Anime: Current versus Past.

[Kraco]

Yes but had you seen those earth-shattering classics when they were released, when they were light-years ahead of their time, I think you'd see a difference between how great those were and how good the current stuff is.

I never followed that reasoning. Things that want to be considered great should be measured up against everything else that is considered great, not against whatever it happened to be up against at the time.

I mean, I understand the idea of "giving something it's due for doing something that had never been done before" but just because something did something unique doesn't AUTOMATICALLY make it better.

Yeah, I could call this the big Gilgamesh fallacy: That the original must always be better than those that followed. It would indicate people don't ever learn from past works and can't develop any existing ideas further. That is, of course, utterly ridiculous. Naturally it can be said that first time seeing a totally novel idea would make it taste that much better, but such an argument would take us to a purely subjective area. Besides, it's not like the usually named anime classics would be treasure chests of unique ideas in the first place. They were simply shows that worked exceptionally well, but nothing has prevented later shows to work well either.