I gotta hand it to Midjourney Version 4 (currently in alpha), is finally letting me make what I want to make.
And that is, of course, Saturday Morning Cartoons from the 80s and 90s.
Not to be a hipster, but pre-digital toons had a vibe rarely recaptured with new tech. It’s a blend of style shifts, technological limitations-as-style, and aesthetic choices that is a particularly tricky recipe to recreate, particularly when some of the ingredients essentially don’t exist anymore.
Ironically, AI’s monkey-do-robot-see-robot-do aspects make it able to
pick up on stylistic touches and aesthetic features that we don’t see
because we don’t see things the same way machines “see” things.
The V4 alpha is particularly good at the Sunbow Animation style used in everything Hasbro in the 80s, which is good because that’s my personal favorite.
What it REALLY wants to make is the early 90s style that was a more angular, heavily inked version of the earlier 80s advert-Toon style.
To the point that my attempts at creating an anachronistic 70s-Hanna Barbera X-files made a guest appearance of Dana Scully on the Extreme Ghostbusters.
Thus far I’ve been unable to get it to produce anything in the hyper-minimal styles of 50s and 60s Hanna-Barbara, at least if its referencing anything outside those concepts. Flintstones Columbo fits more with the 80s Flintstone reboots than the 60s take on the show.
So Aliens VS Jetsons is probably not yet in the cards… at least not in the almost-cardboard-cutout classic style.
In my pursuit of exact nostalgic styles, I’ve also found a sort of 80s-90s blend that, at least for me, creates a sort of “uncanny nostalgia”, of its supposed time, but imprecisely so. A one-size-fits-many aura of familiarity.
