Monday, April 15, 2024

"Gimme a break!"

By the time the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon series premiered in September 1983, I'd been playing D&D almost four years. I was also just shy of fourteen years old. Perhaps inevitably, I greeted the arrival of the cartoon with some trepidation, despite the involvement of Gary Gygax as its co-producer. That's because, at the time, I was increasingly concerned about the "kiddification" of my beloved D&D.  Consequently, I turned up my nose at the cartoon and only caught a handful of its 27 episodes when they were originally broadcast. 

Then, at the tail end of the 3e era, a DVD collection of the entire series was released in 2007. My daughter, who was quite young at the time, took an interest in it and so I bought a copy for her as a Christmas gift. It was only at this point that I ever had a chance to watch the show for any length of time and discovered, with the benefit of age, that it wasn't that bad. It's written for children, to be sure, but, judged with that in mind, it's certainly no worse than any other cartoon of its era and, in some respects, it's better

I bring all this up because my now-adult daughter asked me if the DVD collection had been placed in the garage, along with so many other childhood things. I went and checked and, sure enough, that's where it was. I brought it back inside and, over the last couple of weeks, we've been rewatching it slowly, looking to see if there were anything about that we might not have noticed when she was a child. So far, I can't say that there I've gleaned any particularly deep insights from this rewatch. However, I have noticed a few things worthy of comment. When I'm done with the whole series – perhaps in several weeks – I'll do at least one more post on this topic. If nothing else, I have some thoughts about this early attempt to broaden the appeal of Dungeons & Dragons beyond its original audience.

22 comments:

  1. Just started rewatching with my 5 year old son. We watch together early Saturday mornings for maximum effect. Also because his 2.5 year old sister gets frightened by it.

    Honestly better than I remember. And some small things I could realistically "borrow" for my campaign. More importantly gets my son excited about D&D which he thinks is just rolling dice* and yelling out the numbers.

    *note not funny dice, he probably assumes everyone has a massive collection of different sided dice and in no way associates the d6 as a "Dice". He is especially proud of his spiderman d20 he got for his birthday.

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  2. I loved the D&D cartoon... I was nine when it first came on and we had "played" a bit. But I missed the early teen dislike that I could see being present for it. I recently watched several of them and have the boxed set... Need to finish!

    Interestingly, there was a plan to end the storyline with Venger being redeemed as the son of Dungeon Master and to make the kids more powerful, basically rebooting the comic as a Companion campaign!

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  3. I was excited to see the cartoon characters in the D&D movie last year. It was a great "Easter Egg."

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  4. Fans made the final episode (Requiem) based on the original script. They even got Katie Leigh (Bobby & Sheila) and Frank Welker (Uni) to return to do their voices. Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1_6SeRRflo

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  5. I learned of the show by accident, seeing an ad for reruns on a channel I didn't get when I was at a friend's house, but I only ever saw it when I picked up the DVD a few years ago. Judged for what it was, I thought it was quite good. There were worse fantasy cartoons in the '80s for sure.

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  6. Two points-
    The first: I find it so 14-year-old to have been playing D&D, oh scuse me -A- D&D for 4 years (meaning said 14yo started at 10) being concerned that the adult-serious thing they do is being dumbed down for kids. Ah the ironic intricacies of perspective! I’ve been in those shoes!

    Second: one thing that surprised me was that Eric actually has a very clear character development arc you don’t pick up on if you watch the episodes piecemeal and out of order.

    PS: Quest of the Skeleton Warrior totally blew my mind. How something like that got on children’s tv at that time is just bananas! Best episode ever…

    PPS: I love how the Easter egg of the kids in the movie ties into their appearance in a forgotten realms comic. Interesting given the choice at the end…

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  7. The artist of the promo piece is Bill Sienkiewicz, who has done some great fantasy/horror art over the years. He was also an artist for Marvel, probably best known for his work on early New Mutants and Frank Miller's Elektra series. One of my favorite artists of the 80s. Here's a sample of some of his work.
    https://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2012/09/bill-sienkiewicz.html#

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  8. The cartoon was my first exposure to D&D, and possibly fantasy as a genre. I loved it as a child and still retain a great deal of fondness for it today.

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  9. 1983 is the same year that GI Joe and He-Man launched in the US, both of which went on to have far more cultural impact (and commercial success) than the D&D cartoon. In Japan (the other market where D&D was aired) it was going up against massively superior new anime like Armored Trooper VOTOMs, Aura Battler Dunbine, and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA (which was used as the Invid invasion arc of Robotech a few years later).

    To put it mildly, the show came out at one of the worst possible times in the 80s in terms of competition, and while it did well in its time slot in the first season it was very carefully not thrown up against the big contenders in most markets. And things would only get worse as the 80s went on - 1983 was just the start of the of the surge of "toy commercial cartoons" that (for better or worse) are rightly seen as the definitive US animation of the decade. Maybe if D&D's own toys had sold better things might have been different, but they got drowned in the flood of other action cartoon lines.

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  10. Three of the character classes the kids are assigned (Barbarian, Cavalier, and Acrobat) weren't even available outside of back issues of Dragon magazine. And Ranger was only in the Advanced version of D&D. If the goal was to sell more copies of the game, this seems like an odd design choice.

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    Replies
    1. They were pushing the new Unearthed Arcana, which had Barbarian, Cavalier, and Acrobat. And Gary definitely wasn't interested in non-Advanced D&D.

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    2. Except the cartoon came out in 1983. Unearthed Arcana was released in 1985.

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    3. This might be a case of production pipelines moving at different speeds. Gygax must have liked those old Dragon articles enough to make them "official," and I can imagine that having more (and distinctive) character classes made for an easier pitch meeting in Hollywood. In spite of UA's slapdash qualities, Gygax might have sat on it for some time before it was eventually published.

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    4. More to do with the network not wanting to deal with religious implications of a cleric or paladin, or the concept of a kid being a thief on a saturday morning cartoon. so they went with cavalier, barbarian, and acrobat.

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  11. I was nine when it came out. I was glued to the TV to watch it. That being said, other than occasional cool monsters or the occasional D&D action figure character showing up, I thought it was a junk show. I cannot understand the nostalgia for it.

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  12. I've got the feeling that this wasn't broadcast in the UK until 1984 and I remember that my sister and I loved it. Hank was my favourite but I liked Diana too.

    I went back to it on YouTube a couple of years ago to see how it had stood up and how much gaming content was in it. My plan was to make a series of gaming notes on the episodes and write them up.

    The premise of kids being sucked into an alternate universe and trying to get home was a pretty good one and I think remains so - Quantum Leap and Jumanji in both its forms would use a similar one many years later.

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  13. I must've been squarely in the target demographic; I was (and still am, out of nostalgia I suppose) a diehard fan. My D&D buddy, too - every character he ever made was a ranger named Hank.

    I watched it through again with my now-college age nieces several years ago soon after the DVD came out; they were willing to tolerate it. More recently, somehow I seem to've missed the window with my own older kid; it looks like it'll be touch and go with the younger one. ("It's kind of boring," she whispered conspiratorially to me several days after we'd watched the first episode.)

    Years ago I saw a short fan live-action fan film featuring an adult Hank and Sheila, never having made it home. I haven't been able to track it down more recently.

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  14. I was a bit too old for the D&D cartoon, although I vaguely remember watching a couple episodes. Had I been a few years younger, however, I believe I would never-the-less have found to too juvenile for my tastes. “Kiddiefication” and all.
    I think my biggest hand-ups would have been:
    • The characters are children. Bobby the Barbarian? “Gimme a break!”
    • There’s a literal Dungeon Master hanging around, handing out quests, giving advice, or whatever.
    • Nobody is slaying hordes of wicked orcs.

    I think the cartoon set off a long and unprestigious saga of stupid/campy/downright awful representations of D&D on the screen.
    IMO - obviously

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  15. I was brought to the hobby by the cartoon. I still love it, despite its flaws.
    I do agree that it is an odd presentation of the property, but I think its weird touches actually helped make it distinctive. (Given that D&D the game is a genre pastiche, i think it's really hard to make a D&D adaptation that doesnt feel like a generic fantasy story.)
    Since no one else has mentioned it, I have to say I got a real thrill when I was older, having seen many reruns of Happy Days, Eight is Enough, and Code Red, and realizing that Willie Aames, Donnie Most, and Adam Rich were some of the voice actors.

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  16. I seen it when it first came out when I was a little kid. At the time, my folks played D&D, but I was too young and too wild to really sit down and play, so all I knew about D&D was bits of stories my parents told me about their adventures and when I seen in the cartoon. So when I start reading the book, I was surprised to find there was no magic bow that fires light arrows, nor classes called "Acrobat" or "Cavalier." Oh well, I had to make my own, with mixed results. Despite how bowdlerized everything was, and how much they made it different from the “official” game, I still love the show.

    I do hear you about the dumbing down of animated media. Although, I would not even dignify that by calling it "kiddification", “kid-friendly” or “kid’s shows, as I grew-up watching R-rated movies and those shows like to talk down to children, give the worst life-lessons and give a sanitized outlook on life. I sometimes wonder what western animation would have looked like without the “Concerned Parents” groups calling the shots and animators had more freedom to make better shows. I feel the same with how bowdlerized mainstream role-playing games have gotten for the sake of being “mainstream.” Hopefully folks take a lesions from the success of Baldur's Gate III and add more sensuality to their games (and not fall into the ‘90s comic trap of just having the most immature “mature” content).

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  17. You might already know about this, but there was a Brazilian car advert (the cartoon was big there apparently) https://youtu.be/msDp_k-Fid4?si=JqGROiKkZ8-orx7u

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  18. Haha, I too was a kid when the D&D cartoon came out (in elementary school I think) but I was still annoyed there wasn’t actual sword slashing & killing in the cartoon unlike in my beloved violent RPG, so I rarely watched it. I was immaturely edgy then and I’m immaturely (?) edgy now darn it! XD - Jason Bradley Thompson

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