Badmovies.org Forum

The Bugs Bunny thread brought this to mind. How many examples can we name, of cartoons that were just bad ideas. These might be ones that seemed like a good idea, but were ruined by TV execs trying to apply a winning formula (for example, every show needing its own "Scooby"), or introducing incompatible ideas meant to ratchet up the potential for wacky adventures (Fonzie as a time traveller, for example), or turning a popular movie, live-action show or game into Saturday morning fare, or putting classic characters into new situations.

We've come up with a few examples already, such as ABCs attempt to produce cartoons of its most popular sitcoms - Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy. Even as kids, we knew that these were not true to the shows, and just seemed ridiculous, even for what they were. And Godzilla, which was good, even with the addition of a crew of human adventurers (so good, the idea was used again in the 90s), but could have done without Godzookie, an idea that baffles me to this day.

Other examples? Which ones really drove you nuts?

Do you remember the live action Saturday morning GHOSTBUSTERS from the 70's (preceeded the movie by several years)? It had three characters named Spencer, Tracy , and Kong, one of which was a gorilla, interestingly enough named Tracy. It starred Forrest Tucker and Larry Storch. Well, they could not leave well enough alone and an animated version was made which featured characters with the same names but much younger. The animated version was truly a snorefest. I believe that it was because of this series that the cartoon based on the movie used the title THE REAL GHOST BUSTERS since GHOSTBUSTERS was already taken.

I thought The Real Ghostbusters was used so that the characters could differ from Bill Murray et al. There was, for example, an episode where the characters went to see the movie that was based on them.

I remember the other Ghostbusters cartoon, just barely. It didn't air much around here. It seemed really weird. I recall they used a lot of supernatural stuff in their ghostbusting, and didn't they have some kind of haunted old car with a face?

Just remembered another live-action show turned into a dumb cartoon - Gilligan's Planet. The professor's best efforts can't get them to Hawaii, but a mistake can land them on another habitable world. The mistake began with building a bamboo rocket ship(!) when a raft would have sufficed. WTF?



Post Edited (02-22-05 10:40)

The Ghostbusters Live action show is mentioned here.



Not cartoons, but some were good.  I liked "Jason of Star Command" and "Space Academy."



Post Edited (02-22-05 10:46)

Speaking of Ghostbusters, I remember in the late 90's they had a remake of the old cartoon the Real Ghostbusters. They had a whole new team that were considered "losers". Their was the goth/punk girl, the "urban"spanish guy, and  "nerdy" black guy in a wheelchair. They were led by a ageing Egon. It only lasted season I think. I tired to give a chance, because I am a big Ghostbusters fan,only saw a couple episodes (Thanks to its jumping time slot that went from different times in the morning). But from what I saw It sucked.

Another "bad" cartoon was adding "Scappy" to the Scooby Doo. Man I found him annoying.

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You can’t give it, you can't buy it, and you just don't get it!-Aeon Flux

Out of those series, ARK II was my favorite. I did like GHOSTBUSTERS for the camp value and ISIS for the Joanna Cameron value. I also got a kick out of DR. SHRINKER. Even though they don't properly fall into the Saturday morning live action category, the Hudson Brothers were among my favorites.

I had understood that it was due to a title conflict, being that the title was already copyrighted for television, but the use of the title to distinguish the cartoon from the movie makes sense too. I actually enjoyed THE REAL GHOST BUSTERS (I get confused about which one is GHOSTBUSTERS or GHOST BUSTERS) as it was definitely, in my opinion, a better follow-up to the movie than was the second movie.

Anybody remember the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS cartoon? Anybody want to foget the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS cartoon? Also, how about the cartoon based on the WWF wrestlers in the eighties? Was that pointless or what? Does anybody remember what it was called (I don't)?

Scrappy-Doo almost single-handedly killed the franchise. What was the name of the other Scooby relative they brought along around the same time? I believe it was his uncle or something like that.

Yeah, I remember D&D. That was one of my favs. I always wanted that big badass bad guy with the horned helmet to punt the hell out of that little barbarian kid bastard. I still hate that little punk.

Anyone remember the Planet of the Apes cartoon from the 70's? It didn't last very long but I did watch it (I was a huge PotA fan) while it was on. They drove around in trucks and it really wasn't like the movies too much. I also recall the art being fairly poor.

Menard wrote:
> as it was definitely, in my opinion, a better follow-up to the
> movie than was the second movie.

You can say that again. Although, I always thought one of the reasons Ghostbusters II sucked so much was because of the popularity of the cartoon. It was geared more toward kids, and lacked a lot of the more clever humour of the original. Ghostbusters II was, in a lot of ways, more like the cartoon, except that the cartoon was better.

Hulk Hogan's Rock & Wrestling. Man, what they did to the WWF characters in that show was beyond belief. I still remember them repairing an alien's flying saucer with one of Captain Lou's rubber bands.

I've only heard the opening music but the t.v. cartoon "Chuck Norris Karate Komandos" doesn't sound very good.

I don't mind the 2nd one that much it's still one of the better sequal out there in my opinion like Wayne's World 2 it's stupid but it still entertains enough that you can watch it.

I actually liked the cartoon Extreme Ghostbusters that came out maybe 7 years ago. It was a really interesting continuation

This sickest thing they ever did was let Tom and Jerry start talking.  That was bad.

When my kids were little I remember such greats as Camp Candy (cartoon John Candy) and Mr. T.

Anyone mentioned the japanese YU-GI-OH-cartoon series (don´t know the accurate speeling) - that´s a load of crap...
The only aim of this cartoon is:  to make the little customers buy... buy more... by all!

The same with BEY-BLADE (ughhh, even more brainwash!)
I watched them sometimes just to remind me how bad they are.

Man, I don´t want to be kid nowadays!

I loved the old school tom&jerry cartoons and I agree that all newer cartoons with them sucked.

When I was a kid I watched often SABER RIDER or MILA SUPERSTAR...
(never ever seen again)

"Anyone mentioned the japanese YU-GI-OH-cartoon series (don´t know the accurate speeling) - that´s a load of crap...
The only aim of this cartoon is: to make the little customers buy... buy more... by all!"

Well make their parents buy anyway. I probably bankrupt mine on He-Man toys when I was a kid.

You´re right, I remember that there were was much He-Man-stuff to buy,
(most expensive: Castle Greyskull)

Maybe they even then brought up He-Man to make the kids make their parents buy, but it seems to me that this got even worse...

I kinda liked Yu-Gi-Oh at first in how they would set up the strategies of the games.  I wish, however, that they didn't pull out the Deus Ex Mahcina card so often (pardon the pun), that they would've been more consistant in applying the rules of the game, and that they would've more often tipped the player's hands to the audience so the audience could guess what the player was going to do

As it was, though, it got a little tiresome

Oh it was. I think it's considered one of the first cartoons to be an advert for a toy. Here's a short article on the history of the cartoon if your interested.

http://www.he-man.org/cartoon/cmotu/index.shtml

Honestly I'm still a closet he-man fan. : )

Mentioned the Mr.T cartoon in my second post in the Loonatics thread. What a trainwreck! Take an over the top TV star getting past his prime in popularity and stick him in a situation so removed from what made the kiddies like him in the first place.

He's the bus driver/bodyguard/dispenser of crackpot lessons in good judgement and decision making for a team of teenage exhibition gymnasts, who were so milquetoast and bland you wanted something bad to happen to them. I wonder if there was ever a special episode where one of the group is bulimic or worryed that puberty will ruin their gymnastics career. And, oh look, there's an annoying little kid comic relief sidekick, a little white kid who wants to grow up to be Mr. T and dresses like him and speaks in a faux T voice to prove it. But the the sidekick must always get in trouble trying to imitate his tough hero (and scream for help letting the Mr. T voice drop to show how scared he really is) so that he too can learn valuable lessons. They might as well have named the kid "Scrappy T" since he can from the same mold. But the kid can't have a mohawk, that might be too hard too explain away to kids who wanted one in real life. Instead Mr. T's bulldog gets to have the mohawk (must have been a bulldog/Rhodesian ridgeback mix) and some jewelry.

I don't want to rehash the terminally boring Gary Coleman cartoon show again like I did in the other thread. But it did have that "time slows down while it's on" factor it was so awful.

I would have liked the D&D cartoon if they didn't contantly get cheated every week out of going home by having to make "a tough choice" EVERY SINGLE WEEK on behalf of the greater good. I'm convinced the Dungeonmaster was just as evil as the baddie (Tiamat?) and was just using the going home thing as the carrot on the stick to manipulate the kids for his far reaching nefarious plans. Or if there had been any sense that they were actually learning to use their powers and skills and improving as time passsed, but continuity in cartoons forget it. Or if the most destructive power hadn't been given to the youngest and
least responsible of the group (he was another Scrappy clone after all). As bad as these fanboy ramblings about the show are, what's worse is that they are the exact problems I had with the show when it first aired and I was the ideal age and audience for the show.

While I was too old to be watching cartoons by the time this came about, and the kind I liked weren't being made by then anyway, I knew that cartoons as I knew them were dead when I first saw this : Hammerman.

Does anyone remember that cartoon about Link? Man that was bad, it had one of the worst one-liners from a tv show in history "Well excuuuse me Princess". One of my friends is the biggest Zelda fan (he's got the tats to prove it) but he never saw it and when he did he actually hid the tape. I tried to talk him out of buying it but, would he listen to me.

I remember the Link, Captain N and Mario t.v. show. I have found memories of watching those shows.I always liked the life action Mario and Luigi I still can remeber the episode when Seargent Slaughter came  on in one episode and my older brother's friend ,Nick, said "If he suppose to be Koopa or something?" my brother replied "no" and explained.

Ah I want to see that show again just for old time sake.

There was an MC Hammer cartoon, he was like a normal guy helping out kids in the ghetto, then he'd turn into Hammerman to fight bad guys,  I don't remember what his powers were, and I can't imagine what they could be other than weird dancing.
There was also a Bill and Ted cartoon, but I don't think I watched it much.

The Back to the Future Cartoon also was around for a while like the Bill and Ted

Oh yeah movie's that got their own t.v. show...

Beetoven(ms)..

Dumb and Dumber

Both of those didn't look or sound to good but the I think the Mask t.v. show had potential to be pretty good and more solid than other shows based off a movie.

Let's go Fishman!!
Stop calling me that!

saintmort wrote:
> The Back to the Future Cartoon also was around for a while like
> the Bill and Ted

Ohhh, I hated that one. What gets me about the movie-based cartoons is that they always took a gimmick from the movie, and made it a weekly occurrance. How many time travelling adventures can you have in which the bad guy is some relative of Biff Tannen?

There was that, and the tendency in all movie-based cartoons to overuse catchphrases. The character gets off a good line once in the movie, and it suddenly becomes something he ALWAYS says in the cartoon. This drove me frigging nuts.

Thought of a couple of others. In the real-celebrities-as-crimefighters vein, there was The Pro Stars, featuring, I believe, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson. Bizarre.

In the category of great idea badly executed, there was that guy who was a hero for hire. Kind of a bumbling idiot who would be called to fill in for real pop-culture heros. Great parody potential. If only it had any real laughs, beyond dumbed-down kiddie humour. If only it really parodied the stories instead of simply borrowing a few of their trappings. If only they had stuck closer to the stories they were spoofing, instead of inserting their own villain in every single story (much like the many Tannens, but resembling an evil clown for some unfathomable reason). Talk about an idea that could have been great, but was completely botched. I don't know what they were thinking.



Post Edited (02-23-05 12:13)

That was the guy's name. Walter Melon: Hero for Hire. Man was that show just.....dumb!

AndyC wrote:

> That was the guy's name. Walter Melon: Hero for Hire.


Do you suppose the reason he never got married is because he 'can't elope'.

It was begging for a pun.

It wasn't really an ill conceived toon in my opinion but I did have friends that disliked it....

Remember M.A.S.K.?
It stood for Mobile Armored Strike Kommand

I used to watch that show and collect the toys religiously!

I actually liked M.A.S.K. too. That is the early episodes. It got rather ridiculous when they started replacing characters and had twin badguys.

What about those underwater Smurf like things? Snorks I think they were called.

I see Snork shirts now sometimes on kids who've never heard of them.

I loved Mask. It's my second favorite cartoon ever. I only wish I taped a couple of episodes or something. Funny thing about the toys, I had all the characters but, none of the vehicles.

Gilligan's Planet .... a cartoon based on Gilligan's Island T-V show, but based in space.

Turbo Teen - a teen and car become morphed together in a science experiment... when the teen gets hot he turns into a car... when he gets cooled down (usually by ice cubes or cold water) he turns back into a teen.

Rubik the Amazing Cube - an alien that looks like a Rubik's Cube and has a blue face that can do amazing things for a family.

All from the 80's .... chris

I completely forgot all of the many crimes against the Flintstones. Redoing classic cartoons as crappy forgettable shows for 'today's kids' is definitely nothing new.

Remember the All-New Flintstones Comedy Hour of the early 70s, with teenage Pebbles and Bam Bam, and their pals with names like Moonrock and Fabian?

Or there's Fred and Barney Meet the Thing, as well as Fred and Barney Meet the Shmoo. Stupidest part was that in both cases, they were separate cartoons. Fred and Barney never met the Thing or the Shmoo.

There was the incarnation in which Fred lived next door to Frank Frankenstone for some reason. The Gruesomes, for a couple of original episodes, were a funny nod to the Addams Family, but what the heck was this about?

And the other characters from the late 70s/early 80s, such as O.K. Simpstone were equally cheesy.

There have also been any number of crappy movie-length Flintstones cartoons too.

Interestingly, after all that, it's still the original series everybody remembers. I had to think pretty hard to remember the others. Kind of gives you hope, doesn't it?

One of the greatest creations of Al Capp before he became a mean right-wing jerk.

The Schmoos was a great satire on the New Deal. You could cook them and eat them, use them as money, and use them as transportation. Wall Street hated them and sought to destroy them, but they kept coming back and reproducing at alarming rates.

Hanna Barbera killed the Schmoo (they only used one) by putting him in a neo-Scooby Doo rip off. Then had the nerve to rerun it as part of the Flintstones.

Extra coolness: Rival cartoonist Ham Fisher was upset that his former assistant Capp was becoming so popular that he went before Congress and to varrious media outlets claiming that the Schmoo was to look like a part of the male anatomy (SHOCK! GASP!).

Yeah, I remember my mom telling me about the original Shmoos when the 80s version came out. She grew up in the 30s and 40s, and is well versed in the lore of Dogpatch comics.

I tried to share this information with my best friend at the time, and his reply was "It's Mighty Mysteries Comics, not Dogpatch!" I gave up trying to explain any further.

Funny, for a while there, Sccoby Doo clones seemd to be just about all HB knew how to make. Goofy cartoon animal (or shapeshifting Barbapapa wannabe, or caveman or ghost of an old-west prospector) teamed up with a group of teenagers to solve mysteries, or have some kind of wacky adventures.

I always thought Grape Ape felt like a marketing gimmick that somehow outlived its product.  Like there was a "Grape Ape Grape Cola" or something released at the same time as the cartoon but got yanked off shelfs after a few months while the popular cartoon lived on.

A mix of Rodney Dangerfieldand Curley from the Three Stooges as a shark teamed up with Fred-Shaggy-Velma-Daphne clones solving underwater mysteries in "Jabberjaw" was an ill-conceived cartoon, but somehow it worked anyway.

Ah, Turbo Teen, one of those shows built around the hero's power activating at inappropriate times like the old gimmick of "I have to sneeze," at exactly the worst moment. Plus the way his face deformed when changing into the car was a little too freaky looking for a kids show.

There was a Thing solo cartoon in the late 70s- early 80s, that was awful and dull. Ben Grimm was an awkward, and I think poor, teen who could change into the Thing when he would link two magic rings together and recite the lame magic chant, "Thing Ring, do your thing!" He had to do and say something similar to change back. Since he usually changed two or three times per episode, they could burn up a couple minutes per episode using the same animation each time. Grimm spent every episode moping about his miserable life and how the stuckup kids (basically every other character on the show) hated him and poked fun of him in between saving their ungrateful butts.  

Grape Ape, a cartoon built around a character being so big and dumb that he was actually a burdon and a danger to other characters. Yet, it was okay because he had the dog sidekick to say "I'm sorry".

I remember the Schmoo cartoons. I had heard it was a character from an old comic strip, but only knew it from the cartoon. I hated trying to explain to adults how I knew what the character was even though the comic strip was "before my time".

Since he usually changed two or three times per episode, they could burn up a couple minutes per episode using the same animation each time.

I like on "Static Shock" that the earllier episodes made a bigger deal of Virgil becoming Static but the later ones did/do not .  Like "OK, you know the routine, so let's not waste time.."

Wasn't that called Star Trek:  Voyager?