I frequently grab a delicious breakfast at one of Lexington's many bakeries and about a month or so ago I was at Magee's Bakery. On Saturday mornings (my "pastry day") they play old school Saturday morning cartoons like Mask, GI Joe, etc. I got thinking about cartoons and how today's compare with the ones I watched growing up... and how some long running shows (like The Simpsons) fare over time.
I did some cursory searches and found IMDB had a list of shows (Top 250 Animated Series by Avg Rating). I thought that was neat but I wanted to look at the shows over time so I designed a scrape to extract every episode ratings data from each episode from each season. These had things like number of people to rate, original air date, etc.
I then started vizzing to get my answers!
I did some cursory searches and found IMDB had a list of shows (Top 250 Animated Series by Avg Rating). I thought that was neat but I wanted to look at the shows over time so I designed a scrape to extract every episode ratings data from each episode from each season. These had things like number of people to rate, original air date, etc.
I then started vizzing to get my answers!
Things to Note:
- Most shows don't go past 4 seasons (by season 5 up to 73% have been cancelled)
- 1/3 of cartoon series don't make it past the first season
- Median Star Rating for an episode is 7.6
- Rick and Morty have an ENORMOUSLY passionate fan-base (6,742 votes per episode average) with a votes-per-episode level that is 4X the next highest show (The Simpsons at 1,636 avg ratings per episode)
- Star ratings (overall) decline by season without any real upswing until a show hits it's 15th season (which only a very few percent do)
Here's a quick viz of top cartoons by season and their season breakdown. Mouse over the show to get a breakdown of their seasons ratings in a little box-plot to the right.
But what if you REALLY want know the "BEST" rated cartoon episode ever...? The problem becomes one of rose colored glasses. I'm personally a fan of Batman The Animated Series... sadly of ALL the Batman cartoons Batman TAS ranks the LOWEST!
I then started thinking about what decade had the greatest cartoons ever and so I built the next viz to help me encompass everything a little more completely (1980 has the highest rating year of any year BTW)... If you click on a year the graphs will reform follow the DIRECTIONS IN RED for help navigating the entire history of cartoons and use your won criteria to figure out for yourself what is the Best Cartoon of All Time!
What do you think? One Punch Man? South Park? The Simpsons?
As always hit me up on Twitter @wjking0 with any questions!
