Re: February General Discussion Thread: A Brave New Horse Ye
Mr. Big wrote:I think the show operates on Comic Book Time. Look at it this way, the Simpsons has been running for nearly 25 years, but Bart is still 10 years old. In the 17 years "South Park" has been on the air, the boys aged 2 years (in season 1, they were 8 years old. Sometime around season 4 they became 9 years old; they finally became 10 in season 15).
What I'm saying is, animation timeline doesn't make sense.
Yeah. A show can't plan out in advance how long it's going to last. It might be on the air for ten seasons, or it might only last for one.
A show that is funded in advance and planned out to last for years can build aging into its design. Like For Better Or For Worse, which (at least as a comic) was intended from the outset to grow and age in real-time. But it's a rare animated cartoon that has that kind of job security. If you plan to have its characters age along with its viewers, or even just to have a long-term story arc, and then it gets cancelled... well then it just sort of leaves everyone holding the bag.
If it's a short-lived show, you can get away with designing the characters not to age (this particularly goes for kids). I think this is what South Park had in mind—I doubt they expected the show to last longer than a year or two before people got sick of this crazy offensive construction-paper fad. But what happens when a show that was planned to be short-lived just keeps going... and going... and going?
Pony was probably planned not to live longer than the three seasons that are about the outer limits of plausibility for characters like the CMCs not to age in a world that clearly shows the passage of time. Now that it's going on beyond that point, they have to scramble a bit to rethink things, and will probably just transition into Simpsons rules. (That or give 'em those dang marks.)
Note that live-action shows, like sitcoms, do have to think about real-time aging all the time, because they employ kid actors who are going to age whether you want them to or not.

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Headless Horse
The yoke is strictly ornamental - Joined: May 23, 2011