babylon 5

Geek Punditry #127: Revival Vs. Reboot

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As you no doubt have heard by now, at least partially because I’ve mentioned it here two weeks in a row, Disney’s brought back its fantastic animated series Phineas and Ferb, and the first part of the new season dropped on Disney+ today. It may surprise you, then, to know that as of this writing, I haven’t watched it yet. You see, I have to wait for my wife to get home from work, because as any competent marriage therapist would tell you, holding off on watching coveted television programming until your spouse is available to watch it with you is a love language. 

But I don’t want to talk about Phineas and Ferb specifically today, I want to talk about what it represents: the TV Revival. That concept of bringing back old TV shows from the dead. It’s not a new idea, of course. The history of television is littered with shows that were cancelled and then came back after some time. Game shows like Jeopardy, Supermarket Sweep, and Let’s Make a Deal are all better remembered from their second incarnation than the original, for example. The 80s gave us resurrected versions of old sitcoms like Leave it to Beaver and The Munsters. And for a time, it was popular to continue a TV series by creating an animated version, as they did with the likes of Star Trek, Happy Days, or Gilligan’s Island. 

It’s like time stood still.

But in recent years, where studio executives are more hesitant than ever to take a chance on a new idea, it seems as though the revival has become a fundamental part of the television landscape. Is anybody going to want to watch a comedy about the goings-on at a municipal courthouse? Maybe not…unless we remind them that they already DID a few decades ago by making that show a new version of Night Court. Go ahead and look at any current network TV schedule (or spin through the offerings of a streaming service) and you’ll be astonished at just how much of the current episodic landscape is stuffed to the gills with shows that have relaunched older ones. I don’t object to revivals as a concept, but like anything else in the sphere of entertainment, I fear that we’ve reached a point of saturation where they’ve become a crutch rather than a tool.

That said, that doesn’t mean resurrecting an old show can’t be successful. But what, exactly, does it take to make a good one? The creators of Phineas and Ferb released a video to social media a few days ago, ramping up to the new season, where they very explicitly chanted “It’s not a reboot – it’s a REVIVAL!” It’s an important distinction, although I think there are a lot of people who don’t understand the difference. A reboot, to me, means starting a franchise over from scratch. You take the concepts, the tropes, the characters, but begin from square one, as though there had never been a previous iteration. Wednesday is a good example of this – there’s nothing that specifically ties it to the canon of any of the previous versions of the Addams Family – not the original TV series, the animated series, the 90s film series, the more recent animated films, the Broadway musical, or the original comic strips that the whole franchise was based on. It’s using the pieces of the older shows, but it is inherently its own thing. So yeah, reboots CAN be good.

In general, though, I prefer a revival – you’re not eliminating the previous canon. You’re not starting over. You’re just picking up where you left off. The original Phineas and Ferb took place across one epic summer. The new season – which they wisely promote as “Season Five” rather than “Season One” of a new series – starts one year later, at the beginning of the NEXT epic summer. Night Court returned to the same courtroom after an absence of many years, bringing back one returning character and one new character who was the child of an original. You get a revival more often when the old cast – or at least some of them – is still active and wants to return. We’ll be getting that with the new version of King of the Hill, coming to Hulu soon, and creator Bill Lawrence has announced a Scrubs revival where – although nobody has officially signed on yet – many original cast members have expressed interest in returning.

If this picture doesn’t make you vaguely uncomfortable, you’re too young.

Sometimes it can be difficult to tell whether a show is a revival or a reboot at first. In 2005, when the BBC brought back its defunct science fiction series Doctor Who, it wasn’t immediately clear if the old shows were in canon or not. And as part of the Doctor’s whole deal is that he occasionally regenerates into a new body, you couldn’t even make up your mind based on the fact that there were no returning cast members. Slowly, references to the old series started to appear, and eventually it was made explicit that this was a continuation – not only of the old series, but it even included the American co-produced TV movie that had tried (and failed) to revive the franchise a decade before. The show has been reinvented many times since then, and the DNA of the franchise makes it fairly easy to do so, but every version has thankfully been a revival rather than a reboot.

This straight-up wouldn’t work with a revival of The Andy Griffith Show.

The reason I prefer revivals is because a reboot has a tendency to dismiss the original. It takes place in a universe where the original didn’t happen and doesn’t matter, and that makes no sense to me. From the perspective of a studio, the only advantage a revival or reboot has over a brand-new property is the built-in audience, so why would you START by declaring that the thing the audience loved doesn’t exist anymore? Paul Feig and the cast of the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot will claim until their dying breath that their film failed at the box office because the fans were put off by the all-female cast, but any conversation with a true fan of the franchise will make it pretty clear the reason it was rejected was because fans wanted a revival. And when they got a true revival a few years later with Ghostbusters: Afterlife (with a main character that was a preteen girl), fans were delighted. 

That’s not to say that a reboot CAN’T be good. When J.J. Abrams was given the task of rebooting Star Trek for the big screen, he wisely took the track of making it an alternate universe. A villain traveled back in time and created an alternate reality in which these new films would take place. The original timeline still existed, and was still available when the TV revivals began a few years later. No matter what you think of the Abrams Star Trek films, most fans will agree that the alternate timeline was a good idea. Similarly J. Michael Straczynksi has been trying for years to get a reboot of his seminal science fiction series Babylon 5 off the ground. In 2023, he even gave us an animated film, Babylon 5: The Road Home, which ended in a way that – similar to the Star Trek example – opened up a different, alternate timeline in which the reboot could take place.

The classic sci-fi trope of “Eh, close enough.”

Of course, it’s easier to do that with a science fiction series than it would be a drama or a sitcom. If somebody wanted to do a reboot of The Golden Girls, for example, it’s unlikely that they would start with a CGI Betty White causing some sort of temporal rift that would take us to a different dimension where the girls all moved in together in 2025 rather than 1985. But that also begs the question: would you really WANT a reboot where they cast people other than Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, Estelle Getty, and Betty White anyway?

That’s another thing that revivals have over reboots: the continuity of keeping a cast that the fans love. One of the reasons a Babylon 5 reboot is more likely than a revival is because so many members of that cast, in the years since the show ended, have sadly passed away at a surprisingly young age. Over the course of that show’s five years, 17 actors were series regulars for at least one season. Seven of them are no longer with us, and several others have retired from acting altogether. It would be anathema to many of us to see Bruce Boxleitner’s John Sheridan return with somebody other than Mira Furlan playing his wife, Delenn. In a new timeline, though, with new actors in BOTH roles…that feels a little easier to swallow.

Some shows, however, simply should never be brought back, for many of these same reasons. Any ideas of a Friends revival, for example, went up in smoke with the sad death of Matthew Perry. Any revival, even a one-off movie – would necessitate either recasting Chandler Bing (which fans will tell you is basically impossible) or writing him out of the show by having him either die or leave his wife and children, which would be depressing as hell. As for a reboot…poll the fans. Ask if anybody would want a different cast, and I’m pretty sure you’ll hear a resounding NO.

It would be impossible to recreate this and a mistake to even try.

It’s less of a problem if the actor is still alive and has chosen not to return, or if they’ve fallen from grace in the years since the show’s airing and neither the studio nor the fans want them back. Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum, two of the stars of Smallville, occasionally make noise about wanting to bring back the show as an animated series or through animated movies. Many fans would welcome this, although it is unlikely that anyone will bat an eye if Chloe Sullivan is recast. (I’m not gonna get into it – if you don’t know why this would be necessary, just Google it.) In a less problematic example, former child actor Erik Per Sullivan has retired from the business, so when a revival of Malcolm in the Middle was announced, nobody was really angry that they decided to recast his character of Dewey.  

In general, though, revivals are more interesting to me – I want to see a continuation of the original series. There was chatter for years about a reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Sarah Michelle Gellar wasn’t interested. Therefore, I wasn’t interested. Then they announced that they’d landed on a pitch that Gellar IS interested in, a pitch in which she is mentoring a new character entirely rather than trying to have somebody else play Buffy Summers… well, at this point, I’m willing to listen.

(There’s an irony here in that Gellar’s series was, in fact, a reboot of a mediocre movie starring Kristy Swanson as Buffy. But again, it just goes to prove to you that reboots CAN work sometimes.)

There’s an adorable video of when Gellar called Ryan Kiera Armstrong and told her that she got the part, because REAL slayers go by three names.

For some shows, the question of reboot vs revival is academic, of course. It doesn’t matter for nonscripted series like game shows, or shows that dramatize real events such as Unsolved Mysteries. You may miss Robert Stack, but that doesn’t mean the show can’t be made without him. Similarly, anthology series like The Twilight Zone are by their very nature immune to this. That show has been brought back several times over the years, and as there was never a regular cast or set of characters to follow, it’s a non-issue as long as the show has the flavor of the original – in this case, that of a sci-fi show with horror elements and, usually, some sort of twist ending. 

The biggest problem comes when a resurrected series – whether it’s a reboot or revival – lacks that taste of the original. Every so often you’ll hear about a new version of a show where they proudly announce that none of the current creators are fans of the original. This is a position so bafflingly stupid that I’m surprised it’s not mandated by federal law. While it’s true that some fans can be a bit too close to the property, a bit too reverent, if NOBODY involved in the creation of a show has any passion for it, the odds of creating something that satisfies the existing fan base drops so dramatically as to be almost nonexistent. 

“Well, we’re not making this show for the OLD fans,” some of these studio executives say. “We’re trying to appeal to NEW fans.”

Bullshit. If all that matters is acquiring a new audience, there’s no reason to bring back an old property. By bringing back a classic IP you are inherently announcing a desire to get the attention of an existing fan base, and by creating something you know will dissatisfy them, all you’re doing is trying to court controversy, as if that somehow inoculates you against the need to make a good show. Sometimes I think they’re COUNTING on that. They know their reboot is weak, so they rile up the fans against it, giving them a handy shield of claiming that these narrow-minded old fuddy-duddies just don’t want something new, thereby preventing them from having to admit that they made something that sucks.

Ultimately, I try to judge any show – revival, reboot, or brand-new idea – on its own merits. But when you’re reaching back to a classic series, you need to really think about what made that show successful in the first place before you even THINK about giving it a try.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Someday, he swears, somebody is gonna do a revival of Cop Rock, but they’re gonna do it RIGHT this time.

Geek Punditry #126: Whomsoever Holds This Hammer…

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A few days ago, a meme I’ve seen several times floated across my Facebook page again. You’ve probably seen it; it asks one of the classic geek questions: “Who is a non-Marvel character that you know is worthy of lifting Thor’s hammer?” I like this a lot more than the usual “Could so-and-so beat Thor in a fight?” type of question. The question of which fictional character could win a fight with any other is pointless, because the real answer is always the same: whoever the writer wants to win.

But a question of worthiness is different. If a writer wants us to believe that a character is worthy of Thor’s power, we have to be persuaded first. And the person who created this particular iteration of the meme already gave us the perfect answer:

More like Ernest P. WORTHY, amirite?

I don’t know the person who made this meme so I can’t say if they meant this as a joke or not. I’m going to assume they didn’t, because Ernest P. Worrell is actually the perfect example of a character who demonstrates worthiness. Let’s establish, for a second, what “worthy” actually means. Neither the comics nor the movies ever give any SPECIFIC criteria, but there are a few things I think we can agree upon. The stipulations – whatever they are – were created by Thor’s father Odin, and we can assume that courage is one of them, as is a certain warrior’s instinct. The other one can be extrapolated from the first Thor movie: Thor is cast to Earth and deprived of his power because of his arrogance. He doesn’t regain his power until he learns to put it aside and think of others before himself. Therefore, we can reasonably assume that selflessness is the last criteria. 

Now let’s look at Ernest. Whether it’s when he goes to camp or jail, when he was scared stupid or when he had to save Christmas, the predicaments he winds up in are often tied up in his desire to help other people. Wayward youths, his fellow bank employees, non-wayward youths being pursued by monsters, Santa Claus – Ernest fights for other people again and again. A warrior’s instinct? Go back and watch Ernest Goes to Camp again – he lines up to fight the evil land developers (it was the 80s, 97 percent of movie villains were evil land developers) even after they beat the stuffing out of him the first time. As for courage…well, again, we turn to Ernest Goes to Camp, where he passes the Native American “Path of the Brave.”

If he had faith in The Great One, the knife would not cut him.
If he had courage; true courage, the rock would not break him.
If the brave was pure of heart, the arrow could not catch him.

“Wait a second though, Blake,” you’re saying, “You think he’s BRAVE? Ernest freaks out all the time. Remember how he panicked when that turtle bit his nose?”

“This never happens to Beta Ray Bill, does it, Vern?”

My friends, courage is not the LACK of fear. It is the ability to OVERCOME fear. Does Ernest get scared? Sure. But he still STEPS UP, EVERY SINGLE TIME. So when Ernest tries to pick up Mjolnir, he’d do it on the first try. Then he would drop it, stumble, fumble around, accidentally summon up a cyclone, and probably set his hat on fire with an errant lightning bolt, because he’s still Ernest. But despite all of that, whatever danger he was facing, he would somehow still triumph in the end, because his heart is simply too pure to give up.

But as always, this meme gets me thinking about who else might qualify. Other than Ernest, what other fictional characters are worthy of lifting Mjolnir? I’m going to skip over anyone who has been shown, canonically, to be worthy: that would include Captain America, Vision, Storm of the X-Men, Beta Ray Bill, Superman, and Wonder Woman. (I’ve written about crossovers before, right?) I’m sure there are others who’ve lifted the hammer in some continuity or other, but I don’t have a comprehensive list. And since the meme specifies “non-Marvel,” I’m not going to go into the pages of dissertation I could write arguing that Ben Grimm or Peter Parker should be worthy. But let’s look into other fandoms, shall we?

“I’m comin’ with you, Mr. Thor!”

I’ll start with probably the least-controversial choice I’ll have on this list: Samwise Gamgee from Lord of the Rings. If you’ve never read or at least WATCHED Lord of the Rings (in which Sam was played by Sean Astin), well…what century are you from? Come on, get with the program. But lemme tell you about Sam. Sam is a gardener – simple, humble, and with no great ambitions towards adventure or danger. But when his friend Frodo is tasked with the job of carrying the Ring of Power to Mount Doom, the only hope to destroy the ring and prevent the rise of the evil Sauron, Sam joins the Fellowship accompanying him without hesitation. When the rest of the party is separated and Frodo attempts to continue the quest without them, Sam refuses to allow him to go alone. Sam has no desire for glory or power, and it is arguable whether he would even make the journey for the good of all Middle-Earth, which is at stake. But for the sake of his friend? Samwise will do anything. Cross a continent on foot. Battle an enormous spider. Climb a raging volcano with the exhausted Frodo on his back. There is no character in all of Tolkien more unflinchingly loyal and brave than Samwise Gamgee, and you can’t tell me for a second that Odin would disagree. 

Something about those eyes. Those are WORTHY eyes.

Next, I would like to nominate Marcus Cole of the epic science fiction series Babylon 5. Marcus, played by Jason Carter, was a member of the Rangers, a secret society of human and Minbari warriors tasked with maintaining peace across the galaxy. As a Ranger, Marcus is a skilled fighter and never hesitates to go into battle against any manner of otherworldly threats. He also never displays any particularly selfish qualities, but it’s the way his story ends that I believe truly marks him as worthy of Mjolnir. I’m about to spoil the end of Babylon 5 season four, so you should watch the series. It’s currently available on Tubi for free; you go watch the first four seasons – I’ll wait here until you get back. 

Done? Great. So as you just saw, Marcus quickly fell in love with Susan Ivanova, second-in-command of station Babylon 5. Ivanova, however, wasn’t interested in romance. To be fair, there were wars and stuff happening, she had a LOT on her plate, so she would rebuff Marcus’s advances. At the end of the season, though, Ivanova is mortally wounded. Marcus, however, sees a chance to save her: in an earlier episode, the characters had come into possession of an alien device that could heal virtually any wound, cure any disease, basically bring someone back from the brink of death – but to do so required the transfer of life-force from another being. In other words, you had to kill one person in order to save someone else. Marcus hooks Ivanova up to the machine and hooks himself up to the other end, sacrificing his life to save her. If his other feats throughout the series hadn’t already proven him worthy of carrying Mjolnir, his final act of courage and selflessness more than does the trick.

Let’s see him science the shit out of Mjolnir.

Staying in outer space, let’s turn our attention back to our own solar system, particularly the surface of Mars, where Mark Watney of The Martian has proven his worth. In the novel by Andy Weir and the film adaptation, where he is played by Matt Damon, Watney is an astronaut stranded on Mars when the rest of his crew escapes and heads back to Earth. The others don’t leave Watney deliberately – they think he was killed by the same storm they are attempting to flee – and by the time they realize he’s still alive, there’s no way for them to go back and get him. On Mars, alone, Watney has to figure out how to survive on limited supplies long enough for NASA to arrange a rescue. 

Both the book and the movie are a joy to me. For one thing, it’s a rare story in which there is no traditional antagonist. Literally the entire planet Earth bands together to save the main character; there’s no evil in this story. That’s so damned refreshing. The battles Watney has to fight are against Mars itself, trying to find ways to create food, provide power, and ultimately make his way to the site of another rocket that can blast him into orbit for his rescue. And although Watney (not unlike Ernest) often displays momentary panic following his many, many setbacks, he also overcomes that panic every single time, putting his brain to work and figuring out one unbelievable way to survive after another. He never backs down and keeps fighting until he finds a way to safety. 

As the entire plot of the story is Watney trying to stay alive, it’s a little harder to prove his selflessness. However, from the very instant he is stranded on Mars, Watney makes it a point to say that he doesn’t blame the rest of his crew for leaving him behind. He never shows any anger or resentment against them for his predicament, and when the rescue attempt boils down to his crew basically giving up another year and a half of their lives to turn back to Mars and save him at great risk to themselves, Watney shows willingness more than once to die on Mars if that’s what it takes to protect the rest of the crew. Could he lift Mjolnir? I posit that he could. Tragically, if he HAD the hammer, he could have prevented the storm that stranded him on Mars in the first place. 

With four characters down, I turned to my wife. “Erin, who else could lift Mjolnir?” I asked.

“D’vana Tendi,” she said without hesitation.

Go ahead, speak it into the Horn of Truth.

“Duh,” I said, berating myself for forgetting my favorite character from Star Trek: Lower Decks.

Tendi is an Orion, a member of a species who, prior to Lower Decks, were known for their pirate captains and slave girls in other Star Trek series. Not exactly an obvious choice for lifting Mjolnir, of course. But from the first time we see her, Tendi defies what we think of Orions as being. She’s not a pirate or a slave – she’s a scientist. She gleefully loves science, she dives into it with the sort of joy and excitement that Thor himself carries into battle. Tendi sees a problem as something to defeat with her brain rather than her fists, but it’s a battle nonetheless.

That should not, however, give you the impression that she COULDN’T fight. Tendi has forsaken the warrior aspect of her culture, but she was still brought up in it. She holds the title “Mistress of the Winter Constellations,” and it is a title that strikes fear in her enemies. Tendi is fierce in battle when the situation calls for it, then turns on a dime to being the sweet, good-natured Starfleet Officer she truly WANTS to be. 

As for selflessness, at the end of season four of Lower Decks (it is apparently my day for spoiling the fourth seasons of science fiction TV shows), with her ship and her crew on the line, Tendi makes a deal with her family. In exchange for their help, she will leave Starfleet and rejoin the family syndicate, taking her place as Mistress of the Winter Constellations once again. She’s willing to leave everything and everyone she loves in order to save everything and everyone she loves. Thor had to learn to let go of his arrogance – I don’t know if Tendi would even recognize it to begin with.

“Ferb, I know what we’re gonna lift today!”

“Phineas and Ferb,” Erin continued, and good grief, how did I forget THEM? I talked just last week about how much I love Disney’s Phineas and Ferb cartoon and how excited I am that it’s coming back, but somehow it passed right by me. Phineas and Ferb are stepbrothers who refuse to waste a single moment of their summer vacation, spending their time creating incredible inventions and having amazing adventures with their friends. Giant rollercoasters, life-size board games, soccer pitches that defy the laws of physics, portals to Mars (if only Watney had known they were on their way) – nothing is beyond the two of them. And despite the fact that many of their creations would be objectively terrifying to anybody else, they never show a moment of fear. Is it truly courage if you’re so pure of heart that it honestly never occurs to you what what you’re doing COULD be dangerous? I’m not sure. But at the very least they’re aware of the CONCEPT of danger – they always wear helmets and safety gear when appropriate. 

As for selflessness – the very few times Phineas displays any sort of concern over the course of the series usually come when he’s worried about other people. And more than once, the brothers put aside their plans to help someone else in need, whether it’s protecting Baljeet from a bully (this is before Buford joined the gang), getting their parents’ favorite band back together to create a romantic evening for them, or constructing an entire haunted house to scare away Isabella’s hiccups (it doesn’t work – Isabella is so thrilled that Phineas is paying attention to her that she never feels a moment of fear), even their grandiose plans will take a backseat to the needs of the people they care about. 

Unlike any of the other characters on this list, it should be noted, Phineas and Ferb actually met Thor once, in their Mission Marvel special. In that episode, though, the Marvel heroes were powerless and Mjolnir spent most of the episode stuck in the middle of Manhattan collecting parking tickets, so the question of whether the brothers could lift it never comes up. But if it had, I maintain that they could. 

“They’d probably build something to help them hold the hammer at the same time,” I tell Erin.

“Like a cupholder,” she says.

People, get you a partner who understands you the way mine understands me. 

There you go, friends – seven characters who have demonstrated the courage, fearlessness, and purity necessary to lift the mighty Mjolnir. This should not be considered a comprehensive list, mind you. It’s just the first few characters that came to mind when I thought about it (and asked my wife for her opinion), so there are certainly others. I heartily invite your own suggestions, along with a brief explanation of why you think they’re Mjolnir-worthy. There’s nothing nerdier than talking about this kind of stuff with other fans, and that’s the kind of nerdity I like. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He would like to believe that he could lift Mjolnir himself, if given the chance, but he was nervous to take his son on the Ladybug ride at City Park, so…

Geek Punditry #18: The Animation Hole

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J. Michael Straczynsi is an accomplished storyteller, a phenomenal writer, and a little bit of a troll when it comes to teasing his fans with the promise of upcoming content. Among his other achievements, Straczynski is the creator of Babylon 5, which a lot of people consider one of the finest science fiction shows ever made, and which is in many ways a precursor to the current model of long-form storytelling that we enjoy on television. But while B5 is acclaimed, it’s obviously not as well known as the likes of Star Wars and Star Trek. Aside from the series itself, the universe has only enjoyed a few TV or direct-to-DVD movies, a spinoff series that lasted a single season, and a relative handful of novels, comic books, and short stories which are all long out of print and not even available digitally. Last week I told you guys how fans always want “more.” By that metric, Babylon 5 fans have been starving for a long time.

This week's news that Babylon 5 is going to return with a new movie should be met with joy -- but some fans are put off because the film will be animated. Why, in 2023, are we still looking down on animation?
But lunchtime is coming…

This week, though, we were finally promised a meal when JMS announced an upcoming Babylon 5 animated movie. Although we don’t yet know the plot, the title, or the release date, Straczynski told us the following: the film includes the voices of most of the surviving members of the original cast, the movie is already finished and will be released “very soon,” and it is – in his opinion – the best thing they’ve done with Babylon 5 since the original series ended. And as with most news announced to a group of starving genre fans, the reaction had two phases:

1: YES! New Babylon 5 content! FINALLY! The prophecy has been fulfilled!

Followed shortly thereafter by…

2: Pfft. 

Any time a popular franchise makes an announcement, there is a “Pfft” contingent, and while that contingent is usually small, it is extraordinarily vocal. One “Pfft” is capable of raising his voice on the internet above approximately 5,000 fans who are genuinely happy and excited about the project, and he does so in such a manner to indicate that the news is nothing to get excited about, and anyone who is excited is beneath him. These people have existed since the dawn of  civilization, the first recorded practitioner expressing their displeasure with a cave painting of a pack of wildebeest made by Hector “Ugg” Gutierrez, but which was clearly inferior to the one made by his arch-rival, Andy Warhol.

But back to the Babylon 5 announcement, specifically. The “Pfft” people usually latch on to a few key elements to fuel their derision, such as the cast or writing. In this case, though, since it’s almost all the original people involved in the new project, they have focused their spite on the medium: animation.

“Pfft. It’s a cartoon?”

“Pfft. I’ll wait for the real show to come back.”

“Pfft. Look at what happened to Star Wars.”

(That last one is the most perplexing to me, actually, since many of the Star Wars animated projects have been widely acclaimed, but it does demonstrate the phenomenon of cross-fandom “Pffting,” an activity that has always existed but which has become much more prevalent in this age of the internet.)

Look, I’m not here to tell anybody what to like. I’m not telling anyone they have to enjoy something, and I’m not telling anyone their opinions are invalid. I am, however, going to say that if your argument against a project is based solely on the fact that it’s animated, an opinion formed before even a single frame of the project has been seen by the public, then you’re kind of a dink.

“Come on, you don’t think anyone actually liked this, do you?”

The idea that animation is strictly a medium for children is a stupid one, and one that’s never made much sense to me. It certainly wasn’t the intention when it was invented. Early cartoons were made for a mass audience, with references to popular culture that would often go over the heads of children and plenty of double entendre that definitely wasn’t intended for the little’uns. It’s hard to watch classic Looney Tunes shorts with a discerning eye and think that bits like Bugs Bunny’s Clark Gable imitation were intended for kids even in the 1940s, or that the leggy girls the male toons would often chase after weren’t there for a little bit of grown-up fanservice. The people who made those cartoons were really trying to entertain themselves, and the fact that their work also entertained everybody else just showed how talented they were.

After my standard “I am not a historian” disclaimer, I’m going to say that I think the (largely American) perception of animation being strictly a medium for children probably is due to television. Once TV became more prolific and turned into a fixture in most American homes, content for every member of the family became a requirement, and cartoons became the preferred delivery system for the kids. Saturday morning cartoons blossomed, and they were glorious. They eventually migrated to weekday afternoons so kids had something to watch after school. And then, even older works (like the aforementioned Looney Tunes) were repackaged and shown during these children’s blocks, cementing them as kid stuff in the tightly-closed mind of the public. It’s a stigma that was set firmly, and while I think the last few decades have started to chip away at that mindset, things like the reaction to the Babylon 5 announcement prove that it’s still real for a lot of people. 

The thing is, none of the arguments for animation being only for kids hold up to even minimal scrutiny. Let’s break them down, shall we?

“Animation is childish.”

Sure, it can be. It can be a realm of crude humor and slapstick comedy and lowbrow jokes and goofy gags, just like the Three Stooges – who (although they did have a cartoon in their later years) were decidedly human. The things that people call “childish” are elements of the way the story is written or presented, not the medium. Animation can be mature and serious, and I’m not just talking about raunchy humor like South Park. I’m talking about things like the razor-sharp satire of early seasons of The Simpsons. I mean experimental films like Batman: Death in the Family. How about Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies, a story about two Japanese children surviving an American firebombing during World War II? It’s a transcendent film, but most definitely not something that any reasonable parent would show a small child.  

To call something “childish” derisively seems to mean that the content is not worthy for consumption by adults. And to be certain, there are kids’ shows that fall under that category. But even shows that are aimed at kids don’t necessarily lock out parents altogether. Bluey is the most current example of this – this Australian show ostensibly for preschoolers is a favorite among kids, but has been embraced by parents all over the world for portraying a loving mother and father (sure, they’re dogs, but so what?) who do their best with their children, fall short sometimes, but keep on going. The characters have become inspirational, role models even. Animated dads have far too often been cast in the mold of Peter Griffin. The truth is, every dad should aim to be a Bandit Heeler. 

Bluey is an instructional video on parenting disguised as a show for preschoolers.

And there are far more examples. The original Animaniacs series came out when I was in middle school, and it was a show my father actually enjoyed as well. It was part of the Fox Kids lineup, but like the Looney Tunes shorts that were their true parents, it had layers of satire and entendre that kids never would have understood. I was in college before I realized the episode “King Yakko” (which you may just know as “the Anvilania episode”) was a full-plot reference to the 1933 Marx Brothers’ movie Duck Soup. Yeah, that was a joke for kids in the 90s. 

How you make something does not determine the proper audience. What you make does. 

If you’re anywhere close to my age you know EXACTLY which joke this is.

“It’s just a cartoon, I can’t feel anything like I do for human actors.”

That’s a failure of the viewer, not the film. Animation can be deep, powerful, meaningful, and personal, and it all depends on the story you’re telling. If somebody came up to me and said that the saddest 60 seconds of television ever made came at the end of the Futurama episode “Jurassic Bark,” I would be utterly incapable of arguing against it. After a full episode about Fry, trapped 1000 years in the future, coming to terms with losing the dog he left behind but finding comfort in the fact that he had a full life without him, the viewer learns that Seymour, the dog in question, literally spent the rest of his life waiting for his master to return before quietly passing away in front of the pizza parlor where Fry worked. Even somebody who hates dogs has to feel something for that.

97 percent of you got a lump in your throat when you saw this picture. The other three percent are assholes.

“But Futurama is adult animation,” you say. “Not all animation is like that.” I’m going to ignore the fact that you just utterly shattered your own argument that animation is all for kids and move on to examples that are for children, but which are still deeply moving for adults. How about the Pixar film Up? As a teacher, there are occasionally days where we show films because of reasons, such as having a room full of standardized testers who have finished early and I need to kill time before we return to our normal classes. On days like that I have a strict rule to never show the movie Up, because I may have to teach some of these 9th graders when they become seniors and I don’t need them remembering that time I sobbed like an infant in front of them. The beginning of Up tells the story of a boy and girl who grow up, fall in love, marry, discover they cannot have children, and grow old together before the woman, Ellie, leaves her husband Carl as a widower, and utterly alone. It’s a powerful story and it’s told, after their initial meeting as children is over, completely without words. It’s entirely visual, requiring the viewer to infer what has happened to them at each stage, and causing their souls to crumble as the reality sets in. I admit, I’m a softie. I cry at movies. At TV shows. Whenever I heard the John Williams anthem from Superman. But this was the only time in my life a movie made me cry in the first ten minutes.

I’m gonna make you people cry before the end of this column.

Emotion is an intended byproduct of art, all art. Whether it’s a film, a poem, a painting, or a concerto, art is created for the express purpose of evoking an emotional response from the audience. And great animation can nail it just as much as live action.

“Animation is just a cheap way to tell the story.”

First off, buy a calculator. The price tag on rendering animation can be pretty staggering. But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here – maybe you mean that animation looks cheap. Sure. Sometimes. It’s hard to imagine that anyone involved in the 2012 magnum opus Foodfight! is particularly proud of what they have loosed onto an unsuspecting world. But that’s bad animation. Bad live action sucks too. So does bad writing, bad acting, bad special effects. If your argument is that “animation is bad,” you’re choosing to ignore the mountains of good animation that exist or the mountains of bad everything else you had to wade through to get there.

If Futurama and Up didn’t get a tear out of you, the existence of this abomination should do the trick.

Let’s go back to Babylon 5 for a second. Although very few details have been released, and everything I am about to say is speculation, the fact that Warner Bros. owns the property makes it reasonable to assume that the animated film is the work of the Warner Bros. Animation studio, the company whose history goes back to those magnificent Looney Tunes I keep bringing up. For a more recent example, and one that is thematically much closer to what the B5 movie will likely be, this is also the studio that has made the collection of DC Comics animated films that have come out over the last several years, movies like All-Star Superman, Batman: Under the Red Hood, Superman Vs. the Elite and Justice League Vs. the Fatal Five. The current unit is also responsible for many films featuring the likes of Scooby Doo and other Hanna-Barbera properties, Tom and Jerry, and…you guessed it! The Looney Tunes. And while people may debate the relative quality of any of those productions – they may dislike the story, the casting, the character design – one thing they rarely complain about is the quality of the animation itself. WBA knows what it’s doing.

And frankly, the notion of using animation for science fiction just plain makes sense. When you’re telling a story in a world beyond our own – be it sci-fi, fantasy, horror, or superheroes – the special effects are often make-or-break. The filmmakers have to convincingly create something that does not exist in the world and put it in front of an audience in a way that it appears real. Some people are great at this. Some people are not. Animation removes that requirement. Star Trek is often derided for its reliance on “rubber forehead aliens” – in other words, alien species that are created by slapping some prosthetics on human actors. Well what else were you supposed to do, especially with the budget and technological limitations of television in the 1960s? When the Star Trek animated series was created, for the first time, there were recurring alien creatures who were not wholly humanoid, such as the tripedal Edosian officer Arex. Even in modern times, where improved effects make it easier to show things that are less human, we still see a much wider variety of alien species on the animated series Lower Decks and Prodigy than we do on any of the live-action Treks, and you never hear anyone say that they look “fake”.

I mean, in live action this guy might look silly.

What about superhero movies? Since Marvel Studios changed the way blockbusters are made, the “Pfft” crowd has come out in force to complain about the overabundance of special effects that are used. “Did you see the new Ant-Man movie?” they say, ignorantly forgetting that the Wasp receives equal billing with her partner. “It’s just a couple of people in CGI suits in front of a green screen for two and a half hours.”

You know what movie they never say that about? The Incredibles.

In fact, after The Incredibles and the largely-forgotten but highly-enjoyable TMNT (an animated feature starring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that you likely didn’t know existed) I came to the opinion that animation is the perfect medium for superhero movies. I’m not saying that animating a huge action sequence is easy, but when literally the entirety of the universe is created digitally or on a drawing board, there are fewer limitations. The live action Marvel movies recognize this, which is the reason they’re so heavily reliant on CGI these days. And while their live action features have been a mixed bag, DC’s animated superhero projects have been a hallmark of quality ever since Batman: The Animated Series. Even non-superhero, non-science fiction movies do this these days. I’ll never forget the hilarious moment when Disney’s “live action” remake of The Lion King had so little live action that the Golden Globes nominated it for Best Animated Feature. I still laugh about that.

Superheroes and animation go together like ham and eggs, peanut butter and jelly, sauteed sea bass and rum raisin ice cream…

Animation is a medium. It’s a method of telling a story, and dismissing an entire medium because of what you perceive it to be is a kind of ignorance. If the Babylon 5 animated film comes out and underwhelms…well, that would suck. I love B5 and I want more stories in that universe, and I think that the success or failure of this film will impact the odds of that happening in the near future. But if it turns out to be a dud, there’s one thing I’m sure about: it won’t be because it was “just a cartoon.”

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. Thanks to his wife, Erin, for reminding him to include the Futurama example when he told her what this week’s column would be about.