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It happens all the time. This year alone sees a new Thundercats, Voltron Force, and yet another Transformers. Then there's My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, an adorable little show that started one of the bloodiest nerd wars the Internet has ever seen. All of these animated revivals have one thing in common: they're a far cry from the worst. For the most insulting and terrible attempts at bringing back popular cartoons, read on.
11) Quack Pack
The shows of the Disney Afternoon never tired of putting familiar characters in strange new clothes. Chip and Dale became private investigators, Goofy became a suburban single dad, and the characters of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, in a pitch session we'd just love to hear, became 1930s bush pilots and corporate oligarchs. This formula wore thin over the 1990s, however, and after limp attempts like The Mighty Ducks and Bonkers, Disney trotted out some familiar characters in the tiresome Quack Pack.
It was a desperate attempt at recasting characters from Duck Tales, which adapted many creative adventures from Carl Barks' old Uncle Scrooge comics. Quack Pack showed far less invention. Instead of tagging along on worldwide treasure hunts, Huey, Dewey, and Louie are now the kids from Home Improvement -- or any other inane sitcom. Their perpetually foiled adult guardian is Donald Duck, and the show's only watchable if you assume that Donald is actually in hell and being tormented by three teenage arch-demons.
10) Voltron: The 3rd Dimension
This year's Voltron Force isn't the first attempt at recapturing the glories that the multi-lion robot knew throughout the Reagan years. Back in 1997, World Events Productions greenlit Voltron: The 3rd Dimension, an all-CG sequel to the original Voltron series. Someone possibly thought that what had worked for Transformers: Beast Wars would work for Voltron.
Well, it didn't. A primitive CG look was acceptable in Beast Wars and wasn't that bad for ReBoot, but it didn't do Voltron any favors. Most of the show's human characters have the same mannequin-y look as an early PlayStation game intro, and the robots are also as awkward. Yes, Voltron: The 3rd Dimension can't even put together good robot battles, and that's one thing clunky CG shows could conceivably do well.
9) Dirty Pair Flash
In chronicling the destruction sown by interplanetary police officers Kei and Yuri, the original Dirty Pair movies and TV series are silly, frantic, and, to put it scientifically, '80s as fuck. The big hair, detailed animation, and vapid sci-fi flashiness all make Kei and Yuri symbols of Japan's cheesy '80s anime boom. Not realizing that Kei and Yuri were best left in the decade that spawned them, their creators wanted to revive the Dirty Pair for the 1990s. Plans for a sequel went astray, leaving only a bland remake. Like so much mediocre anime, there's nothing horribly wrong with Dirty Pair Flash; it's just unremarkable in everything from the generic plots to the obligatory quasi-nudity to the routine J-pop opening number.
Other '80s anime staples were reinvented with debatable success; in fact, some still claim that the Bubblegum Crisis 2040 TV series is better than the original. But few people recall Dirty Pair Flash fondly -- and those who do appear to be batshit insane. Consider the Wikipedia entry for the series, which tells us that the new Kei "dislikes showing her softer side, which she does have, as apparent when she had to protect a young baby being chased by assassins. During a crisis, she had allowed the baby to suckle her (even though she wasn't lactating) in order to keep him quiet when the assassins were close by."
Even though she wasn't lactating. This is very important to someone, and we hope we never learn why.
8) Speed Racer: The Next Generation
Speed Racer will be remembered for its original 1967 series and, if there's any justice in this world, the Wachowskis' brilliantly garish film. Not to say that there aren't many other versions of Speed Racer, but most of those are terrible. For one, there's the 1997 New Adventures of Speed Racer, which again proves that kids should immediately turn off anything pitched as "The New Adventures."
Then there's the more recent (and even worse) Speed Racer: The Next Generation, which meshes stilted, cutout characters with ugly, featureless CG. Its only saving grace: veteran actor Peter Fernandez, who adapted and played the title hero in the original Speed Racer, got a paycheck out of this mess.
7) Tom and Jerry Kids
It's a rite of passage for every major cartoon property to have a "Kids" incarnation. It happened to Scooby Doo. It happened to The Flintstones. It sorta happened to The Pink Panther. And it was always predictably inane. Then it happened to Tom and Jerry.
Tom and Jerry were always vaguely unpleasant in their one-dimensional violence, but the original cartoons are at least dynamic and competently animated. So it's painful to see the characters in low-effort TV animation from 1990, complete with a flat theme song that rhymes "dripple" with "simple." The show also assumes that the best thing about Tom and Jerry was the repetitive slapstick, so there's plenty of that and very little clever humor. Say what you want about Tiny Toons, but at least it knew what to take from its source material.
Tags: Bad Ideas, G.I. Joe, Hanna Barbera, He-Man, Looney Tunes, Mean-spiritedness, My Little Pony, Speed Racer, Voltron
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