I’m glad that Cartoon Network hasn’t taken the power of cartoons for granted, what with their live-action shows. I can’t wait for Regular Show and Sym-Bionic Titan, two shows that seem to be continuing the trend of smart, witty, older than Y7 audience-aimed cartoons.
Regular Show, created by J.G. Quintel, the former creative director for The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, is about friends, roommates, and golf course groundskeepers Mordecai (a blue jay) and Rigby (a raccoon) go through random things all in the effort of entertaining themselves. Their antics get on the nerves of Benson, a high-strung gumball machine, and Skips, the yeti. However, Pops, a lollipop-headed man, loves them.
This show is carrying on in the now-extensive tradition of shows being marketed for kids but are really for teenagers and adults between 20 and 30 years old (I’ll even go as far as to say some 40-year-olds would love these shows). While Nickelodeon/MTV has always been doing this, what with Ren and Stimpy, Rocko’s Modern Life, and to a degree, some episodes of Hey Arnold and even Spongebob Squarepants, Cartoon Network is now picking up on the “old, ironic audience” bandwagon (they dropped it in the mid-to-late ’90s after they got rid of Freakazoid, The Animaniacs, and other shows like them from their daytime roster). Now that Adventure Time, Flapjack and Chowder paved the way for alt-cartoons, CN has been indulging in that market, so I’m sure Regular Show will not the be last show in this vein.
Sym-Bionic Titan is being billed as a hybrid of “high-school drama and giant robot battles“. Created by cartoon legend Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack), the show chronicles three teenage beings from planet Galaluna who crash land on Earth after attempting to escape the evil General Modula who has taken over their home planet. The teens, Ilana, Lance, and Octus, then have try to become a seamless part of everyday life in Sherman, Illinois.
I’m glad to see Tartakovsky back after so long! He really was a force on Cartoon Network during the mid-to-late ’90s, so it’s great to have him back on television. I can’t wait to see his show; I’m sure that it’ll have a lot of pop-culture humor, a trademark of his shows, but I’m positive that, also like his shows, the plot will have a lot of depth and heart.
Are you guys excited for these new shows?
[...] a post on how Cartoon Network is keeping up their alternative cartoon line-up with the additions of Regular Show and Sym-Bionic Titan. Well, it appears they’re getting even bolder by greenlighting MAD, a [...]
[...] or will launch this year and (I’m assuming) the next. Some of them I’ve covered, like Sym-Bionic Titan, Regular Show, MAD, and Scooby-Doo! Mystery, Incorporated, but some of them, like The Looney Tunes [...]