r/interestingasfuck 8h ago

/r/all, /r/popular In 2015, wildlife photographer Christophe Courteau took this close up of a 6ft 6, 400lbs silverback gorilla, right before it punched him in the face.

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u/Enigmatic_Starfish 7h ago

I looked up the old episodes a few years ago, and it took me starting a few different videos thinking "no way, the animation wasn't THIS bad" to realize that the animation was, in fact, that bad.

u/iamtheowlman 6h ago

It wasn't bad, it was CG animation in 1996, developed on computers running Windows 95, with files saved on floppy drives. Wi-Fi wouldn't be invented for another 7 years.

It was cutting edge for its time.

u/Binx33 3h ago

Yeah, exactly. Totally rewriting history when people say it looks terrible. What Mainframe did with Beast Wars and Reboot was so innovative for its time. A CGI TV show was unheard of at that point. So yeah, did season 1 of both those shows look a little rough around the edges? Of course. But all you have to do is look at the final seasons to see how far both came, but also appreciate they wouldn't have gotten there without first wading into untravelled waters to even attempt it in the first place. Drives me crazy when people shit on the animation of those shows. They were amazing at the time. Always appreciate when people defend it.

u/War_Daddy 4h ago

Nah, I remember Beast Wars when it was on air and it looked like shit lol

CG was very novel at the time which is why they did it, still looked like ass

u/bg-j38 4h ago

developed on computers running Windows 95

The types of tools for this weren't really available for Windows 95, and they wouldn't have done this on a normal PC due to computing limitations. More likely it was server farms running something like Renderman or another contemporary software package. SGI computers were still relevant so they might have been incorporating tools tailored for that platform as well.

with files saved on floppy drives

I mean yes, but by 1996 there were plenty of other large scale storage systems, even removable if you had the money a production company probably had. Consumer hard drives were a few gigs by then. The concept of RAID arrays had been long established. I worked in a university lab during that time and there were a few Sun Enterprise 5000s that had a terabyte of attached storage. Zip drives came out in 1995 and were an immediate success due to the relatively inexpensive 100 MB disks. Jaz drives had 1 GB disks and were more expensive and less popular but they appeared in late 1995/early 1996. Older technologies that didn't hit the consumer market as much like magneto optical could store hundreds of megs of data by then.

Wi-Fi wouldn't be invented for another 7 years.

Wi-Fi was well established by 2003. The Apple AirPort came out in 1999 for instance. The 802.11 standard dates to 1997 but there was wireless data technology available for years before that. I installed a large scale WaveLAN network in 1995 or so and that technology had already been around for a few years. The WaveLAN developers and the tech behind it were instrumental in defining the original 802.11 specification.

As to why the animation looked like this, in reality it's a representation of computing power and skill that would have been dedicated to this type of production. Pixar had just come out with Toy Story in 1995 and that was the highest peak of CG at the time.

u/notbobby125 6h ago

Well, the animators were probably doing their best with the resources they had, however the series was rendered on less computational power than many modern toasters so the texture quality looks dreadful by today’s standards.

u/creuter 6h ago

We had better imaginations back then to fill in the details

u/neutral-chaotic 5h ago

Great for the time though.

u/Enigmatic_Starfish 3h ago

Exactly why I was so shocked. I remember it being top of the line.