Teen Titans, STOP!

Ok, so Cartoon network canceled Young Justice just as I got into it, fine. I hadn’t been watching it, and people (mainly Beardiac) told me I should be watching it so I gave it a shot. I found it to be very well executed and smartly written. Great characterizations of all the heroes and I felt it did a good job of separating itself from a justice league world, while it kept you feeling like that world still existed.

It was so smartly done, it could have been a live action show on the CW. Heck the thing won an Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation. It was a good show, so I found myself asking, “Why did it cancelled?”

But, not only did it get cancelled, it was replaced with Teen Titans Go! Perhaps one of the worst superhero cartoons ever. Look, no offense to the people working on the show, but it is a silly little animated show that is filled with stock jokes and puns and does not take itself seriously in the littlest bit. I don’t see how this cartoon could appeal to even the most casual of comic book fans. Instead of fighting Death stroke we get an episode of Beast Boy trying to figure out what to get Cyborg for his birthday. The kind of stuff you might see on Spongebob or Tiny Toons.  The places where that kind of story  and humor belongs, not on a super hero show. No thank you.

I was watching this new show and found myself getting angry that they took a well written and entertaining piece of art off television to replace with this crap. How dare they  do this to a true comic book fan, I thought. I was all set to turn the TV off when low and behold my 11 year old son asked me to keep it on. SLAM!

And that’s when it hit me. Like a huge ton of bricks. I’m not the audience for this show. Not even young adults or teens. I’m not DC, Cartoon Network or WB’s target audience either. The target audience was sitting right next to me. Kids! Kids buy toys, kids play video games, kids buy comics and kids watch cartoons. Life was telling me I was old. But not only that, I realized that marketing to kids to sell products wasn’t good tv, but it was good business. Let’s be honest most cartoons we grew up on GI Joe, Transformers, He-Man and so on were on just to get us to buy the toys. And we bought a lot of toys. So if you have a show like Young Justice that kids aren’t watching, you aren’t making money. And no company wants that.

When I was watching Young Justice, my son didn’t care for it. That did tell me something right there. It was too adult to be appealing to him. Now he likes Ironman’s Armored Adventures and the Ultimate Spider-man cartoon, but didn’t care for Young Justice.  And that is where Young Justice’s problem lied. It was perhaps to high brow for the audience and for the time slot. It wasn’t an ‘adult show’, but it was too grown up to appeal to the target.  But now he like Teen Titans Go.

But that fact aside, I still think DC missed the mark. They didn’t find the middle ground to appeal to adults and children. See comic book fans raise comic book fans. It’s how it works in the nerd circle of life. Marvel seems to have gotten this right. They have the right level of humor and action with decent story lines to appeal to a larger demographic with their current cartoons. DC/WB seemed to miss the memo that there can be a happy medium. I love the teen titans characters, but let’s find the family friendly middle ground , ok? I can’t stand this show. It really makes me sad to see the characters treated this way. Again, can’t they make it a family show instead of a mindless kids cartoon?

I guess though, at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter. If my son ends up asking for Teen Titans action figures for Christmas, DC/WB did their job. I’ll feel dirty buying them knowing where his fandom came from, but as a dad I’ll do it. Well played you peddlers of crap, well played.

-Dave