Today several users reported that a handful of significant Cartoon Network shows—including Ben 10, Steven Universe, Regular Show, the 2016 Powerpuff Girls revival, Amazing World of Gumball, We Bare Bears, and Chowder—were suddenly no longer streaming on Max with the turn of the month, with no prior announcement of their impending removal.
Just removing Steven Universe alone seems insane to me. I’m not into it, but it has a massive fan base.
From my understanding, Max has to pay every time the show is viewed. So there’s a calculation they have, how many subscribers will they lose by removing it?
For reference, they removed Westworld.
It’s too bad they couldn’t pay a certain amount in one lump sum to produce a limited number of, say, small physical discs that play video for people to buy more often.
They removed Westworld? So they’re removing their own IP that they own?
The last season of Westworld was so interesting and then it was canceled. （︶︿︶）
But… wouldn’t that “take up” the views of other shows?
In other words, the consumer has X amount of time for HBO Max, so they’d either be paying for more views on another show or a potential lost subscriber who can’t find anything to watch, right?
And, with all due respect, there’s no way cartoons are more expensive-per-view than other shows.
Ideally they would subscribe and then watch a different service. Or maybe a different cartoon is cheaper per view. Or maybe it’s a retroactive contract negotiation tactic. Basically negotiate or you won’t get any residuals.
Ideally they would subscribe and then watch a different service.
Thats so cynical and self defeating. “They’ll use our competition and save us money.” But you’re not wrong, they could totally be thinking that rofl.
Or maybe it’s a retroactive contract negotiation tactic. Basically negotiate or you won’t get any residuals.
Very possible. I guess all that is even more behind-the-curtain than cable, as when shows disappear there is no reason given, no “protest” like some channels will do.
I feel like streaming has made all this stuff even more opaque.
Max pays who? Warmer Bros owns both Max and Cartoon Network. Are they legit paying themselves, that’s so stupid it must be true.
I think it’s the people who worked on the show, like the actors.
I mean, in a large company, that is often how things are done.
Departments have their own budgets and pay each other to work on various projects.
you know where shows and movies never get deleted from? my home server 🏴☠️
But your home server’s drive can malfunction and then you’re stuck. Unless you make regular backups I guess.
RAID1 is cheap. It’s not a fool proof solution but has saved my Plex library a couple times over the years.
Hell, raid 5 isn’t that expensive. 4 bay enclosure with some drives and your set.
You can even run most of your services on them if you choose wisely. I run all of my arr apps on my NAS along with the torrent client. I use a little SFF PC as my Plex server for the extra power to transcode.
Cheap and expensive are relative terms. A NAS enclosure and 4 drives of any usable capacity will be upwards of $2000.
Valid. Spent entirely too much on my 16TB setup in RAID 1 (total of 32TB drives) and I’ve got it half full already.
People regularly spend $100 a month on streaming services. It pays for itself quick.
Lol, no. I just built one for less than $1000. I used 8TB drives.
I do have a backup! I just use 4 HDD in raid 1, two separate data pools. so far works great, I’d love to upgrade them from 8tb to 16th one day but for my needs I’m ok for now
If you aren’t doing more you have a parity drive, not backups, to be clear.
If a drive fails you can resilver and your data is fine.
If someone with write/delete access makes a mistake and deletes everything, or ransomware encrypt all your files, you can’t just “restore from last week’s backup” because you don’t have one.
that’s a good point! one day I’ll get around to making a proper backup
Just recently I finally convinced my wife to watch Venture Bros. I watched it on Max a couple years ago and enjoyed it, but I hadn’t gotten the chance to watch the movie. So I was hoping we could watch the series together and finish off with the movie.
The movie is on Max, but the show is not anymore. The first 3 seasons are on Netflix. Seasons 4-7… They don’t seem to be available anywhere. Well, I think Adult Swim’s website might have it but their website sucks for binging shows even on a desktop, and either worse or literally not possible to use on other devices. I could “buy” them digitally on Amazon. Instead I just bought the DVD collection and added it to my Jellyfin server.
It used to be that a show had to be really special for me to shell out money and dedicate digital and physical storage space for me to buy a physical copy. But more and more I find myself buying the DVD’s and Blu-Rays even for shows like Venture Bros that I like, but may not love. Streaming just keeps getting worse.
It does. Ownership really does beat everything, just like cash will always be king
Yesssss… “bought” a “dvd”….
That show is fantastic! I wish they fleshed out the ending a bit more instead of a movie. If they had one more season to give it a proper ending would be chef’s kiss. Still one of the best Western animations ever made.
Max is notoriously capricious. If I remember correctly, they have a terrible reputation with animation on their platform.
In a sense I’m surprised these cartoons remained on there as long as they did.
I’m fairly certain that Max despises their fan base.
Pretty much every mega corp, except Costco, is a mega douche.
Welcome to Costco, I love you! If you raise the price of the fucking hotdog I will kill you! Figure it out.
Reminds me of WhatCulture’s video yesterday on 10 great shows that you cannot stream anywhere:
There are several HBO Max cartoons on there.
Time to sail the seas to preserve artwork.
You are the first recommendation for What Culture in the wild. I find their stuff a bit WhatMojo clickbait for my liking.
Slightly less click baity than WatchMojo. I enjoy their presenters and I get a rundown of lesser known movies. I have watched a few WatchMojo videos and the presenters seem a bit stale.
🏴☠️, come get your 🏴☠️!!!
And these clowns wonder why people pirate shit. There’s a subscription for everything now and they still limit what content you can watch.
It’s not a cartoon but I still don’t understand why I can’t watch episodes of Tales From the Crypt on Max. It was an HBO show.
The World According to Jeff Goldblum was a show made by and for Disney+. They deleted it for tax purposes. There is no legal way to watch the show now. Completely gone.
Jesus Christ. I had to look into this. Yeah. Apparently these companies that own streaming services can just remove their own content they hold the rights to if they’re having a “line not go up as much as we’d like it to” year, and receive tax credits back from the Federal government. A multi trillion dollar company, in order to pay less taxes AND siphon off taxpayer dollars to add to their coffers, is allowed to choose to make their service less valuable. What a load of fucking horseshit.
Go Capitalism!
Same with The Mysterious Benedict Society. I did find a site that would sell it to me on a disc, but once I received it, it became clear to me they didn’t actually have a license to do so and just sold me a bootleg. Oh well. I dunno why Disney just didn’t want my money in the first place.
That’s dope. Thanks!
They are now quite a bit dated unfortunately First and last seasons are not great, but there are some good ones in there still. It’s just not how I remembered them back in the 90s. Still worth a watch.
I’ve watched a few on YouTube and the quality isn’t great. The shock and gore is still there though. Some of those episodes left me scarred as a kid.
What??? Season 1 is still great! Just watched the Lea Thompson episode “Only Sin Deep” last night. The show is timeless imo
-but also, yeah just buy the series, it’s so worth it
For me, the first season was them finding their way. The ones after were much better, imo. Better stories, better budget.
Could hardly watch the later shows that were in England.
Yeah in truth the only episode from England I remember is the one where Timothy Dalton is a vampire? Or a werewolf?
If they have old shows you like they can’t sell you new shows.
It’s all artificial scarcity, just ask the millions of people pirating content.
When buying isn’t owning…
Again the same story… Digitization has removed the so called actual ownership
I must be old. Getting high and watching Power Puff Girls was a lot of fun when it was new. But everyone is talking about Steven Universe, and I have no idea what that is.
It’s Tumblr as a show
Oh yeah, I’m old. No idea what that would even look like.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to groan loudly as I get up from my chair.
The MC cries at genocidal maniacs so they stop and say sorry.
I watched the whole thing because of my ex. This is an apt description. Just when you think the show will do something cool they just go “I’m sorry” and hug it out.
deleted by creator
You could try watching it…
For what it’s worth, I like it, and I’m kinda old.
Ahoy, me mateys!
They are all on Hulu
They’re also all freeeeeee!
What? Nooooooooo! SU is one of my comfort shows.
“io9 has reached out to Max for comment and clarification on the removal, and whether or not the departures were intentional updates to Max’s catalogue or if, like the recent situation with Over the Garden Wall on Hulu, an oversight that will be corrected.”
Artwork doesn’t re-Photoshop itself accidentally. This was all intentional.
