"Eric: The money and the interest and the people all seemed to balance. As the years went on, from the late 90's into the early 2000's, for whatever reason, the money for shows kept going down. Even X-Men was a low to moderate budget show, half of what Batman was. It was still expensive compared to many of the modern simpler animated shows. To make X-Men look as good as it did took a lot of effort. More and more people stopped doing ambitious shows. We tried to pitch ambitious shows. Production companies would look at the scripts and say, screw this, we're just going to have a couple of close ups and be out of the scene. The money went down. Now it's become more affordable and people are making more spectacular animated shows again. So, there's money again for quality action-adventure shows."