The New Style

[CleverNickName]

We needed D&D Cartoon 2, to teach this new generation the good old western values!!

Fourth Edition Cartoons?

 

[WizarDru]

Comparing the D&D cartoon to current kid stuff like "Ed, Edd & Eddy", "Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy", "Fairly Odd Parents", "A.T.O.M.", "Max Steel", "Totally Spies", "Winx Club", "W.I.T.C.H.", "Johnny Test", etc? The D&D cartoon was so much better, more than two decades ago!

I wouldn't say you need to watch more kid's shows, but your list is pretty scatter-shot. Avatar, for example, is light years ahead of the D&D cartoon show. A continuing, advancing storyline with deep character development, excellent mythology, political intrigue and far more action. Any of the DC animated universe shows manages to straddle the fine-line of kid's entertainment and well-done shows. W.I.T.C.H., while yet another cross-media license, manages to rise somewhat above it's source material. The most recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series was much better than any previous series, being much more faithful to the original material while still managing to make it kid-appropriate. Kim Possible manages to turn the male-female dynamic on it's ear and be very funny, to boot. Shows like Hey, Arnold and As Told By Ginger managed to be effective kid's comedies that also happened to be smart and wise beyond their years. And I'm not even counting different anime shows.

The D&D cartoon was good, but I think rose-colored glasses are in effect here. Celebrim's list is almost entirely licensed shows that were backed by a toy line. The 80s was RIFE with shows that were made to support a toy line, not the other way around. That shows like the Transformers, The Gummy Bears and The Real Ghostbusters managed to rise above that fails to remember all the AWFUL shows that also came out then. Sure, everyone remembers Thundercats...how many people are hugely nostalgic for Silverhawks? Tigersharks? Anyone? Foofur? Pound Puppies? Snorks? The Go-Bots? Rubik the Amazing Cube? Turbo Teen? Camp Candy? PUNKY BREWSTER? Every last tired retread of the Flinstones and Scooby-Doo? Yikes.

I mean, let's look at the shows side-by-side with it in the line-up, shall we? Prepare yourselves for some pain.

And the D&D cartoon timeslot, at least on the East Coast, was shown at 10:30 originally, iirc. Later, it got shoved to the 11:30 AM slot which was always the sign of imminent death, as shows were often pre-empted for sports events in those slots.

 

[GreatLemur]

Kids absolutely get better cartoons these days than they did when I was a kid. I can't really watch stuff like Avatar and such for long, because they're still way too blatantly for children for me to tolerate, but they definitely seem to be smarter and better animated than the vast majority of stuff I used to watch. I mean, Transformers was cool, and Thundercats had its charm, but nothing other than sheer nostalgia could make anyone believe Masters of the Universe or Superfriends weren't completely retarded. (But that new MotU show seemed pretty cool for the five minutes it lasted, and Justice League Unlimited was gloriously awesome, and I don't even like the Justice League as a general rule.)

We needed D&D Cartoon 2, to teach this new generation the good old western values!!

I made a thread about that a while back, actually...

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Sure, everyone remembers Thundercats...how many people are hugely nostalgic for Silverhawks? Tigersharks? Anyone? Foofur? Pound Puppies? Snorks? The Go-Bots? Rubik the Amazing Cube? Turbo Teen? Camp Candy? PUNKY BREWSTER? Every last tired retread of the Flinstones and Scooby-Doo? Yikes.

I hate you for making me remember things best left forgotten.

 

[Tewligan]

D&D had a series finale that was never produced. The script for it is available on the internets somewhere. It's quite good. It was intended to set up a new series of the show where the kids focused on using their own skills rather than their magical gear to succeed.

Actually, although not as good as seeing it, that last script is performed as a radio play in the DVD set. It's pretty damn good, actually, although the kid playing Presto sounds like he's about 5 years old.

 

[Klaus]

I wouldn't say you need to watch more kid's shows, but your list is pretty scatter-shot. (...)
The D&D cartoon was good, but I think rose-colored glasses are in effect here.

Two things:

1) I'm not saying that the D&D cartoon is the end-all, be-all of animation. I know there are shows that are better (Batman:tAS, Superman:tAS, JL and JLU, for instance). Yet all of the shows mentioned as being better than the D&D cartoon (and we are getting a bit of repetition in the lists) are a fraction of what's airing. And Kim Possible? Really?

2) No "rose-colored glasses". Like I said, the D&D cartoon has been aired pretty much constantly in Brazil since the mid-80s. The last time I watched it was this year. And it is still just as good as I remember it.

 

[Celebrim]

Kim Possible manages to turn the male-female dynamic on it's ear and be very funny, to boot.

I'd be willing to defend Kim Possible as good, witty, story-telling. However, the male-female dynamic has been turned on its ear so often, that I think it hardly is worth noticing any more. It would be more surprising in the current culture to see the reverse dynamic, and the 'kick butt girl'/'slightly buffoonish guy' is so common that it can practically be considered the traditional gender role at this point.

Celebrim's list is almost entirely licensed shows that were backed by a toy line.

You say that like it was a bad thing. The connection between the shows and the toys allowed the producers to dump alot more money into the shows writing and animation than would have otherwised occurred. It turned kid's shows into money makers, and that brought with it quality. Granted, alot of suits never saw the connection between making a quality show and generating sales, and so you had alot of dreck along with the good. But at the high end, it was allowing the shows to hire writing and production talent that they never would have had otherwise and those writers were fighting for high quality production values and often got them. Licensing is good for children's show, and its not a coincidence that most of the few good children's cartoons since the 80's have been associated with licenses.

That shows like the Transformers, The Gummy Bears and The Real Ghostbusters managed to rise above that fails to remember all the AWFUL shows that also came out then. Sure, everyone remembers Thundercats...how many people are hugely nostalgic for Silverhawks? Tigersharks? Anyone? Foofur? Pound Puppies? Snorks? The Go-Bots? Rubik the Amazing Cube? Turbo Teen? Camp Candy? PUNKY BREWSTER? Every last tired retread of the Flinstones and Scooby-Doo? Yikes.

Absolutely. Silverhawks and The Go-Bots are among the worst cartoons ever. They were insulting even to the mentality of the eight year olds at the low end of thier target audience. Like I said, the licensing/toy connection produced an explosion in the demand for animation as everyone with any sort of line at all wanted to get in on the act, often on a shoe string budget with no clear idea of how the successful shows (Smurfs, GI Joe, etc.) had managed it.

As for the supposed pain you show, I wasn't personally a fan of Muppet Babies, but they definately 'hard thier charm' and could work on several levels, CBS Storybreak often rocked, Pole Position I mentioned, and most of the rest were aimed at an under 8 audience (for that matter so was Muppet Babies) and so are often painfully limited in thier stories and overly cutesy. But even some of those ('The Berenstein Bears') are classics of the type. I'd put that list up against anyone's Saturday morning line up now.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

And Kim Possible? Really?

Yes. Really. Kim Possible rocks out on toast.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Hey WotC: If you really want D&D to appeal to a younger audiance, a great way would be to get Cartoon Network to rebroadcast the D&D series. Like maybe a marathon of some of the best episodes for a trial run to gauge interest.

 

[Celebrim]

Hey WotC: If you really want D&D to appeal to a younger audiance, a great way would be to get Cartoon Network to rebroadcast the D&D series. Like maybe a marathon of some of the best episodes for a trial run to gauge interest.

I have an even better idea. Get some quality writing talent and do for the original D&D cartoons what the Sci-Fi network has done for the original Battlestar galactica. The plots are solid. It's actually in my opinion great source material, and there are elements of it that are sophisticated enough that they impacted the way I DMed, for example, monsters and people living together because 'monsters' are people too (the equivalent would have been to have orcs and goblins from the caves of Chaos drinking in the bar in the keep on the borderlands).

I for one have always wanted to know what happens when Eric finally picks up a sword to go with that shield. We know that at least Bobby is going back, but does Diana (or Presto!) choose to stay in the Realm forever? Does Hank ever kiss Sheila? How many of the kids are in foster care, and if so, do they ever find real parents? Would Eric's father really scare Venger, or would they be on the same side? Are the kids aging as they mature? That is, will we ever see Hank with a beard? If not, how long before Uni starts losing her infantile appearance? Before they got on the ride, who was the DM? Erik? Presto? Diana? How do these kids from such obviously different backgrounds know each other? What was the DM's family life like before Venger turned against him? Are there more parallels between the DM and Erik than we've thus far seen? That would go along way to answering the question of why the DM summoned these particular heroes.

We have some tantalizing hints of the depth of the show, some of which we glimpsed from the script of the never produced series finale, but alot of what the writer's were aiming at is significantly above the 8-12 year old target audience and could use fleshing out as an over 13 episodic series IMO. The potential of raising the bar even above Batman:TAS is there.