Geek Syndicate Issue 9 March 2014 | Page 62

Geek Syndicate
“And suddenly we had families
and girls watching, and girls really became a big part of our audience, in sort of like they picked up
that Harry Potter type of serialized
way, which is what The Batman and
[indistinct]’s really gonna kill. But,
the Cartoon Network was saying,
‘F***, no, we want the boys’ action…”
- Paul Dini on the cancellation
of his show “Tower Prep”
In a late 2013 interview on Kevin
Smith’s podcast, write r Paul Dini
dropped the quote that heads up this
article when talking about the cancellation of Tower Prep, his live action show for Cartoon Network. What
makes this interesting and why the
interview was so well covered, was
that it opened a view into the world
of kids television. A world which is
covered with animated adap-tations
of big-named superheroes, yet these
shows seem to come and go with little warning.

Green-lit in the wake of the hugely
successful (and itself heavily merchandised) Batman movie, Batman:
TAS was a cut above any other Saturday morning cartoon both in terms
of its storytell-ing and its moody,
red-light visuals. It may have been a
kids cartoon, but it brought a depth
of characterisation that you really
didn’t see before. Being Batman
- rather than, for example, a Robot Car that talked, or a Cat-riding
Muscle Man - it was a show that an
older audience wasn’t going to be
embarrassed about watching. It set
off a run of series in what became
known as the “DC Animated Universe”
that only came to an end with Justice
League Unlimited in 2006, a staggering legacy.

Image © Cartoon Network, 2013

Cartoon Network especially seems to
have problems with its’ DC properties: Young Justice was well regarded
but struggled to survive, Green Lantern only got the one season before
being un-ceremoniously dropped,
and the new Batman series, Beware
the Batman, got dropped after only
eleven episodes were aired. Dini’s interview implies what a lot of people
have long sus-pected; these shows
are purely adverts. If they don’t shift
toys to boys, they’re history.

Let’s start with a bit of background,
shall we? I’m old enough to remember the kids cartoons of the 1980s,
which were closely aligned to the
stuff I could go and buy in the local
toy shops. He-Man, GI Joe, Transformers and the like were animations of
pretty basic quality in the main and
outbursts of quality always seemed
to be more luck than judgment. Children aren’t the most discerning of
viewers - I know, I used to be one
- and being able to act out the cartoon adven-tures with the action
figures is a neat bit of synergy that
license holders and manufacturers
must have loved. This changed in
1992, with the launch of Batman: The
Animated Series.

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More importantly, the
show brought a more serialised approach to its
competitors. The X-Men
cartoon ran from 1992 to
1997 and adapted many
of the comic book series’
more famous story-lines,
including The Dark Phoenix
Saga and the coming-toa-movie-screen-near-you
Days of Fu-ture Past. Stablemate series Spider-Man
did much the same, even
doing a version of the Secret Wars arc. It’s all a lot
of effort to go to if your
core audience sits in the

younger age range and reflects an
older audience that has a bit more
money to spend - and is therefore
more valuable to the advertisers
these networks need. Furthermore,
in the early days of these networks,
you took your viewers where you
could.
It’s hard to think of this kind of serialisation being successful today
for a number of reasons. For a start,
even a cursory glimpse at the schedule of say, Cartoon Network or Disney
XD will reveal shows on pretty hard
rotation. Different episodes of the
show will be broadcast during the
course of the day. It makes it hard to
tell a cohesive story if your audience
watches out of order, which means
that contained episodes are the order of the day with the exception of
“specials” that be cut together. And
then we come to the “toys for boys”
theory, which is where we came in.

This is how it goes; the network
doesn’t make its money from the
advertisers, or the cable fees, because in this splintered, time shifted
and multi-platform world no-one
really does and there’s not cash in
DVD sales like there is for “grown up”
television. So you make your money
from merchandise, especially the
cheap-to-make, high margin stuff
like action figures. Who buys ac-tion
figures? Boys do. Therefore, aim at