Cartoon Smackdown: A 300-fighter roster representing the sum totality of the history of animation!
This has been a long term project of mine that I'm relieved to finally see through - the goal was to represent animation as a medium as best as possible. The characters here are sorted by their animated debut appearance, even if they're using a much later design, and if there's anyone you do not recognize (almost definitely true, since I had to do a ton of research myself to populate this roster) you can reference this handy spreadsheet listing each character's name, debut appearance, debut year, and current rightsholders (to the best of my research capabilities, let me know if you spy anything inaccurate.)
Characters were chosen under the following rules and guidelines:
- Appearing in an animated work. Animation is a very broad category, including hand-drawn, computer-generated, stop-motion, 2d and 3d, flash and indie, and tons of other niche ways of making fictional characters move around. 1a. For the purposes of this roster, I did not count any video games, despite every video game character being animated in some way I simply felt it would balloon the roster too big to have to consider the full history of gaming as well as the full history of animation. 1b. I also did not count any live or real-time puppetry. Whether or not you can call Kermit the Frog an animated character (outside of animated stuff like Muppet Babies) is a really interesting debate and I think ultimately I think there's very little difference conceptually between operating a puppet in real time and recording it for a film and carefully moving a puppet frame by frame to create the illusion of motion when played back, but for this roster's purposes, I once again felt it appropriate to limit my scope.
- A given franchise may only receive a maximum of two fighters, to ensure a large variety across different creators, companies, and IP. 2a. Special exceptions were made for just a few broader multiverse-style IPs that have a tremendously large impact in animation, i.e. the Mouse/Duckverse at the core of Disney's brand, the Looney Tunes-iverse, and the Marvel and DC slate of interconnected franchises. Within these, however, an effort was made to adhere to rule 2 within sub-franchises - for example, DuckTales is represented with Scrooge and Magica, X-Men is represented with Storm and Morph, and Teen Titans is represented with Raven and Beast Boy.
- Selecting IPs and characters within IPs to represent and include came down to a number of factors including: my own personal bias, impact on the animation genre and industry, representation from specific regions, representation of specific animated tropes, workability for a fighting game, unique and interesting animated qualities to showcase (ie Genie has more going on visually than Aladdin, so he gets the nod), the bias of my friends who influenced this roster, general popularity, and being funny.
Animation is incredibly broad so I know there's always tons more to include. I'd be interested in hearing what you all want to see, I'd be interested in hearing what characters you all got excited to see on this roster, and I'd love to hear if any of the choices I made in making this roster or roster graphic got a chuckle out of you!