1067 Guileless.

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You know, in the span of a few days I’ve had a large chunk of my television viewing time freed up. Green Lantern Animated, Young Justice, Tron Uprising, Scooby Doo Mystery Inc, Iron Man Armored Adventures, Staw Wars The Clone Wars, and probably other shows I’m forgetting, have all either ended, been cancelled, or not been picked up for new seasons. It was a real golden time there for a while of exceptional shows. Tron hurt the most. It had the best cliffhanger ending. The kind of final episode that just begs for more. Scooby Doo actually ended. Everything tied up, but open for more if the money was there. Green Lantern felt like it ended properly too. It could have gone on, but there was closure. Clone Wars is apparently going to move to Disney Channel for its last season, if it actually has one at all. They’re acting cagey, and with the Lucasarts thing I feel like they might yet dick the fans over and not spend a thought on it. Hopefully Transformers Prime will wrap up nicely with the beast hunters thing. It’s already been announced that this is the last season so I hope they planned an ending for it too.

Not a lot of kids shows get endings. A few do, but if they don’t get crazy popular it’s all up in the air. I mean, even Transformers doesn’t really have an ending. It just kind of stops. Except in Japan where it didn’t.

That kind of thing really bothered me as a teen. Pirates Of Dark Water in particular never finished telling its story, even though there was a clear goal to accomplish. I don’t think the Real Ghostbusters has an ending. I know the comics didn’t. they just stopped coming one day. Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t. Those kids never get home… I dunno, it’s just kind of a shame.

If nothing else it’s a lot more clear now that people put some effort into writing kid’s shows compared to when I was actually a kid.

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There has definitely been a LOT of good writing within the last 20 years of animation, especially stuff that has been aimed at kids but really ended up being for everyone.

Paul Dini gave us a great run in the 90’s with Batman: The Animated Series, perhaps one of the best written animated series for kids, but dark and held something for the adults as well. If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t have had great shows like Justice League Unlimited, Young Justice, Green Lantern, or even TRON. The Batman series was really the opening for what we have now, to show that there was a market for young adults.

It IS a shame that these shows are all thrown by the wayside – I just hope that we continue to have good programming and not this live action crap on Cartoon Network that we currently have. It’s CARTOON NETWORK, for god’s sake! It should be CARTOONS!!!

Have you watched Cartoon Network in a while? Cause a lot of the live action crap isn’t around anymore. Both Nickelodeon and Disney currently have more live action in their regular programming, and have for a while.

While it is a shame that we’re losing some of these great series, we’re not being left to dry, and we could certainly drop the complaints about about a program block that hasn’t been on the air in two years.

I hope I don’t hurt anyone’s feelings when I say that Scooby-Doo needed to end. It already jumped the shark a few years ago. As you have seen, there is plenty of talent out there capable of creating new stuff so for all its nostalgic value, Scooby-Doo needed to take a final bow (or bow-wow) and retire to the old dogs home.

Young justice has just started showing here in aust, i like it hopefully the channel that has it will continue to show it in order and not start jumping around replaying it or playing the same eps over and over like ben10 or wolverine.

sometimes with anime i wish once a series was over they would just give us one more ep so we can see what they are up to after the series is over. like ouran host club the two leads finally acknowledged their fondness and that was it. full metal panic 2, gundam seed destiny, comic party revolution. etc.

Dungeons and Dragons did have an ending… But the episode was never filmed. You can read the screenplay online, and the episode itself was released on the DVD series in the form of a radio play… If you care for hat sort of thing. Anyway, there was always meant to be a resolution to the series.

Wait… so the final episode I saw where they did get home was a lie? Admittedly Venger followed them through and they were normal kids again, not their jobs, so they had to lure Venger back into the world of D&D…

The lack of endings is one of the main differences between Eastern and Western entertainment. Here in the west the theory is that so long as the money comes in, they can keep filming stories without really worrying about a beginning, middle, or end (aside from an episode by episode basis). It can be seen in everything from the smurfs, to spongebob, to… well, most Western shows. Happy Days kept poor Ron Howard in High School for almost a decade to pull it off. Of course recently there have been some admirable changes. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (while succumbing to a villain of the week and/or season) syndrome is meant to be watched from episode one to the final episode, more or less in order (although some of the Xander fill-in episodes were the best). Avatar, the Last Airbender had a definite progression, and an ending that might have felt a little bit rushed, but if you take into account the timeline of the whole thing makes more sense rushed, but also did NOT wrap everything up tidy.

Meanwhile, in Japan, and to a lesser degree China, Story form mattered more. The art forms that their animation was based on had a beginning, a middle, and usually a conclusion. Even Speed Racer (not that it translated well into the animation. Or maybe it did and it just didn’t translate well into English…) Honestly, I can’t say why the Eastern stuff took endings more into account, and it’s a little to pat to just call it cultural differences, but I am glad to see more Western media following suit.

You know, I was so annoyed that I would watch shows constantly as a kid, waiting on them, and then, with no warning, they would suddenly start over.
I’m still haunted by the episode of Spiderman in which they are doing MacBeth or Hamlet or whatever in the park and the Green Goblin shows up and ruins it. I never got to see that ending! Likewise for the X-Men starting over after Mr. Sinister or whatever his name was getting blown up. Voltron just started back over after they found “Sven” (um… yeah.) wondering around crazy in that other castle with “Arula” (No, I didn’t mistype Alura, though these quotation marks are for a vastly different reason…). The biggest one, though, was Speed Racer figuring out Racer X was his brother. Racer X just gut punched him and drove away and then it was all the way back to the first episode again… sigh…

Anyone else hoping one day, cartoon network or maybe Disney will look back, grab a bunch of series that didn’t get endings, and either continue them or give them satisfying conclusions? Or is that just me?

I think, on the wikipedia page, about the Dungeons & Dragons [ tv show], Michael Reeves wrote an unproduced episode, named Requiem / #28.

Here is a link to the page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dungeons_%26_Dragons_episodes

As of Dec. 3, 2017, this page on the D + D episodes, has 1-2 external links to Michael Reeves’ personal webpage. on the wp, you can read the “Requiem” episode.
The wikipedia page says: #28’s script was made into [a radio play], + put on the [Region 1] set, of the DVDs of- the D + D tv cartoon show.

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