I legitimately find this stuff fascinating. It's so interesting to me how the furry style originated in this stuff that so clearly is coming from the Spielberg cartoons, then gradually evolved into what's thought of today via very, very select individuals that had an outsized influence on the style. Seeing Eric Schwartz's stuff feels like reading Sumerian cuneiform tablets that are clearly the seeds of modern civilization to me, it's the evolution of culture distilled into a microcosm.

>>149093611
The 2008 Global Financial Crisis made studio executives increasingly risk-averse and that sense of avoiding risk trickled down into general production culture. This happened almost simultaneously with the release of the smartphone, which over the next several years would grow to become an almost ubiquitous device, giving everyone on Earth constant internet access. This both made people terrified of acting too much out of line IRL because someone could record it and share it online, and also made people afraid to step too far out of line on the internet out of a fear of some kind of purity mob descending upon them, and as maximal saturation began to blur the lines between the internet and real life people increasingly saw stepping out of line in any capacity damaging their looks both online and IRL.

The result is people terrified to push boundaries and studios having no desire to promote them being pushed.