D&D Cartoon

[N'raac]

In any case, whatever its merits as an example of animation as a medium, or the sub-genre of the Saturday Morning Cartoon, the D&D cartoon was about as representative of the game as the Intellivision licensed D&D cartridges, in my opinion. The comic book ads probably came much closer, but then they were written to directly advertise the game.

 

[Celebrim]

In any case, whatever its merits as an example of animation as a medium, or the sub-genre of the Saturday Morning Cartoon, the D&D cartoon was about as representative of the game as the Intellivision licensed D&D cartridges, in my opinion.

Well, to be fully plain regarding my opinion, I think this damns the game and not the cartoon.

As for the survival of comics in the post comic book scare, I think the impact was greater than you claim and I think that its role in creating the modern superhero genera likewise greater than you claim. With graphic violence having to be replaced by fantasy violence, and comic books having to be centered on paragon virtue, nothing was better suited for the task than the superhero - which went from being a basically dead genre to a best seller within about a year of the Comic Book Code.

I also think the scare was rather predictable, the years leading up to the scare IMO really did take on the character of a race to the bottom because lurid and graphic content where becoming the main selling points in the medium. Each publisher not only had to outdo its competitors, but it reached a point where each publisher felt it had to be more over the top than the previous issue in order to sell. While the quality of the drawing wasn't suffering, it wasn't exactly an atmosphere that inspired good story telling. Plenty of people in the comic industry had been warning for nearly a decade that if they didn't police themselves it would eventually make the market toxic. Almost nobody listened because they were too eager to make a quick dime.

And the thing is, because it was a moral panic, it was unreasonable and excessive and often unjust they way moral panics always are, but ultimately much of the industry was guilty as charged. We can be sanctimonious about it all we like, but if the modern comics book industry was churning out the exact same material that they were turning out in the late 40's and early 50's to the same readership, there would be a modern moral panic about it now. The modern version might emphasis slightly different things in order to be politically correct within the modern prevailing morality, but most of the things that it would emphasize were additional concerns back in the 50's as well and made it into the Code and the moral panic would be successful - just as it was in the 50's - because it would be broad based and cut across the political spectrum and because I know EnWorld I know the majority here would probably support it for reasons as diverse as the posters are. Ultimately, if the bandwagon started, almost no one here would be standing up for good girl race baiting titles with sexist jokes and rape subtexts. And the modern version of the panic would be even more sanitized and sanctimonious about it - no book burnings of course, we have to keep up appearances - but in the end it would be just as effective.

To that extent, and also because of the differences in market penetration you mention, I don't agree that there is a close comparison between the Comic Book scare and the RPG scare other than they are both predictable moral panics in relatively new media. In some ways the Comic Book scare has more in common with the recent Confederate Flag panic. Sure, as a moral panic the Confederate Flag panic is unreasonable and destructive and all the rest, and ultimately results in silly things like the destruction of old TV show props and pulling Civil War themed video games from store shelves, but on the other hand you've got to be really naïve to not see it coming or at least be sympathetic to the critics.

 

[Deathstrike]

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[N'raac]

Well, to be fully plain regarding my opinion, I think this damns the game and not the cartoon.

I think it's more telling of licensing than anything else. Pick something loosely connected, then license a recognized property in the hopes of a marketing boost. File off the occasional D&D-specific IP (like, say, Tiamat - I think there was quite a bit, but "Orc", "Goblin", "Acrobat" and "Ranger", frex, aren't exactly trademark terms) and I don't think you would do a lot of damage to the cartoon.

Intellivision released two D&D cartridges, both of which had previously been developed for release with no licensed property attached to it. A third cartridge which was designed to hold the D&D name (but didn't have a ton of connection as far as gameplay went) was ultimately released without it, after the license was lost.

Had the movie been released without the D&D name, it would have been another in a long line of pretty crappy fantasy/sword & sorcery movies, and be long forgotten - it did not need the IP. Attaching the name did get more people out to see just what a stinker it was, though. At what point is something "D&D in Name Only"?

 

[N'raac]

As to the side discussion on comics, I agree with the "moral panic" issue.

The innocent get sucked in with the guilty. I don't think DC or Atlas (Marvel's precursor) were caught up in the more lurid publishing, but Batman was tagged by Wertham as selling homosexual pedophilia nevertheless.

What would have happened absent that, and the Comics Code Authority? Impossible to say. We have bookstores selling Shades of Grey (and more blatant books) and children's fiction. Comics may well have evolved down separate paths (adult comics certainly exist today, although not side by side with Archie and Superman). Like other print media, comics are struggling, and they could easily have been gone back in the '80s as well had direct distribution not been developed.

One may as well ask what would have happened if Stan Lee had caved to the CCA, rather than publishing his Spidey tale that largely broke its back, or how comics would have evolved if real Supers had emerged (which Watchmen did, tangentially), or whether pulp magazines would have faced the same backlash if they had not largely been supplanted by picture books long before Wertham came along.

For that matter, your own review of the history of animation shows how easily the medium can change - it wasn't that much later that animation was relegated to a medium aimed at children alone.

 

[N'raac]

On the topic of "who knows where things will develop to", is there an award for "most thread drift"? Moral panic on RPG's in the '80's, on comics in the '50s, the development of animation as an adult niche, to mainstream, to children's, back to mainstream, medium - who would have guessed that's where we'd be on Page 3 from reading the first post?

As a major culprit, apologies to the OP!

 

[Celebrim]

File off the occasional D&D-specific IP (like, say, Tiamat - I think there was quite a bit, but "Orc", "Goblin", "Acrobat" and "Ranger", frex, aren't exactly trademark terms) and I don't think you would do a lot of damage to the cartoon...At what point is something "D&D in Name Only"?

Well, I think that's a difficult question. What you are essentially asking is, "What is D&D?" And as we know, that doesn't have any one answer. And in particular, you aren't making the easier assertion - that the adaptation is unfaithful to a particular story or intellectual property - because when you make something that is just "D&D" as opposed to "Return to the Tomb of Horrors" or "Chronicles of the Dragonlance", it's not clear exactly what you are adapting. D&D is an interactive story medium; a movie, book, or cartoon is a non-interactive story medium. The only thing the two share is the story, and so if you don't have a story to share how would you know that something was done right or done wrong?

Sometimes the core story of D&D has been described as, "Kicking down doors, killing things, and taking their stuff." But first, is that the core story of D&D or the core story of a D&D parody like Munchkin? And secondly, is that really the core story of D&D or just the core story of a certain sort of D&D that mostly does exist as a sort of self-parody in the same way that having the first episode being killing rats in the basement is a 4th wall breaking wink at the audience? And thirdly, and most importantly for my purposes, if that really was the core story of D&D then that would be further reason that the cartoon damns the game and not the other way around.

I don't think that TSR saw the D&D name as boosting the cartoon as much as the other way around. In many ways, D&D was rolling out the same model of business that at the same time was being rolled out (more successfully it would turn out) by GI Joe and Transformers. The fact that Diana was an Acrobat, Bobby a Barbarian, and Eric a Cavalier was deliberate product placement for D&D's new product 'Unearthed Arcana'. The fact that the cartoon had cameos by proto-iconics like Strongheart the Paladin, Warduke the Fighter, and Kelek the wizard who in turn were part of an action figure line meant that the cartoon was supposed to boost interest in toys, which in TSR's case was supposed to lead kids from playing make-believe with the toys toward playing make-believe in the formal structured way of an RPG. On the whole, this strategy was I think well thought out - or would have been had someone raised their hand in a meeting and said, "Since we are rolling out a fantasy product to an audience of children, we probably shouldn't be calling our villains 'demons' or otherwise associating ourselves with any real world occult in any fashion. The last thing we want to do in a story filled with wizards and magic, is give the impression that we are connected with any real world beliefs about magic. It will probably freak some people out, and then the fact that the game that is ultimately driving our RP is adult oriented, often horrific, and built around violence is probably going to concern people in a way it wouldn't if didn't look like we were thumbing our nose at people."

But was it D&D? Yes, I think it was. It had bullywogs, lizardfolk, Tiamat, wizards, thieves, fighters, acrobats, gnomes, orcs, nightmares, shadow demons, cavaliers, barbarians, rangers, halflings, gold dragons, rocs, red dragons, unicorns that could teleport (as a plot point, no less!), illusionists, psionics, shambling mounds, dwarfs, skeleton warriors, giant eagles, hook horrors, frost giants, behirs and most everything more or less has to sort of role that it would have in Dungeons and Dragons except for the 'Dungeon Master'. But the DM being embodied and in game isn't a bad conceit as far as it goes, and helps capture the feel of being in game where there is a DM sitting there with you. There is a party, and they have a quest, go on adventures, fight monsters, solve riddles, and often end up heroes.

Sure, you could file off the serial numbers and the story wouldn't suffer, but do you honestly feel that hook horrors are going to even appear in the cartoon if it's not inspired by D&D?

Maybe even more to the point, in many ways, the cartoon was more grown up and mature than what most people were doing at the time. Heck, I would be happy if I had characters as consistently well drawn in my games as the kids. Just as the introduction of less paragon Superheroes with ordinary problems and relatable normal drama was seen as an evolutionary (or even revolutionary) step forward in writing quality in comic books, so the fact that the kids weren't just brutes kicking down doors, killing things, and taking their stuff but kids with real world problems, understandable fears, and relatable emotions was I think a step in the right direction.

Let me ask you this: when has there ever been anything faithful to the in game story of D&D in its ideal? The best D&D movie by far is 'The Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising', but that movie isn't faithful to D&D so much as it is faithful to the act of playing D&D. The in game story is a parody because in real life, the in game stories we tell in transcription so rarely even rise to the level of good parody. The same would be true of the D&D episode of 'The Community' which likewise isn't about D&D so much as it is about playing D&D.

If this isn't D&D, what would pass your test?

 

[Celebrim]

[MENTION=6681948]N'raac[/MENTION]: First, my favorite threads at EnWorld are of two types. Ones where people share useful game content and help each other out DM to DM, and ones like this which resemble the rambling nerdy conversations about seemingly trivial things taken very seriously because maybe they aren't really so trivial, that we'd have face to face as friends and fellow gamers.

Secondly, as for where comics and graphic novels are today, I really fear that the medium is once again being held back by how easy it is to substitute shock value for story telling. So much of what passes for comic book art these days is badly written and has as its real selling point how over the top it is. In my opinion, the only thing worse than censorship is a complete lack of restraint. It's like waffling back and forth between extreme law and extreme chaos. On the one end you have something as sterile as an infinite crystal. And on the other end... you have something as sterile as an infinite void. There are times that a story needs to deal with sex, violence, dysfunction, cruelty, addiction and other serious themes. There is a time for the grotesque or the provocative in art. But if you were to remove the depiction of those things from the story, and without the depiction of those things there wouldn't be anything left of interest, then chances are you have neither a very good story nor a very interesting treatment of the themes. The deft story teller has subtlety, and its a definite lack of subtlety that pervades the way modern graphic stories are told.

But on the animation front, I think the opposite prevails. For the last 20 years or so we have been in the true Golden Age of animation, and the medium has I think finally evolved into a mature art form. If you look at the work of Disney, Pixar, Studio Ghibli, and others I don't think we've ever had as many well written, beautifully made animated movies as we do now. If I were listing greatest animation of all time, almost all of it would be very recent. 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' was probably the greatest animated series ever made. 'The Incredibles', 'Wreck-It-Ralph', 'Inside Out', 'Toy Story II', 'Spirited Away', 'Howl's Moving Castle', 'Tangled', 'The Wind Rises' and tons of other movies hit levels that entertain both kids and adults. And that's to not even get into the question of whether CGI mean most of the movies we watch are in some sense animated art.

The only real weakness I'm seeing in animation right now is... stuff related to comic books, where if anything we are regressing. DC really helped kick this off with the original Batman: The Animated series, which was a heavily censored title that nonetheless managed to have great story telling. But since bucking the censors, instead of using this freedom to tell more mature stories, it seems like every series tries to out do itself in cheap pushing the boundaries violence and innuendo and is not doing the expensive process of writing well and crafting art (with or without violence, sex, or whatever the story needs).

If I were going to remake The Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, I'd want more freedom than the original story tellers had. I'd like to see the kids deal with the consequences of having killed something, and the conflict within the group that caused - particularly as foreshadowing and building the tension for 'The Dragon's Graveyard'. I'd like Bobby to have the freedom to actually use his club as a club occasionally. I'd like to have Bobby, Sheila and maybe even Hank explicitly foster kids or orphans with troubled pasts which are only hinted at in episodes like 'City on the Edge of Midnight'. I'd like to show backstory of Sheila shoplifting and living on the streets that explains why she is the thief, but also why she is the moral heart of the group. I'd like to show fear and deprivation on the screen more than the original. I've got ideas for a finale that involves that sword in the Dragon's Graveyard and who it is meant for if not the kids. I'd like to do tons of things you couldn't do with a mid-80's Saturday morning cartoon. But ultimately, none of that would make the cartoon better in and of itself. The cartoon would be judged not on that, or whether it had 'adult themes', but whether the story was better.

 

[N'raac]

Well, I think that's a difficult question. What you are essentially asking is, "What is D&D?" And as we know, that doesn't have any one answer.

Which does make the question, however valid, a tough one to answer. What is the “feel” of D&D. And the answer, at least in part, is that it is many different things to many people.

To me, D&D is not a bunch of kids transported to a quasi-fantasy world and given superhero-style magic items. It’s not a cutesy baby unicorn. It’s not a wizard who doesn’t actually know how to cast spells. It’s not warriors with no weapons or armor.

The D&D movie probably comes much closer (it captures the game without capturing a story, or at least not one well thought out and conveyed). Many movies without the “D&D” brand do a better job with a story, lacking the brand name.

A cartoon adaptation of the DC Comics D&D books from the late ‘80’s/early ‘90s, or some of the other writings since would better capture the game feel, at least for me. But the core question of what that D&D “feel” actually is probably can’t be answered.

We have heated debates on these Boards over whether various incarnations of D&D even capture “What is D&D”, so expecting other media to do so is probably asking a lot.

GI Joe and Transformers started as toys, so they didn’t come with the same need to translate a “feel” into the game. An RPG on these properties would be judged by their media releases, not the other way around. They’re very reasonable comparables – all three were designed to sell toys, not emulate a game’s feel.

Sure, you could file off the serial numbers and the story wouldn't suffer, but do you honestly feel that hook horrors are going to even appear in the cartoon if it's not inspired by D&D?

If not, it is solely because they are IP of the D&D trademark. D&D without Hook Horrors, Umber Hulks or Beholders seems quite achievable. Pathfinder captured the feel of 3rd Ed D&D, and can use none of these.
Part of the problem is a chicken and egg one. Lord of the Rings is probably a D&D movie, which is simply the wheel coming full circle – D&D was designed to emulate fantasy literature, so a movie designed to emulate that fantasy literature would have a similar D&D feel.

To your own comments, it seems like you would like your game to emulate the cartoon, more than you feel the cartoon is an accurate emulation of the game.

As you note, few games have the quality of top notch fantasy literature. But that is the feel the game strives to emulate.

That makes it tough – if D&D is a success, it emulates the source material we want it to emulate. A successful D&D movie or cartoon, then, has to be a successful emulation of what D&D set out to emulate, probably with the trappings (like its unique creatures) that have grown into the IP.

A poor answer to your question, unfortunately, and I wish I had a better contribution to an interesting discussion. Perhaps others would care to weigh in.

 

[N'raac]

Secondly, as for where comics and graphic novels are today, I really fear that the medium is once again being held back by how easy it is to substitute shock value for story telling.

Treating mature subjects in a childish manner doesn`t make it good for the entire family? ‘nuff said on that topic!

To the animation comments, it has become accepted as an artistic medium, not just for the kiddies, and has grown as a consequence.

If I were going to remake The Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, I'd want more freedom than the original story tellers had. I'd like to see the kids deal with the consequences of having killed something, and the conflict within the group that caused - particularly as foreshadowing and building the tension for 'The Dragon's Graveyard'. I'd like Bobby to have the freedom to actually use his club as a club occasionally. I'd like to have Bobby, Sheila and maybe even Hank explicitly foster kids or orphans with troubled pasts which are only hinted at in episodes like 'City on the Edge of Midnight'. I'd like to show backstory of Sheila shoplifting and living on the streets that explains why she is the thief, but also why she is the moral heart of the group. I'd like to show fear and deprivation on the screen more than the original. I've got ideas for a finale that involves that sword in the Dragon's Graveyard and who it is meant for if not the kids. I'd like to do tons of things you couldn't do with a mid-80's Saturday morning cartoon. But ultimately, none of that would make the cartoon better in and of itself. The cartoon would be judged not on that, or whether it had 'adult themes', but whether the story was better.

I think a lot of the things you would do are things that could not be done in a Saturday morning carton, simply because they are things which we would not consider appropriate for children’s entertainment.
By the same token, Bobby the Barbarian bashing the baddies bloody and broken is probably not something we would consider appropriate for an eight year old (or ten year old). I think you’d have to age the characters a bit to tell the stories you seem to want to tell, as well as change the medium from a Saturday morning cartoon.

That might make the feel more D&D to me, or to others, or it could make it less so. Do D&D characters actually feel conflicted about killing?

Maybe that’s an aspect that throws me off – the modern persons thrust into the fantasy world cost some of that D&D feel. However, treating killing as a serious matter, and debating its appropriateness, would be a mature theme which could be incorporated into a D&D game. And modern persons grappling with the realities of a D&D world could also make for an interesting program - but I`m not sure it would feel like D&D.