Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-14138255-20140701202255/@comment-10390252-20140804083726

It's worth noting that Wacky Races itself was more miss than hit, although that was more to do with the appalling quality of Hanna-Barbera's mid-1970s production line and script-writing.

IMHO, the only reason we consider 'animé' to be the baseline of animated story-telling is mainly because HB so totally dropped the ball in the 1970s, leading to a nadiir of western animation that it only really began to recover from in the late 1990s/early 2000s with things like Ben 10 and the various Disney made-for-TV characters. Japanese animé just stepped into the wide gap left during that period.