One of the nicest things about this page is that it's allowed me, for however brief a time, to share my thoughts with you, and for you to share your thoughts with me. An awful lot of you have e-mailed me. Some of those e-mails turned into pretty lively conversations. I've enjoyed them and I've learned from them. Some of you agree with me, some of you disagree with me, and that's what makes being a part-time critic so much fun. I like creating well-formed, well-researched opinions and I like it even more when I am surprised in an e-mail by someone else who does the same.
Now, you can interpret 100,000 hits anyway you want to. One of the nicest things about getting 100,000 hits is that I can justify writing a new essay. 100,000 is a nice, round number, and nice round numbers give me an opportunity to reflect on the some of the web authors who've influenced or entertained me and are now offline or don't update their pages much anymore. There are too many to mention all their names. I miss the wacky Unca Cheeks, who wrote so hilariously about Silver Age Comics. Unca Cheeks never let his encyclopedic knowledge cripple him into sounding like an encyclopedia, and I loved his bi-weekly updates for it. In a very different way I miss The Animation Nerd's Paradise, which was more "professional" than Unca Cheeks. To be honest, there were times when I read Paradise only to disagree with Thomas Reed's latest anti-otaku tirade, which were often quite amusing in a xenophobic way. An awful lot of us have abandoned online fandom for something else, or have been forced offline by bizarro ISP schemes, and pockets of the Net are a poorer place for it. Maybe I'm just a little more tenacious, or maybe I'm too dumb to quit while I'm ahead, and that's the secret to my longeivity. Woody Allen once said that 80% of success is simply showing up, and maybe he's right.
No one should be too surprised that I took the time to remember the Webpages of Internet's Past. After all, this is a site about the history of animation, after all. But I've still got a lot of life left in me, and it's time to look to the future as well.
While I've written about almost every Golden Age cartoon I want to write about, there are a few Nixon-era cartoons I haven't explored on this website very often, particularly the Rankin/Bass holiday specials. I'm also going to continue to periodically review live-action/animation hybrids like Godzilla 98 and Jurassic Park 3. This will mean the pleasure of revisiting some Ray Harryhausen classics. You can also expect retrospectives on Ranma and the original Superman cartoons in upcoming months. I may even look at the career of animator-turned-blockbuster film director Tim Burton. Truth be told, there are only a limited amount of American-made animated films and even fewer of them are worth writing about, so unless I continue to nudge this website's content in the above-mentioned directions, I'm going to run out of new content. Count on an update every month or so, and if there's nothing new, read something old. There's enough here to read, after all. If the Bob Clampett cartoons where Bugs Bunny races with Cecil Tortoise taught us anything, it's that slow and steady has a good shot of finishing the race. I plan to continue updating this page slowly so please be patient.
Aside from using the number 100,000 as an excuse to look backwards and forwards, I don't assign much meaning to this milestone. I could have abandoned this site and (assuming Geocities didn't purge my account) eventually 100,000 lost souls would have stumbled upon its mothballed carcass. I think it's delightful and rather humbling that so many total strangers have read at least some of my words about animation, and that a few of you have returned time and time again. Granted, I know that you really came here to read about Dragonball Z, but hopefully you enjoyed my writing style enough to make your stay worthwhile.
On that note, I'd better finally post this essay before I reach 200,000 hits and have to rewrite this essay from scratch.
Au Revoire and Godspeed!
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