Rights movement, for example. They disobeyed unjust laws in protest, but they succeeded in their cause because they were often punished for the disobedience. Being punished is a sine qua non of non-violent protest methods as pioneered by MLK, Ghandi, and Mandela. (Notably, all of whom started out believing in the necessity for violent protest, AFAIU.) If there was never any serious threat of punishment, especially for protesters (as opposed to authorities just letting it slide, and then reintroducing enforcement later) then we might still have many of the laws and norms the Civil Rights movement was working to rescind and change. It's difficult to convince people to change unjust laws; much easier to convince them to change unjust consequences. In a way it comes back to what Socrates taught: you can't reasonably expect to make effectual changes in the law or politics without subjecting yourself to the consequences. And if you're a citizen, making effectual changes is an obligation. The self-righteous justification for surreptitiously violating copyright as some sort of protest really bothers me. I'm not going to claim that I haven't ever knowingly violated copyright, and I certainly am not going to defend our overbroad copyright protections, but I'm not going to delude myself about why I'm doing something--purely out of self-interest. Doing something out of self-interest isn't per se unethical, but there is something dissonant when you do it knowing that you're technically violating a law that should be changed, and would be more likely to be changed, if everybody felt the pain, either through strict adherence to the law or open violation and consequent punishment.
  - semanticsbitch 6y ago
    You sound like a little bitch
  - mk81 6y ago
    Good post. Self-styled revolutionaries who are proud of themselves for torrenting consequence-free rub me the wrong way too.
    - semanticsbitch 6y ago
- hakfoo 6y ago
  I think the right answer, in the short term, is to go for mandatory licensing. If you can't compete on your catalog, since everyone else can license it at a reasonable price, you have to compete on the best user experience-- discovery, performance, compatibility. But they also can't whine "but what about the artists" because they're still getting a cheque.
grillvogel 6y ago
these seem like oddly specific complaints. personally i am impressed with the huge back catalog of old hanna barbera cartoons on the service it's pretty fun watching jetsons and seeing how far off some of their predictions were, but then other things are spot on.
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  They're not specific complaints. Said complaints can even be attributed to several streaming services. Why even bother releasing collections of something when there's major gaps in content for no apparent reason? Omitting content, whether it be through sheer incompetence or the company volunteering as a censorship board, does the series a horrendous disservice to its legacy.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  > these seem like oddly specific complaints. personally i am impressed with the huge back catalog of old hanna barbera cartoons on the service I think the difference is that you have sat down and watched it and liked it, while the article author has done this previously and wants to again, but half is missing. Is all the Jetsons present? Is Hanna Barbera all there?
- undefined1 6y ago
  will you still be impressed if they also censor(ed) episodes of the Jetsons?
- funemployed 6y ago
  Totally agree, and I also generally find the article poorly written. I would reduce it to the following statements: 1. HBO is not showing the entire Tom and Jerry collection, which is bad because even though some episodes contain offensive stereotypes the show is culturally significant and unavailable elsewhere. 2. HBO streaming has bad UX. Most of the article seems devoted to 1 and focused on the 'cancel culture' reasons why HBO might not be showing the full catalog while also admitting that there is also a large amount of the catalog not on HBO that is not plausibly part of the several episodes that would be targeted for being cancelled. Seems like the premise of the article kind of falls apart at that point, a little self-refuting. Having the Jetsons and Flintstones on streaming has been a blast for me as well.
thedudeabides5 6y ago
Anyone else annoyed with how buggy the HBO Max apple tv software is? vs binging on Netflix, the experience has way more weird UI bugs and hangs. Finding we're constantly restarting the app/apple tv because it keeps hanging or erroring out.
- ssully 6y ago
  I haven't had to restart it, but the app does seem flaky. My biggest issue is the UI; every time I use it I have to relearn how to find the section I am looking for. With that said, I do like how they curate and surface movies based on different themes. I'll be curious to see where it is 6 months or so from now.
- grillvogel 6y ago
  yes, I have a regular profile and a kids profile and permissions get screwed up all the time when i switch between them to the point where i have to reboot the apple tv
- nicolas_t 6y ago
  My pet peeve is the Amazon Prime Video App. The UI is a mess, if I click on a recent tv show, it defaults to the latest season and it's very annoying to navigate back to the first season. They have great content but exploring the content available through the app is such a pain.
- e40 6y ago
  Early on it was buggy on Roku, but I haven't had crashes in a while. However, the UI is really sluggish and painful to use. Have a Roku Ultra.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  Yes. I have spotty internet but Netflix and Prime do great at buffering (on smart TV), so not an issue. Max is terrible at buffering. I don't think it buffers more than a few seconds at a time. I had to keep an additional HBO channel activated on my Prime account just to watch some HBO stuff. I know I can save offline with an iPad and cast to the TV but too inconvenient. Will probably cancel soon.
jancsika 6y ago
I propose the following paradigm which I'll call "RickRoll UIs." The developer builds a beautiful interface for searching, curating, and organizing media in a given genre. Everything down to the moment of streaming works as you'd expect, at which point some boring public domain content is looped for the given duration of that stream. Users would get the benefit of having the curated data accessible through the GUI-- e.g., you could search all the Tom & Jerry cartoons, get/sort by metadata, etc. Perhaps even view a screenshot (not sure about Copyright law around that). Fringe benefit is that this creates a reference UI against all the streaming services may be judged, and gives new users some idea of what it was like to search and use "completist" services like what.cd, etc. Not to mention how thinking about the potential existence of such services can change the options we think we have for how to spend our time-- compare writing a blog in 2021 complaining about a commercial streaming service's faults vs. "completing" some private tracker's Tom and Jerry offerings with the missing cartoons from your own collection.
- paxys 6y ago
  Building the interface itself is the trivial part of this exercise. How are you going to source the database of metadata of every media item produced in the last century?
  - recuter 6y ago
    what.cd did it just fine for music and that was a tiny community. There are a several longstanding open projects out there to compile metadata databases that are free to use like: https://musicbrainz.org/statistics https://musicbrainz.org/statistics (33 million tracks) Music is less than 100 million items, Movies fewer than 1 million, TV somewhere in between and books are a few hundred million. I'm sure they all have mostly-complete metadata databases available already.
  - Solocomplex 6y ago
    TVDB and others have great APIs for this purpose.
  - toyg 6y ago
bitlevel 6y ago
Guys - you can get all 161 episodes (6.23GB and v.slow download) here: https://archive.org/details/126BuddiesThickerThanWater1962/ https://archive.org/details/126BuddiesThickerThanWater1962/ Enjoy!
- paxys 6y ago
  Not for long if this gets popular
  - Miner49er 6y ago
    If that goes down, you can always get 121 of the episodes off of the CIA's public archive of Osama Bin Laden's hard drives.
    - garmaine 6y ago
      Seriously?
      - Miner49er 6y ago
        Yes. https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/index_video.html https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/index_video....
        albertshin 6y ago
        Quuite unsettling to see listed videos of (alleged) bombing videos alongside Tom and Jerry though... I'm surprised these are made available with no lock or warning...
        paxys 6y ago
        Well there are 3 prominent warnings on the top of that page
- lom888 6y ago
devmunchies 6y ago
Couldn't they just show trigger warnings for controversial content? Disney does this with old classics[1]. This is historical animation, I think it's worth showing an accurate snapshot of the past. [1]: https://imgur.com/dkMC6gd https://imgur.com/dkMC6gd
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Couldn't they just show trigger warnings Or people could just grow up and realize that you can't judge people who lived a hundred years ago by today's standards. Imagine what ordinary things you do every day that people a hundred years from now will consider a social crime and want you banned or cancelled for.
  - undefined1 6y ago
    > Imagine what ordinary things you do every day that people a hundred years from now will consider a social crime people judging and censoring content post-hoc will be one of those things, almost certainly.
  - devmunchies 6y ago
    I completely agree, but some parents might not want their kids to watch old stuff. A content advisory is a good middle ground, since it doesn't censor the past while giving the streaming service a free pass.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      Or parents could pay more attention to what their children are watching. Just like when all we had was antenna TVs.
      - watwut 6y ago
        Parents prefer streaming services that don't expect them to watch kids shows in advance to make casw by case decision which boring show is ok or not. Like antenna TV programming used to be - guaranteed to be inoffesive so you don't have to watch crap kids like to watch.
khazhoux 6y ago
Mouse in Manhattan is a wonderful short. The storytelling, the pacing, and the orchestral score are magical. But there is the small issue of Jerry falling into a vial of shoe polish and then popping his head out -- in full blackface. Yup, that's not allowed today. I hope they just correct that (but without messing up the music) rather than outright ban it.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  What is "correct" today will not be "correct" tomorrow. You don't reconcile history by pretending it didn't exist. 50 years from now, some young generation will decide that animal-sourced leather is a hate crime, and every movie you've ever seen will be banned to "correct" the social error of seeing shoes that aren't plastic.
  - khazhoux 6y ago
    Growing up, it was acceptable to shoot a Rodian before giving him a chance to shoot you. But blackface is clearly prohibited today. So there's two choices for art like this: edit it, or it doesn't get shown publicly again. I'm only arguing that I'd prefer the former to the latter.
    - vorpalhex 6y ago
      There's a third choice - just show it unedited. Put a disclaimer if needed. You can still buy a copy of mein kampf and read the loonery Hitler wrote. You don't learn from history by denying it's existence.
      - anotherman554 6y ago
        I'd be fine with making the mouse cartoon available for people who want to study/ experience cartoon history but not showing it unedited on a streaming service where most people who watch it are kids.
        6y ago
reaperducer 6y ago
It all goes back to not owning you media. When you rent ("subscribe") and stream, it's not yours, and can be taken away for any reason, or no reason at all. For the last decade I've been buying up old DVDs and CDs of films and TV shows that I like from fleaBay, Goodwill, and elsewhere and archiving them in my own NAS for my personal use. It's astounding how much quality media has never made it to streaming. In my estimation, probably 5% of what was released on DVD as ever made it to streaming services. And even then, there are huge gaps in DVDs. Probably half of VHS tapes made it to DVD. Recently, my wife wanted to watch all the movies of an important film star (Humphrey Bogart, or someone similar), and it turns out that it's not possible. Many of the films never made it to digital (DVD or streaming), and so can never be seen by the public short of flying to a city on another continent and attending an obscure film festival.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  you missed the part that says "So, to date, a complete, uncut Hanna-Barbera collection has never been released on DVD in the US"
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    you missed the part that says "So, to date, a complete, uncut Hanna-Barbera collection has never been released on DVD in the US" No, I didn't. You missed the part of my comment which stated: "And even then, there are huge gaps in DVDs. Probably half of VHS tapes made it to DVD."
    - devmunchies 6y ago
      But your solution was to own our media. But i have to buy old VHS to legally watch the censored episodes? That's not a solution.
      - reaperducer 6y ago
        I presented no solution. I lamented the current situation.
dbreunig 6y ago
Some wishful thinking here... > For one thing, the promise of being able to stream the ENTIRETY of the classic shorts could generate a tremendous amount of publicity for Max, in the process providing strong incentive for T&J collectors, animation fans, historians, and adults to subscribe to the new platform. That is a very small audience compared to the very large audience of families who would be upset if the their kids auto-played into unexpected blackface. Yes these problems can be solved with UX, yes it would be nice if we can access everything as it existed forever... But the reality is unfettered yet contextualized access to archival Tom & Jerry episodes isn't going to be high on their backlog. For the purposes of access for historical archive purposes...why focus your complaints on streaming? Streaming is great for ease of access, cheaper price points (at least monthly), and breadth of selection. As a format, it's doesn't deliver well for archival purposes.
- function_seven 6y ago
  > That is a very small audience compared to the very large audience of families who would be upset if the their kids auto-played into unexpected blackface. Your point is valid regarding the size of the niche here, but there are probably a thousand other niches that would combine—long tail fashion—into a good chuck of market share. As far as families being upset about their kids auto-playing into offensive content, HBO has already solved for this. They have Sex and the City and The Sopranos on that platform. Mark the naughty T&J episodes as "TV-MA", and a kid-filtered view won't show them, right? (I guess the question is whether they have this ability per-episode, or only at the series level)
  - dbreunig 6y ago
    You've hit on the key design challenge for mass market networks with massive content libraries: how can one build the best product for the largest audience without being boring to the niches. It's why Facebook uses algos to recommend content, which spurs another interesting question. If algos are the tool for recommending the best version of content, the idea of 'archive' and 'preservation' of original forms falls by the wayside. The FB feed you see is different than mine, as are your Google results for the same terms. How would we deal with your Tom & Jerry or other content being different? For the most part it would just be funny quirks (like film edits for airplanes or cable TV). This gets even crazier as contemporary tools for creation can capture and store countless takes that would usually be discarded on the cutting room floor. Now they're just waiting for an alternative cut. I wrote about this 9(!) years ago, but the issue has only accelerated: https://dbreunig.tumblr.com/post/13923466229/multisignal-tools-mutable-art-i-take-a-block https://dbreunig.tumblr.com/post/13923466229/multisignal-too...
wayneftw 6y ago
HBO Max has the worst web video player UI of all the streaming services. The most annoying anti-feature is that skipping forward 15/30 seconds takes almost as long as just watching those seconds. I also had to install an extension just to be able to skip via keyboard! I really don't expect HBO to get anything right for streaming. Even Amazon has a better video player despite some of it's own major annoyances like constantly losing focus, so you can't use the keyboard. Both Netflix and Amazon skip forward almost instantly though.
zxcvbn4038 6y ago
I think the article nails it, they seem to be filtering out anything that might offend contemporary leftest values. A lot of the stuff from the 40s would never be produced today i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZkcsIb2l3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZkcsIb2l3A or even https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAELs42aZt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAELs42aZt4 but I'd say that censoring it is akin to denying the holocaust -- if you pretend it didn't happen then you don't learn the lesson. Nobody seems to censor the leprechauns or gangster characters. Disney seems to get a pass for an inventory of issues https://www.insider.com/moments-themes-in-disney-movies-that-havent-aged-well-problematic https://www.insider.com/moments-themes-in-disney-movies-that... - they would have nothing left if you filtered all their content for modern political correctness. What message does it send when Prince Charming always has to rescue the princess? And so on..
semanticsbitch 6y ago
I am stealing all your shit
throwawaysea 6y ago
I love Tom and Jerry. Children’s cartoons are too serious these days, and many channels like cartoon network are quickly turning into political indoctrination themselves. Meanwhile these beloved classics are being suppressed in a Fahrenheit 451 manner, robbing children of the golden oldies.

85 points by georgecmu 6y ago

Similar shenanigans are the reason I cancelled Disney+. I’ll pay a monthly fee for your entire back library. Otherwise, no thanks. Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale? I’d love to see a copyright overhaul that formalized abandonware and extended it to back catalogs of film and music. That way, people could legally torrent everything currently missing from these streaming platforms. (Offline-only distribution would count as “abandoned” in this regime.)

Lammy 6y ago
> Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale? There isn't one and never has been :)
jayrot 6y ago
Purely devil's advocate would be someone along the lines of -- just because it isn't for sale now doesn't mean it might never be. Pirating it now deprives the owner of some amount of ability to make money from it in the future. Pretty flimsy, imo.
- UI_at_80x24 6y ago
  I've upvoted you because this point needs to be countered and stopped. Something that was pirated does NOT equal a lost sale. I might enjoy Charlie Chaplin films, I would never pay for the ability to watch them. I don't feel it is worth my money. It doesn't matter if it becomes available at some-point in the future, I won't ever pay for it. If anti-piracy measures were 100% effective and reasonable and I couldn't get a copy of his material without paying for it. I will never pay for it. There are a lot of reasons that pirates use to justify their actions; some can be agreed with, others are self-serving rhetoric. Another good example of this "Piracy does not equal lost revenue"; music. Terrestrial radio stations do not pay for the music that they play (unlike internet based streaming services). *[edit: Another HN'er has corrected me, but they do pay a fee to the songwriter] So if I had the ability to hear the song on the radio, the artist did not receive a penny from my listening. They can continue to not receive any money if I play an .mp3 of the same song.
  - apocalypstyx 6y ago
    Radio broadcasts in US territories do not pay the performer, but they do pay a fee to the songwriter.
  - fedorareis 6y ago
    All radio stations do pay for the music they play. They are required to acquire public performance licenses and report the songs they played to the licensing groups so the licensing groups can collect the correct royalties from them and distribute them correctly. IIRC this is actually why Spotify’s T&Cs don’t allow usage for businesses or public gatherings because they don’t pay out at the public performance licensing rate.
  - jfk13 6y ago
    If certain media is "not worth your money", why do you feel you're entitled to enjoy it anyway?
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    > Something that was pirated does NOT equal a lost sale. This is a common argument, but I think it's more complicated than a blanket yes or no. If I sell 1000 copies of a novel (or a CD or a movie or whatever), then strictly speaking, my revenue isn't affected by how many pirated copies exist. I get paid for 1000 copies whether there are zero pirated copies or a million. However, that doesn't mean pirated copies aren't lost revenue in a real sense; it just means it's effectively impossible to measure that lost revenue. Some of those people would never have paid for their copy at all; some might not have even been able to find it legally. Some, though, undoubtedly did have the money and did enjoy the work, they just decided it was cheaper not to pay for it. If enough people take that route, it does affect my revenue, in that I am making less than I would if those people were paying. And it's easy to talk ourselves into believing that's always okay, with what you called self-serving rhetoric: "really, this just hurts big companies, not little ones or individual creators"; "oh, there are enough other people paying for it, we can afford it"; "I enjoy this, just not enough to pay for it." When we're talking specifically about Charlie Chaplin, that latter seems like a pretty easy call, since the vast majority of his filmography is over 70 years old and much of it is in the public domain. If, however, we say "I might enjoy Robert Downey Jr. films, but I would never pay for the ability to watch them," this may not seem so cut and tried. I wish we had a better term than "intellectual property", because I genuinely think "property" makes people focus on physical representation as the thing they are paying for: shoplifting a DVD and pirating a movie are obviously different, and many people who've done the latter would never think of doing the former. But in both cases, what you're really interested in, what you're actually paying for, is the content. I get that there's lots of gray areas: the content may not be available legally in your area; it may not legally be available at all; you may already own the movie on Blu-Ray and find it easier to download a torrent of it to make a good digital copy than to go through the hassle of ripping it. But any argument which, at the end of the day, reduces to "I wanna have this content, I just don't wanna pay for it" is, well... pretty weak.
- fossuser 6y ago
  This is hard to get into without context. Copyright (and patents) exist "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The purpose is to promote the progress of science and useful arts for the public's benefit, the means is a limited time monopoly. The limited time rights are intended to be the minimum necessary to incentivize people to create for the public's benefit. Originally this was 14yrs, required registration, and could be renewed once. The intent has been twisted by those with an interest in perpetuating copyright indefinitely (rights holders). Now copyright is 70yrs after the death of the creator or 95yrs after publication for contract work. [0] Why does someone need to be incentivized to create after they're dead? Why were these extensions retroactive since you can't incentivize someone to create something they've already created? This has been argued in the US courts, the end result of these extensions was because each one is still for a 'limited time' they're okay - even if they're repeatedly extended at each expiration. This isn't the original intent or spirit of copyright law. > "Pirating it now deprives the owner of some amount of ability to make money from it in the future." The rights holders have lobbied to twist the law for their own self-interest and then play victim - I have little sympathy for that. I think if we had something sane (5yrs, maybe special protections around certain types of adaptations, maybe longer time frame to reward authors specifically up to some dollar amount if adapted for-profit, restrictions on for-profit distribution by third parties?) the law would be more aligned with its original goals and there would be fewer issues. Today you can't even declare something 'public domain' if you want to since copyright is reserved by default. The best you can do is license it permissively. [0]: An aside, at one point it was until the author's death. This gave me an idea for a B-movie where a serial killer goes around taking out pop groups so their music goes into the public domain.
  - sputr 6y ago
    A very good comment. I would like to point out to everyone that the correct expression to use in these discussions is rights holder NOT author. Anyone still imagining this as a fight between pirate and "author" is strongly misled. Most people will happily support the author - just look at youtube/patreon. But most are also aware that buying or pirating a book ... has very little to do with the author in either case.
chadash 6y ago
> Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale?... (Offline-only distribution would count as “abandoned” in this regime.) Let's say I author a book and sell it as a paperback, but decide for whatever reason that I don't want to sell an e-book. Would you apply the same reasoning there? Is it ethical for you to torrent an unpaid for e-book copy because you've decided that's more convenient for you? I'd personally argue that it's not. However if you previously paid for the book and you want to read it on your kindle and i don't offer an ebook, that would be different in my mind. Same thing if you purchased the Tom and Jerry's DVDs and decided you prefer to stream.
- mynameisvlad 6y ago
  Some of the content actually isn't available for sale in any format. From the article: > While there has never been a complete Hanna-Barbera DVD collection courtesy of Warner Bros. in the US, both the Gene Deitch and Chuck Jones shorts have had complete DVD releases. In addition, the whole Deitch collection shows up on the other Warner streaming app, Boomerang. Because of this, it is baffling that HBO Max does not provide a complete collection of any one era, despite drawing on all three. (emphasis mine)
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  I’ll pirate book if it’s not available in DRM-free format for reasonable price.
  - yters 6y ago
    Do you have a right to everyone's IP who doesn't fit your expectations for reasonable access and price?
    - arrosenberg 6y ago
      Legally, no. Ethically...maybe? The United States does have a long tradition of allowing grey areas when rightsholders become unreasonable. Oftentimes these wind up being formalized as right-of-ways, easements, or other access rights. In the case of online streaming, its clear that the rightsholders are consolidated and engaged in monopolistic, anti-consumer behavior. Piracy is a natural response to that type of behavior, so is it really wrong for consumers to fight back?
realityking 6y ago
A lot of content is not available as streaming flat rates but via various rental or purchase platforms (iTunes, Amazon Video, etc.) There’s no (and there should be no) obligation to make things available for bargain dollars. If the publisher things the movie is worth a $15 dollar purchase or $8 rental, they can charge that. It’s our right not to watch it if we don’t think it’s worth that.
- pavel_lishin 6y ago
  Arguably, there's no obligation to make things available at all.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    But there is demand, and in many times, social interest. I'very much in favor of some ruleset that compells the rights owner to either distribute something for reasonable prices[0], or make it available for redistribution and relinquish any distribution rights to it. This should apply to physical products as well - either sell it, or give blueprints to others. -- [0] - reasonable meaning commensurate with other products in its category, and not e.g. $1,000,000 for a movie they want to suppress.
    - realityking 6y ago
      I disagree. I think copyright lasts too long today but I think it’s completely fair if, for example, a photographer wants to not sell a certain picture until the copyright has expired.
- ThrustVectoring 6y ago
  You're implicitly accepting the frame that copyright is an inherent right that should be granted, rather than a privilege extended to copyright holders on public policy grounds. If copyright owners do more rent-seeking and offer evermore complicated and user-hostile deals, it's well within the purview of our government to alter the terms of copyright extension for public policy purposes. In other words, there's an implicit obligation to offer consumers deals that are better than the counterfactual in which copyrights are not enforced whatsoever. Otherwise, why should we have laws that make things worse for us just so that various copyright holders can maximize the rents they extract from us via intellectual property?
aequitas 6y ago
> Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content... I'd first like to have the discussion about the ethics of the current decades long copyright laws that are creating artificial monopolies and a really crooked supply and demand market.
bitwize 6y ago
> Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale? I’d love to see a copyright overhaul that formalized abandonware and extended it to back catalogs of film and music. Copyright is often closely tied with the broader concept of authors' rights in European law. An author's work is closely tied to their reputation. Therefore, the author has an inherent right to some degree of control over how their work is exhibited or distributed, because their reputation could be harmed if the work was presented in the wrong way. Just because these rights are not explicitly recognized by U.S. law doesn't mean they're not moral rights.
wahern 6y ago
> Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale? The ethical issue with piracy is that you can't expect to change behaviors or the laws if you merely circumvent them, and circumvent them without substantial risk of punishment. Take the Civil Rights movement, for example. They disobeyed unjust laws in protest, but they succeeded in their cause because they were often punished for the disobedience. Being punished is a sine qua non of non-violent protest methods as pioneered by MLK, Ghandi, and Mandela. (Notably, all of whom started out believing in the necessity for violent protest, AFAIU.) If there was never any serious threat of punishment, especially for protesters (as opposed to authorities just letting it slide, and then reintroducing enforcement later) then we might still have many of the laws and norms the Civil Rights movement was working to rescind and change. It's difficult to convince people to change unjust laws; much easier to convince them to change unjust consequences. In a way it comes back to what Socrates taught: you can't reasonably expect to make effectual changes in the law or politics without subjecting yourself to the consequences. And if you're a citizen, making effectual changes is an obligation. The self-righteous justification for surreptitiously violating copyright as some sort of protest really bothers me. I'm not going to claim that I haven't ever knowingly violated copyright, and I certainly am not going to defend our overbroad copyright protections, but I'm not going to delude myself about why I'm doing something--purely out of self-interest. Doing something out of self-interest isn't per se unethical, but there is something dissonant when you do it knowing that you're technically violating a law that should be changed, and would be more likely to be changed, if everybody felt the pain, either through strict adherence to the law or open violation and consequent punishment.
- semanticsbitch 6y ago
  You sound like a little bitch
- mk81 6y ago
  Good post. Self-styled revolutionaries who are proud of themselves for torrenting consequence-free rub me the wrong way too.
  - semanticsbitch 6y ago
hakfoo 6y ago
I think the right answer, in the short term, is to go for mandatory licensing. If you can't compete on your catalog, since everyone else can license it at a reasonable price, you have to compete on the best user experience-- discovery, performance, compatibility. But they also can't whine "but what about the artists" because they're still getting a cheque.

grillvogel 6y ago

these seem like oddly specific complaints. personally i am impressed with the huge back catalog of old hanna barbera cartoons on the service it's pretty fun watching jetsons and seeing how far off some of their predictions were, but then other things are spot on.

Dirlewanger 6y ago
They're not specific complaints. Said complaints can even be attributed to several streaming services. Why even bother releasing collections of something when there's major gaps in content for no apparent reason? Omitting content, whether it be through sheer incompetence or the company volunteering as a censorship board, does the series a horrendous disservice to its legacy.
lostlogin 6y ago
> these seem like oddly specific complaints. personally i am impressed with the huge back catalog of old hanna barbera cartoons on the service I think the difference is that you have sat down and watched it and liked it, while the article author has done this previously and wants to again, but half is missing. Is all the Jetsons present? Is Hanna Barbera all there?
undefined1 6y ago
will you still be impressed if they also censor(ed) episodes of the Jetsons?
funemployed 6y ago
Totally agree, and I also generally find the article poorly written. I would reduce it to the following statements: 1. HBO is not showing the entire Tom and Jerry collection, which is bad because even though some episodes contain offensive stereotypes the show is culturally significant and unavailable elsewhere. 2. HBO streaming has bad UX. Most of the article seems devoted to 1 and focused on the 'cancel culture' reasons why HBO might not be showing the full catalog while also admitting that there is also a large amount of the catalog not on HBO that is not plausibly part of the several episodes that would be targeted for being cancelled. Seems like the premise of the article kind of falls apart at that point, a little self-refuting. Having the Jetsons and Flintstones on streaming has been a blast for me as well.

thedudeabides5 6y ago

Anyone else annoyed with how buggy the HBO Max apple tv software is? vs binging on Netflix, the experience has way more weird UI bugs and hangs. Finding we're constantly restarting the app/apple tv because it keeps hanging or erroring out.

ssully 6y ago
I haven't had to restart it, but the app does seem flaky. My biggest issue is the UI; every time I use it I have to relearn how to find the section I am looking for. With that said, I do like how they curate and surface movies based on different themes. I'll be curious to see where it is 6 months or so from now.
grillvogel 6y ago
yes, I have a regular profile and a kids profile and permissions get screwed up all the time when i switch between them to the point where i have to reboot the apple tv
nicolas_t 6y ago
My pet peeve is the Amazon Prime Video App. The UI is a mess, if I click on a recent tv show, it defaults to the latest season and it's very annoying to navigate back to the first season. They have great content but exploring the content available through the app is such a pain.
e40 6y ago
Early on it was buggy on Roku, but I haven't had crashes in a while. However, the UI is really sluggish and painful to use. Have a Roku Ultra.
devmunchies 6y ago
Yes. I have spotty internet but Netflix and Prime do great at buffering (on smart TV), so not an issue. Max is terrible at buffering. I don't think it buffers more than a few seconds at a time. I had to keep an additional HBO channel activated on my Prime account just to watch some HBO stuff. I know I can save offline with an iPad and cast to the TV but too inconvenient. Will probably cancel soon.

jancsika 6y ago

I propose the following paradigm which I'll call "RickRoll UIs." The developer builds a beautiful interface for searching, curating, and organizing media in a given genre. Everything down to the moment of streaming works as you'd expect, at which point some boring public domain content is looped for the given duration of that stream. Users would get the benefit of having the curated data accessible through the GUI-- e.g., you could search all the Tom & Jerry cartoons, get/sort by metadata, etc. Perhaps even view a screenshot (not sure about Copyright law around that). Fringe benefit is that this creates a reference UI against all the streaming services may be judged, and gives new users some idea of what it was like to search and use "completist" services like what.cd, etc. Not to mention how thinking about the potential existence of such services can change the options we think we have for how to spend our time-- compare writing a blog in 2021 complaining about a commercial streaming service's faults vs. "completing" some private tracker's Tom and Jerry offerings with the missing cartoons from your own collection.

paxys 6y ago
Building the interface itself is the trivial part of this exercise. How are you going to source the database of metadata of every media item produced in the last century?
- recuter 6y ago
  what.cd did it just fine for music and that was a tiny community. There are a several longstanding open projects out there to compile metadata databases that are free to use like: https://musicbrainz.org/statistics https://musicbrainz.org/statistics (33 million tracks) Music is less than 100 million items, Movies fewer than 1 million, TV somewhere in between and books are a few hundred million. I'm sure they all have mostly-complete metadata databases available already.
- Solocomplex 6y ago
  TVDB and others have great APIs for this purpose.
- toyg 6y ago

bitlevel 6y ago

Guys - you can get all 161 episodes (6.23GB and v.slow download) here: https://archive.org/details/126BuddiesThickerThanWater1962/ https://archive.org/details/126BuddiesThickerThanWater1962/ Enjoy!

paxys 6y ago
Not for long if this gets popular
- Miner49er 6y ago
  If that goes down, you can always get 121 of the episodes off of the CIA's public archive of Osama Bin Laden's hard drives.
  - garmaine 6y ago
    Seriously?
    - Miner49er 6y ago
      Yes. https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/index_video.html https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/index_video....
      - albertshin 6y ago
        Quuite unsettling to see listed videos of (alleged) bombing videos alongside Tom and Jerry though... I'm surprised these are made available with no lock or warning...
        paxys 6y ago
        Well there are 3 prominent warnings on the top of that page
lom888 6y ago

devmunchies 6y ago

Couldn't they just show trigger warnings for controversial content? Disney does this with old classics[1]. This is historical animation, I think it's worth showing an accurate snapshot of the past. [1]: https://imgur.com/dkMC6gd https://imgur.com/dkMC6gd

reaperducer 6y ago
Couldn't they just show trigger warnings Or people could just grow up and realize that you can't judge people who lived a hundred years ago by today's standards. Imagine what ordinary things you do every day that people a hundred years from now will consider a social crime and want you banned or cancelled for.
- undefined1 6y ago
  > Imagine what ordinary things you do every day that people a hundred years from now will consider a social crime people judging and censoring content post-hoc will be one of those things, almost certainly.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  I completely agree, but some parents might not want their kids to watch old stuff. A content advisory is a good middle ground, since it doesn't censor the past while giving the streaming service a free pass.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    Or parents could pay more attention to what their children are watching. Just like when all we had was antenna TVs.
    - watwut 6y ago
      Parents prefer streaming services that don't expect them to watch kids shows in advance to make casw by case decision which boring show is ok or not. Like antenna TV programming used to be - guaranteed to be inoffesive so you don't have to watch crap kids like to watch.

khazhoux 6y ago

Mouse in Manhattan is a wonderful short. The storytelling, the pacing, and the orchestral score are magical. But there is the small issue of Jerry falling into a vial of shoe polish and then popping his head out -- in full blackface. Yup, that's not allowed today. I hope they just correct that (but without messing up the music) rather than outright ban it.

reaperducer 6y ago
What is "correct" today will not be "correct" tomorrow. You don't reconcile history by pretending it didn't exist. 50 years from now, some young generation will decide that animal-sourced leather is a hate crime, and every movie you've ever seen will be banned to "correct" the social error of seeing shoes that aren't plastic.
- khazhoux 6y ago
  Growing up, it was acceptable to shoot a Rodian before giving him a chance to shoot you. But blackface is clearly prohibited today. So there's two choices for art like this: edit it, or it doesn't get shown publicly again. I'm only arguing that I'd prefer the former to the latter.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    There's a third choice - just show it unedited. Put a disclaimer if needed. You can still buy a copy of mein kampf and read the loonery Hitler wrote. You don't learn from history by denying it's existence.
    - anotherman554 6y ago
      I'd be fine with making the mouse cartoon available for people who want to study/ experience cartoon history but not showing it unedited on a streaming service where most people who watch it are kids.
      - 6y ago

reaperducer 6y ago

It all goes back to not owning you media. When you rent ("subscribe") and stream, it's not yours, and can be taken away for any reason, or no reason at all. For the last decade I've been buying up old DVDs and CDs of films and TV shows that I like from fleaBay, Goodwill, and elsewhere and archiving them in my own NAS for my personal use. It's astounding how much quality media has never made it to streaming. In my estimation, probably 5% of what was released on DVD as ever made it to streaming services. And even then, there are huge gaps in DVDs. Probably half of VHS tapes made it to DVD. Recently, my wife wanted to watch all the movies of an important film star (Humphrey Bogart, or someone similar), and it turns out that it's not possible. Many of the films never made it to digital (DVD or streaming), and so can never be seen by the public short of flying to a city on another continent and attending an obscure film festival.

devmunchies 6y ago
you missed the part that says "So, to date, a complete, uncut Hanna-Barbera collection has never been released on DVD in the US"
- reaperducer 6y ago
  you missed the part that says "So, to date, a complete, uncut Hanna-Barbera collection has never been released on DVD in the US" No, I didn't. You missed the part of my comment which stated: "And even then, there are huge gaps in DVDs. Probably half of VHS tapes made it to DVD."
  - devmunchies 6y ago
    But your solution was to own our media. But i have to buy old VHS to legally watch the censored episodes? That's not a solution.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      I presented no solution. I lamented the current situation.

dbreunig 6y ago

Some wishful thinking here... > For one thing, the promise of being able to stream the ENTIRETY of the classic shorts could generate a tremendous amount of publicity for Max, in the process providing strong incentive for T&J collectors, animation fans, historians, and adults to subscribe to the new platform. That is a very small audience compared to the very large audience of families who would be upset if the their kids auto-played into unexpected blackface. Yes these problems can be solved with UX, yes it would be nice if we can access everything as it existed forever... But the reality is unfettered yet contextualized access to archival Tom & Jerry episodes isn't going to be high on their backlog. For the purposes of access for historical archive purposes...why focus your complaints on streaming? Streaming is great for ease of access, cheaper price points (at least monthly), and breadth of selection. As a format, it's doesn't deliver well for archival purposes.

function_seven 6y ago
> That is a very small audience compared to the very large audience of families who would be upset if the their kids auto-played into unexpected blackface. Your point is valid regarding the size of the niche here, but there are probably a thousand other niches that would combine—long tail fashion—into a good chuck of market share. As far as families being upset about their kids auto-playing into offensive content, HBO has already solved for this. They have Sex and the City and The Sopranos on that platform. Mark the naughty T&J episodes as "TV-MA", and a kid-filtered view won't show them, right? (I guess the question is whether they have this ability per-episode, or only at the series level)
- dbreunig 6y ago
  You've hit on the key design challenge for mass market networks with massive content libraries: how can one build the best product for the largest audience without being boring to the niches. It's why Facebook uses algos to recommend content, which spurs another interesting question. If algos are the tool for recommending the best version of content, the idea of 'archive' and 'preservation' of original forms falls by the wayside. The FB feed you see is different than mine, as are your Google results for the same terms. How would we deal with your Tom & Jerry or other content being different? For the most part it would just be funny quirks (like film edits for airplanes or cable TV). This gets even crazier as contemporary tools for creation can capture and store countless takes that would usually be discarded on the cutting room floor. Now they're just waiting for an alternative cut. I wrote about this 9(!) years ago, but the issue has only accelerated: https://dbreunig.tumblr.com/post/13923466229/multisignal-tools-mutable-art-i-take-a-block https://dbreunig.tumblr.com/post/13923466229/multisignal-too...

wayneftw 6y ago

HBO Max has the worst web video player UI of all the streaming services. The most annoying anti-feature is that skipping forward 15/30 seconds takes almost as long as just watching those seconds. I also had to install an extension just to be able to skip via keyboard! I really don't expect HBO to get anything right for streaming. Even Amazon has a better video player despite some of it's own major annoyances like constantly losing focus, so you can't use the keyboard. Both Netflix and Amazon skip forward almost instantly though.

zxcvbn4038 6y ago

I think the article nails it, they seem to be filtering out anything that might offend contemporary leftest values. A lot of the stuff from the 40s would never be produced today i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZkcsIb2l3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZkcsIb2l3A or even https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAELs42aZt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAELs42aZt4 but I'd say that censoring it is akin to denying the holocaust -- if you pretend it didn't happen then you don't learn the lesson. Nobody seems to censor the leprechauns or gangster characters. Disney seems to get a pass for an inventory of issues https://www.insider.com/moments-themes-in-disney-movies-that-havent-aged-well-problematic https://www.insider.com/moments-themes-in-disney-movies-that... - they would have nothing left if you filtered all their content for modern political correctness. What message does it send when Prince Charming always has to rescue the princess? And so on..

semanticsbitch 6y ago

I am stealing all your shit

throwawaysea 6y ago

I love Tom and Jerry. Children’s cartoons are too serious these days, and many channels like cartoon network are quickly turning into political indoctrination themselves. Meanwhile these beloved classics are being suppressed in a Fahrenheit 451 manner, robbing children of the golden oldies.