You Ever Notice...and What's the Deal...

[Drtooth]

I've noticed that the animated series with the most interesting concepts/novelties always get pulled well within their first season, like Disney's Raw Toonage on CBS, which only lasted 12 episodes... Raw Toonage was basically a cartoon anthology hosted by classic or moderately well-known Disney characters like Sebastian the Crab, Ludwig von Drake or even Don Karnage. Each episode consisted of 3 shorts featuring completely new characters like Bonkers (who later got his own show, originally to be a Roger Rabbit animated series that fell through).

A) The theory that Bonkers was supposed to be a Roger Rabbit cartoon have been officially debunked. It was inspired by RR and nothing more.

B) I wonder how much of Raw Toonage was perfectly thought out. Seems the main point was to give Bonkers street cred as a toon (the concept for his police comedy show came before the cartoon shorts, the shorts were essentially to promote the character). Marsupilami was destined for his own show next season (and something tells me Raw Toonage was the stop gap concept to promote that guy as well)... which leaves the TV show parodies. I'm almost entirely convinced that at least some of these were cobbled out of unused concepts from Disney's unrealized Bullwinkle revival. The Robin Hoof segment is a dead give-a-way. Add a popular Disney character to host the show and get kids to watch, and you've got a show that was made to market/introduce 2 other shows. Once Bonkers and Marsupilami became their own series, Raw Toonage's usefulness expired.

And then there was Quack Pack on The Disney Afternoon (and later Toon Disney) which only lasted about 39 episodes. The show centered around Donald's nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie as teens living with their uncle. Although it starred several well-known Disney ducks like Daisy and Ludwig von Drake, the show took place in a completely different Duckburg that included no references to Scrooge or his money bin, and that human characters lived in alongside ducks and dog-faced characters common to the common Duckburg universe.

Quack Pack isn't exactly a show that was well liked. From what I understand (trying hard not to believe everything you read on the internet), the original concept was a sequel series to Ducktales, with Donald's Naval service over, and Scrooge relinquishing the nephews back to him to see how responsible he is to inherit McDuck Industries. The All Ducks on Deck episode stands as the only evidence, and Admiral Gribbitz was replaced by a Jim Cummings voiced expy with a different name and slightly different character design. Then someone said, nah, and made it more like Goof Troop, but with Donald. Suffice to say, some really sour people out there hated the show, and it never saw the daylight past those episodes, even though the show is admittedly pretty good.

 

[Oscarfan]

How the heck come in cartoons where they have a cat chasing mice, the dog is always friend to the mouse? I ask that because in reality, dogs chase mice too. Sometimes more aggressively, I might add. There are those who say that a dog is better to have around the house for mice catching than a cat.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

 

[Drtooth]

Ah, cartoons. Constantly throwing out biological fact for the sake of a cliche contrivance.

Seriously... Dogs chase ANYTHING that moves and is furry. My aunt's Jack Russel attacked a singing Christmas toy dog once.

 

[D'Snowth]

My BUNNY used to attack things. Seriously, you get her a new little toy (particularly a little plush toy for her to cuddle with), she had to kill it before she'd play with it.

 

[mr3urious]

Ah, cartoons. Constantly throwing out biological fact for the sake of a cliche contrivance.

Seriously... Dogs chase ANYTHING that moves and is furry. My aunt's Jack Russel attacked a singing Christmas toy dog once.

Also, elephants aren't just afraid of mice. Their eyesight is poor but their hearing is very sharp, so they can be afraid of anything they can't see well but can very easily hear.

 

[D'Snowth]

Ever notice that a lot of commercials for anything these days, like travel agencies, or vehicles, are done like movie trailers? Complete with the whole, "In a world where this stuff happens, and that stuff happens" narration?

 

[CountFan1998]

Quack Pack isn't exactly a show that was well liked. From what I understand (trying hard not to believe everything you read on the internet), the original concept was a sequel series to Ducktales, with Donald's Naval service over, and Scrooge relinquishing the nephews back to him to see how responsible he is to inherit McDuck Industries. The All Ducks on Deck episode stands as the only evidence, and Admiral Gribbitz was replaced by a Jim Cummings voiced expy with a different name and slightly different character design. Then someone said, nah, and made it more like Goof Troop, but with Donald. Suffice to say, some really sour people out there hated the show, and it never saw the daylight past those episodes, even though the show is admittedly pretty good.

The concept of Quack Pack was good, especially when you visualize it as a Donald/Goof Troop hybrid, but I think it would've worked better if set in the Duckburg universe with Scrooge, Launchpad (Maybe even Darkwing! Ever read the new DuckTales comic finale with Scrooge and Darkwing? Good stuff...) and certainly no human characters. I think the dog-faced characters worked just fine...
And besides, even though Raw Toonage basically served as a 12 episode pilot for both Bonkers and Marsupilami, it had a different concept unlike any series before it. I kind of like to think of the show as an animated Wonder Ball (remember those?): You can mix things up a bit and you never know what you're going to get. It was a different kind of experience every time. I'm surprised there hasn't been a kind of interactive media that allowed to create anything close to an episode of Raw Toonage; It'd be perfect to drag and drop random clips in, and pick a character host and be able to export the lineup as a movie file, or something...

 

[D'Snowth]

Ever notice that TV seasons keep getting shorter and shorter to the point that there's really no point in watching a show anymore? And that's something that's been happening since the beginning.

Back in the 1950s, most weekly TV series would have upwards of 40 episodes a season. In the 1960s, that number was reduced somewhat to where a season of a weekly TV series would last anywhere between 30 to 36 episodes. Later still, in the 1970s and much of the 1980s, a season would be 20-24 episodes. By the 1990s and for a lot of the 2000s, a season would typically last 13 episodes. While the 13 episode rule seems to still apply to some shows, by the 2000s, a number of seasons were shortened again to 10 episodes, while some were actually extended to 15. Now here we are the in the 2010s, some shows still have 10 episodes a season, but many others now are shortened considerably to 5-8 episodes a season.

I'm assuming that thousands of cable channels, and hundreds of other shows being available is why seasons are so short these days.

 

[mr3urious]

I think it's more cost effective for some shows to make the 1st season a couple of episodes long so that it won't be a huge loss for networks if the show fails. If the show is a success, the later seasons can be longer. Breaking Bad is one such show that uses this tactic.

British shows, on the other hand, tend to have even shorter seasons. The UK version of The Office is two seasons long, with six episodes per season (not counting the two Christmas specials shot after that).

 

[D'Snowth]

That's networks for you: they barely give you any kind of a decent budget to make the show, and yet they expect it to make them millions.