He went on to star in such mega-hits as, "Super Capers: The Origins of Ed and the Missing Bullion".
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D&D Cartoon
- Thread starter Deathstrike
- Start date
He went on to star in such mega-hits as, "Super Capers: The Origins of Ed and the Missing Bullion".
Deathstrike
First Post
Darjr, that box set is freaking awesome! Expensive. ...but awesome.
Deathstrike
First Post
Henry
Autoexreginated
Really? As a teenager and a fledgling gamer at the time, I LOVED that cartoon and made sure I was plopped in front of the TV at 9:30 on CBS every Saturday. Maybe there were a bunch of "serious" gamers at the time or old-school wargaming guys who didn't, but it was definitely a hit, and apparently was #1 in its time slot for first two years.
Deathstrike
First Post
The cartoon is a classic. If you aren't a gamer, it's still a classic. High quality animation, characters with heart and soul and personality.....it's fantastic. I suppose it all depends on your position- you either get it, or you don't.
Not how the gamers here viewed it, but in fairness a Saturday morning cartoon had a big hurdle to appeal to the gamer crowd where I was (last year of high school into university). It would have been judged on its merits as a portrayal of the game, not its merits as a Saturday morning cartoon.
It obviously has enough staying power to merit a DVD release, and many people with fonder memories than mine.
Celebrim
Legend
A classic example of the maxim that there was no single universal 1e experience everyone had in common. Everyone's 'old school' is simply, "What my group did back in the day."
I was 11 and I loved the cartoon (and still do really). While I did get occasionally frustrated trying to explain to the average non-gamer that the cartoon was based on the game but shouldn't really be taken as literally what happened while playing the game - in particular there was a lot of confusion by non-gamers about the DM appearing as an in game character - the cartoon itself judged as a cartoon was often excellent. And while the conceit of real world D&D players leaving this world and becoming actual D&D characters in a fantasy world with a literal Dungeon Master was non-standard, many of the actual scenarios that appeared in the game would make for great D&D adventures and the actual setting was suitably fantastic and inspired as a D&D setting. It had amazing larger than life fantasy terrain, massive epic killer dungeons, floating islands of stone, multiple moons and suns, awesome monsters many of which were taken straight out of the monster manual, and a wonderful 'star wars cantina' feel to the setting where everyone was an alien so no one was. So what you will, but most homebrew settings in the 80's where less awesome and less creative than the cartoon.
Celebrim
Legend
Comic book guys didn't have an occult scare causing a moral panic just about the time their intellectual property was gaining wide acceptance. No occult scare, and D&D would be right up their with Marvel. CBS cancelled the D&D cartoon despite it being one of the most popular shows in their line up, largely due to concerns about how dark it's material was.
As it is, D&D is suffering the way the comic book industry did following its own moral panic in the 1950's. It took a lot of image rebuilding and new intellectual property creation to recover from that. In the 1950's, 'true crime' comics with brutal violence, sexual innuendo, and pulp style heavily objectified women were more popular than superhero titles and even the superhero titles tended to follow the general zeitgeist. (As just one of many examples, the creator of Wonder Woman drew his inspiration for the character from his real life polyamorous bondage play, and admitted to filling the title with bondage and S&M innuendo. Nor should it be overlooked that despite its sometimes silliness, one of the commandments of the comic book code was a very modern seeming, "Thou shalt not objectify women by exaggerating their sexual characteristics.", which could just as easily be a 21st century feminist criticism as 1950's puritanism.) The fact that it was a moral panic filled with disinformation and exaggeration shouldn't obscure that there had been from the perspective of the average parent reason to smell smoke and suspect a fire. The Comic Book code created the need for superhero intellectual property, and unleashed Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. Once you had a whole generation of kids growing up with wholesome comics, complaints about the medium itself could reasonably fall on deaf ears.
Something probably similar applies to RPGs. Only after the medium establishes that it isn't geared primarily to the young and mainly engaged in shock and titillation is it going to be accepted as an art, at which point it is 'allowed' to investigate darker themes without provoking moral panics.
The lesson here I take away from all this is if you want to guide a new medium into acceptance and profitability, you should probably start with things with wide appeal rather than immediately hitting out for gritty and grim subject matter. Imagine what it would have done for animation if Disney had made some of the darker anime rather than Snow White. (In fact, the reason everyone thought Snow White would be a disaster, is that up to that point animation had largely been about crude lowbrow humor and racist jokes and no one thought it could do anything more.) There seems to be this weird idea that because you can make art exploring dark themes, that only dark themes are art... as opposed to what Pixar for example does.
The thing about non-dark themes is that almost everyone can relate to growing up, moving away from friends, and so forth. Few of us can relate to violence and savagery in a way that doesn't border on voyeuristic. You want D&D to get great movies and TV shows, make some D&D that has at a theme something everyone can relate to - like say Eric's troubled relationship with his dad, Presto's adolescent awkwardness, Sheila's and Bobby's fears of abandonment (orphans? broken home?), or Diana's giddy crush when she finds a soulmate. It was a great cartoon. You could remake it into an even better one.
Deathstrike
First Post
This. That's what makes this hobby and this game so special- we're all a part of something bigger.
Comic books came in all shapes and sizes much more than RPG's did or do, but the comparison of Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent to the D&D Occult Hysteria is pretty spot on. A few comments, though.
The Supers peaked, then waned, in the mid and late '40s and publishers looked for new topics. Crime and Horror were the easy targets for Wetham. But Wonder Woman had the issues you cite from her first appearance in the early '40's - she did not change to compete with the new wave of genres in the comics.
The Comics Code did not have to lead to Supers - really, it was a few DC Comics writers reestablishing them, from the few that survived into the '50s, that caught Marvel's attention, leading to Stan Lee being instructed to create a superhero book. War, westerm, romance, sci fi monsters, ghost stories, funny animals - there were lots of genres in the '50s and well into the '70's, as the Superhero gradually reclaimed dominance in the mainstream.
And there were the underground comix, and the Warren magazines (oversized comics) which still produced more extreme/adult-oriented material - but they didn't have the same mainstream distribution.
Lots of history, but comics had huge market penetration which tapered off. RPG's never achieved that same market penetration - not by a long shot.
