Cartoons ruined by executive meddling.

[Loonyyy]

There was something to ruin with The Legend of Korra?

It had a cool art style and animation, and the setting was awesome, and it had a female Batman running around, with a magical V as well, but Korra was such a terrible, completely irredeemably unlikeable character and a terrible person.

 

[Reincarnatedwolfgod]

I agree with the op
young justice being canceled sucks. I was enjoying the show and they decide to end it. I hope they at least can end it in a somewhat proper way and not end in a annoying cliff hanger. It was the only good show on cartoon network that i know of; thus I am done with that tv channel after this.

I Do hope that Young Justice can pull off a decent ending and not have it rushed.

Hopefully there will be a war with the Reach and the Justice League to end it all in a bang

from what happened in the Gordon Godfrey interview with reach, it could definitively get quite interesting in the end.

 

[Ishal]

There was something to ruin with The Legend of Korra?

It had a cool art style and animation, and the setting was awesome, and it had a female Batman running around, with a magical V as well, but Korra was such a terrible, completely irredeemably unlikeable character and a terrible person.

You know. I'll agree that Legend of Kora was bad... but I just can't remember anything to not like about it. I think it was bad because I don't remember anything except for Zuko's kid or whatever coming in with a navy and getting destroyed?

Why was Kora so bad? All I remember was that she had an attitude.

 

[Darren716]

Spongebob, after Hillenberg left that show went down so fast. Even as a kid I knew something felt different after the movie everything seemed like it was on a lower level now and it was being made more for a younger demographic.

 

[Bat Vader]

Did Batman: The Animated Series ever have a proper series finale or was it just cancelled? Wasn't the staff of the show given a lot of creative freedoms with it?

 

[Marik2]

I agree with the op
young justice being canceled sucks. I was enjoying the show and they decide to end it. I hope they at least can end it in a somewhat proper way and not end in a annoying cliff hanger. It was the only good show on cartoon network that i know of; thus I am done with that tv channel after this.

I Do hope that Young Justice can pull off a decent ending and not have it rushed.

Hopefully there will be a war with the Reach and the Justice League to end it all in a bang

from what happened in the Gordon Godfrey interview with reach, it could definitively get quite interesting in the end.

Wondering if Blue Beetle will die or somehow sacrifice himself to stop the apocalypse

Also wondering if theres a beetle for all the colors like the lanterns

 

[Quellist]

Cant believe no-one has mentioned Pinky and the Brain yet!

When they changed it to "Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain" It was a disaster, someone in production even managed to slip the line "its what the network wants, why bother to complain?" into the theme song.

What was imo one of the funniest cartoons ever got ruined and died pretty soon after

 

[Marik2]

Did Batman: The Animated Series ever have a proper series finale or was it just cancelled? Wasn't the staff of the show given a lot of creative freedoms with it?

It kinda did but it still continued with Batman Beyond

That one had a proper open ended ending

 

[Vausch]

Swat Kats.

Ted Turner: "So what if this is the highest rated show on my network? It's got explosions! That'll teach kids to blow each other up in jet planes! Cancel it!"

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

You never seen this?

This happens in the later seasons so that could be why you haven't seen it.

"I deeply resent this." I think Brain summed up that whole thing rather well. (Perhaps a subtle dig by the cast at the WB execs?)

OT: Samurai Jack and ReBoot. I don't know the details as to why they got canned, but I'm sure it was lame. There was a roumer that ReBoot was getting rebooted, but even if that was true I'm not sure if I'd be happy with that. With Tony Jay gone, Megabyte just wouldn't be the same. Kinda the same deal with Samurai Jack, even if they tried again, with out Mako as Aku it just wouldn't feel right.

Yeah, the creators hated it as much, or even MORE than the audience (viewership was so low they didn't even air the entire first season).

You also missed the biggest and most obvious dig.

"It's what the networked wants, why bother to complain?"

Spoiler: They actually insulted the idea before Pinky, Elmyra, and the Brain even aired.

Moral of that episodes story, you cannot add a third person to "Pinky and The Brain" without ruining it, which is what the network had been demanding.

On the same topic, Animaniacs was also screwed over by the network, with all the seasons after the first one being really short (the shortest only had eight episodes, compared to the first season's 65), and forced the writers to reuse rejected scripts from the first season.

 

[Bat Vader]

Did Batman: The Animated Series ever have a proper series finale or was it just cancelled? Wasn't the staff of the show given a lot of creative freedoms with it?

It kinda did but it still continued with Batman Beyond

That one had a proper open ended ending

I gotta admit I didn't like the series finale for Justice League Unlimited. I was hoping Superman and Lex Luthor were going to team up and finish Darkseid for good but instead Lex just transports him away to teach him things. It kinda felt weak.

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

I pretty much agreed what everyone has said above.
It also made worse that while I did liked Teen Titan and I did read that brought back the voice actors and actress for the team but it's under a different artstyle and it's more focus on comedy-

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Art style look ok but I'm dreading on the comedy aspect of it seeing how I am spoil by the awesome serious and tense tone I watched from Young Justice.

Also this sum up on my view on the whole exective meddling-

Spoiler: How many cartoons is there on Cartoon Network?

Another example of exective ruining the show is Pinky and the Brain. The show was fine the way it is until they decided the whole Brain wanting to take over the world is a bad thing and they competely revamp the show by bringing in Elmyra from Looney Toon!

Now I'm a fan of Teen Titans and very much Young Justice (Literally finished watching the latest episode) but after finding out it was cancelled and to be replaced with a more light hearted and comedy type show with a completely different art style I just let out a massive sigh of disdain.

This is what today's media is like, every show goes by rating and always has done and if the rating's aren't good enough then the show gets taken out behind the shed and snuffed out. It's making me angry and sad that we are losing great shows that actually have decent depth in terms of story and character development and then suddenly they are replaced with cheaper shows with cheap animations, dumbed down logic along with making the show so easy and so simple to follow that the very idea of making a show like that makes it's own existence pointless.

I'm most likely not going to be watching the new Teen Titans as it's nothing like the original but more of a cheap knockoff designed to get more ratings while at the same time gathering a new audience that will support it blindly without knowing what it replaced and what the original was even like.

We've had so many shows over the past 10-13 years ranging from Dexter's lab to Samurai jack to Megas XLR and yet while they were very popular they still got axed and all because of ratings and us not apparently watching the show a lot more than we already had done and that alone is sad for media execs to justify themselves in killing great shows.

however there is still a shiny glimmer of hope for Young Justice:

http://youngjustice.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:BlackTarantula/Two_months_to_save_Young_Justice_-_a_CN_director_comments

 

[Marik2]

Did Batman: The Animated Series ever have a proper series finale or was it just cancelled? Wasn't the staff of the show given a lot of creative freedoms with it?

It kinda did but it still continued with Batman Beyond

That one had a proper open ended ending

I gotta admit I didn't like the series finale for Justice League Unlimited. I was hoping Superman and Lex Luthor were going to team up and finish Darkseid for good but instead Lex just transports him away to teach him things. It kinda felt weak.

Well Batman Beyond is suppose to be the actual ending to the Justice League Unlimited universe

There was an episode with older Terry and finds put about Bruce being his biological dad. Superman is like retired or too old now and Wonder Woman never got with Bruce, which is total bull

 

[yunabomb]

I don't think Korra was hurt by executive meddling. I think only having two writers is what hurt it (although I'm assuming this wasn't caused by executive meddling). The production value was excellent, but the plot was terrible.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

I'd mention Freakazoid. As to why, look to Pinky, Elmyra and the Brain.

Same basic creative team, fresh new IP, new ideas, backing from Steven Spielberg... What could possibly go wrong?

What did go wrong is that Tom Ruegger initially conceived Freakazoid as a kind of reference to Jack Ryder's character, in Batman's canon. That is, a zany, off-the-wall and yet still dark antihero. Sort of a slightly toned down take on the Mask, from the Monhke/Arcudi comics. Seven Spielberg wasn't up for it because, well, you know how Spielberg is about kid stuff. No violence or innuendo, please!

So, as a result, the darker pilot was never aired, and we ended up with the show that got produced. Ruegger would later go on to comment that keeping the cray-cray going for more than one season was getting fairly daunting. Anyone who's seen Freakazoid could confirm this; the show feels like Pinky and the Brain, if Pinky was the lead. That means a steady stream of nonsense, an established continuity and plot that was very quickly vacated in favour of MORE insanity - to the point where the executives got burned out.

The show never received a proper ending, but word on the Web is that "Normadeus" is the production team's last and best effort on the project. They'd received an early warning and starting putting all their eggs in the one basket they had. Someone had just come out of a viewing of 1984's "Amadeus", and figured they might as well lampoon Milos Forman's movie with the Lobe as Salieri and the Freak as Mozart. Well, loosely speaking.

The entire show is covered in self-conscious ribs and references to the cutthroat executives at the WB who, apparently, cut off entire animation teams at the drop of a hat. Ruegger's team had awesome resources to work with, but a terrible workplace environment and a pretty toxic backlog. All that resentment, built up from Tiny Toons to Taz-Mania and Animaniacs, all the way through to Pinky, Elmyra and the Brain...

Yeah. There's a crapton of very mature ribs at the industry in Freakazoid, which is what makes it all the more precious. I'd mention Histeria, too. Same team, same cancellation pattern, same reasons. The bile that's hidden in the cracks of certain episodes is fairly worrying.

 

[iDoom46]

Ooooh. This thread gets me right in the gut.

People seem to be listing ones I already agree with, but here's my list anyway:

Avengers EMH, Spectacular Spider-Man, Transformers Animated, Young Justice, original Teen Titans, Samurai Jack, Big O, Symbionic Titan, Megas XLR, Tron: Uprising, Motorcity, Invader Zim, GI Joe: Renegades, the ThunderCats reboot...

Ugh. They all had so much promise! It hurts too much to go on!

Transformers Animated, Symbiotic Titan, Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force Go, Motorcity, Samurai Jack, Megas XLR, The Spectacular Spider-man... all good shows canceled without a satisfying ending. Note that all of these belonged to Cartoon Network or Disney.

I can't vouch for the others, but Hasbro put an end to Transformers Animated because the second movie was on the way. They don't want to stretch out the licence or something like that.

Which means Prime's shelf life is good up to Transformers 4. Crap.

I heard through the grape vine that Prime is only set to last one more season. Apparently Hasbro has a rule that no Transformers series (except for the first one) is allowed to go past 3 seasons, regardless of quality. So I get the feeling Transformers Prime is going to be joining this list soon...

EDIT: Oh, yeah. And these don't really fit the list with everybody else's because they aren't action series but- Mission Hill and The Oblongs. Two fantastic animated series with great senses of humor that weren't allowed to even finish their first seasons before being cancelled.

 

[Accel]

IIRC Sonic SatAM was cancelled because a new executive didn't have any interest in the show, even though the writers had another season planned out and everything. And then we got Sonic Underground.

While I wouldn't say it ruined the show, we did those awful-looking trans-metal designs in Beast Wars. And then the weird idea of Fuzors.

Cartoon Network has a bad habit of cancelling its best shows, (most recently being Sym-Bionic Titan and Young Justice) with the weak excuse of them not being good at selling toys (though the toylines were either non-existant or the ones they made were shitty).

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Did Batman: The Animated Series ever have a proper series finale or was it just cancelled? Wasn't the staff of the show given a lot of creative freedoms with it?

Batman TAS never really needed a finale. It just sort of merged into the Superman/Batman Show, then into Batman Beyond, and then the two Justice League series.

They all shared a continuity and bled into each other, as well as the spinoffs for Static Shock and another one that's name eludes me.

The ultimate finale for the DC Animated Universe is the Justice League Unlimited episode "Epilogue", which dealt with Terry McGinniss finally coming to terms with Bruce Wayne being his biological father, and continuing on the tradition of Batman after Wayne dies. At the time, the studio didn't know if Justice League Unlimited would be picked up for a second season, so they wanted some closure.

Season two of Unlimited ended with the Justice League defeating Darkseid's alien invasion (which is pretty much the Avengers final battle in cartoon form), but it didn't really hold up as well.

None of the shows really needed an ending. They were the adventures of the DC superheros, not one long storyline. Procedural, not sequential.

 

[Cheesus Crust]

My childhood friend Dexter's Laboratory. It was supposed to end after Ego Trip, but NOPE! And to add further insult, the character models got worse.

OMG You're fucking right I remember this. I don't understand why the heck networks do this. IMO the latest Ben Ten is gross, I miss the original ones.

Swat Kats.

Ted Turner: "So what if this is the highest rated show on my network? It's got explosions! That'll teach kids to blow each other up in jet planes! Cancel it!"

Hope this isn't true, this is like one of the most retarded things ever.

 

[swani24]

The Big Buy and Rusty! That show was awesome back in the day. Also what the heck happened to Spiderman the Animated Series in the 90's? You never find out what happened??? That has bugged me since I was kid and saw that last episode.