Changes to character designs over time

[I REALLY HATE POKEMON!]

After talking about the new Space Jam movie and thinking back to Akira Toriyama's comments about the art changes to the upcoming Dragon Ball film, I thought it'd be interesting to discuss character changes.

There's usually small changes over time with highs and lows, but sometimes characters simply get better or worse quickly. A lot of changes are naturally pretty subjective, for example I prefer the more chubby Pikachu design from early episodes of Pokemon and other early depictions of him, but that seems to be a fairly unpopular opinion.

Sometimes the art is just temporarily different for some reason, like a licensing agreement leading to entirely different approaches to the design (Zelda CD-i). Other times there's different versions of a character in use concurrently (Mario/Paper Mario/Mario & Luigi games' style). There plenty of other different reasons for changes too, among the cost common seems to be reboots/remakes.

Anyway, I think one of the best changes is Mario. His original art design featured him as a scraggly middle-aged dude with a sort of western looking art style (kinda reminds me of Popeye). I don't miss that but maybe including it as a joke in Smash Bros for Mario sort of like Street Fighter X Tekken did with "Bad Box Art Mega Man" could be funny.

A change for the worse in my opinion is Sonic (don't even get me started on Sonic Boom). The "modern" design is still cool, totally fine, but classic Sonic is just more appealing to me. I can't even say it's nostalgia to blame either because the redesign was around when I was still a kid. There's just something about Sonic's simplicity that worked.

I trust Toriyama's judgement but there's rumors that the new Dragon Ball film may be fully 3D. I just can't see that being good, I think one of Studio Ghibli's movies did this and it looks horrible. Then again, I'd take any art style if it means they can put blood and gore back into Dragon Ball. The censorship in Super really just the experience, as censorship in general tends to do. Heck, the games sometimes don't even feature Future Gohan anymore because of his iconic missing arm and when they do he usually has both (*TRIGGERED*). Now that's a bad redesign!

A few more examples of one's I like/dislike:

Like:

Castlevania Judgement (probably a controversial choice but I'm a big fan of Obata's art)

Kirby (white Kirby barely existed anyway, but it's just not as nice as pink)

Luigi (this was probably the most natural evolution of a character I can think of, because he couldn't just stay green Mario; I guess this also applies to Ken from Street Fighter, perhaps )

Dislike:

Beast Machines (Beast Wars sequel)

Devil May Cry reboot (this one's too easy but it really was one of the worst offenders, Dante was unbearable)

Sonic Boom (I already mentioned this but it's so bad I'll do it twice)

So what are your thoughts on iconic characters and their many different iterations? Does somebody out there actually like Michael Bay's version of the Ninja Turtles? Maybe still cursing the sky because Miyamoto dared to give Donkey Kong a tie? For me it's got to be pretty drastic or in poor taste/with questionable intentions that a change will put me off.

Here's something about Mario's evolution. Kind of a sloppy topic but I didn't really know how to structure it.