TIL the 2am YouTube deep dives on old cartoon backgrounds are actually a real rabbit hole
So it's 1am on a Tuesday and I'm watching a video about animation backgrounds from old Saturday morning cartoons, and the guy starts talking about how they used watercolor on paper for these things. Not digital, not paint on canvas, actual watercolor on illustration board. He shows a scan of one from a 1987 show and you can see the paper texture and the brush strokes and it just hits different than anything made now. I ended up on a forum where collectors trade scans of these boards and some go for over $2,000 at auction, which blew my mind because I always assumed this stuff got thrown out. This one guy in Ohio has like 40 of them and he posts close ups of the little pencil marks where the animators labeled stuff. Anyway I lost 3 hours to this without noticing. Anyone else gone down this hole or is it just me?