The thing with the D&D Cartoon is that, symbolically, it sums up the concept of D&D *perfectly*: kids find themselves in a fantasy land, fighting evil monsters with cool weapons and great teamwork.
And yes, making a generic "D&D" series doesn't tap into the best D&D stories. Make a "Ravenloft" miniseries, a la Game of Thrones, based on the novel "I, Strahd". Make a "The Legend of Drizz't" cartoon. Follow the survivors of Cyre in an "Eberron" series.
I have the series DVDs and my daughter loves them. I love them from a nostalgia point of view, but they don't do it for me as an adult. There's also the issue that all the kids are humans, and the one wizard is about as inept as it gets for much of the storyline, and the cavalier is just annoying. Plus, the Dungeon Master serves too much as a Deus Ex Machina, and really doesn't need to be a present force in a show.
As bad as He-Man or She-Ra look when glancing back at them, they still hold up fairly well. I think they hold up better than the D&D cartoon, and I say that having just watched several episodes of each with my daughters.
I think Eberron or Strahd would tinge a little dark, but a Drizzt cartoon could do okay, except that you'd inevitably have to change parts of it and piss off a large fan base. You'd be better with a new character, perhaps the "iconics" that people keep talking about in other threads. Create new characters to latch onto.
I mean, what would a Dungeons and Dragons cartoon actually be about? A bunch of lame fantasy rip-offs meeting at the Color Animal Inn, receiving a quest from a cloaked stranger in the corner and going off to dungeon crawl? Oh, wait, that was the D&D Movie wasn't it?
It doesn't have to be that, though.
There are several elephants in the room here. There's the first D&D movie was not good. The second was better, but still not good. The Dragonlance cartoon movie had some serious pacing problems. But those were all poor in execution, not coming from a poor background story, which is what you've got above.
The next elephant to look at is Avatar: The Last Airbender. It was extraordinarily successful, superbly executed, with tons of flavor, an engaging storyline, and it catered to multiple audiences. D&D does this as a game. How come it can't capture that in a cartoon? The world at large is much more open to fantasy than it was in the 80s, especially when you consider Harry Potter, Narnia, LotR, and the ubiquity of WoW.
I think, if D&D were to get back into cartoons (and they should!), looking at the model of success that is Avatar is a starting point. Rich world with tons of fluff? Check. Likable characters that are competent? Check. Adheres to the adventure myth a la Joseph Campbell? Check. Sophisticated yet simple with clear rules for the mechanics in the world? Check.
That's what I want to see. And having seen that it can be done, I have few doubts that it can be done again.
