Also, almost everything I’ve read about Toth points to him “hating everything.” For all we know, he was probably just an extremely outspoken person with a short fuse and not much patience with other people, thus anything he’d say probably got interpreted as though he hated everything or was a jerk. Most of us will never know either way.

Animation projects, being what they are, rarely manage to look better than the weakest links in the production staff and executives. The show still aimed higher than most ever had before, and higher than almost anything since. From my time in the industry, it’s something of an impossible miracle when a project DOES come through as beautiful and “good” from beginning to end. It’s nearly impossible to manage the hundreds/thousands of people necessary/available who work on any given animation project.