Dungeons and Dragons cartoon series

Hm, and Presto was known for doing silly magic card tricks before they came to the realm, Bobby the Barbarian....well he's a young kid, prone to anger and tantrums so I can see the club going to him.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

I know I'd be a bad choice. There'd be a lot more regularly occurring non-human characters, probably of odd sorts...possibly half-blooded characters...inter-racial romance most likely would occur

Somebody would have an absolutely terrible history they're already recovering from

A nonstandard relationship would be hinted at, if just vaguely, probably involving two or more female characters

and the consequences involved would probably be a bit too harsh for a kids show

I respectfully disagree.

(NOTE: For those who have not yet seen the new Thundercats cartoon and want to, do NOT read beyond this point due to SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS!!)

I just watched the new revamp of another 80's cartoon Thundercats. Not only did they show war, bigotry and racial prejudice, they ALSO included death as a primary focus of their pilot episode.

Indeed, they had what amounted to attempted genocide that quite nearly succeeded.

Death is part of the current cartoon scene. The present audience for cartoons is NOT the same one it was when I was a child. For one thing, more and more adults watch cartoons today than ever before. Also, the influence of Anime and Manga has made even the young viewers want more meat to their cartoon.

Thundercats handled the death about the same way I would if I were re-writing Dungeons and Dragons. They did not SHOW death unless it was pivotal to the plot, but instead inferred it. You saw a bridge filled with people. You saw the bridge explode and then only saw two people get up after the explosion.

No flying body parts. No brain hitting a wall and slowly ooooozing down it. But still, you got the idea. People died. People were killed.

The audience is older. The methods are smoother. I feel that the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon could be updated in much the same manner Thundercats has been.

On a side note, if you have not yet seen the new version and you loved the old Thundercats, I heartily recommend watching it. When Lion-O held up the Sword of Omens and said those words for the first time I had gooseflesh.

Yeah, I'm a sap like that.

Yeah, I could see the D&D cartoon being updated, but I suspect that many of the old "D&D = satanic influence over kids" arguements would also return. Then again these people probably either didn't blink an eye over Harry Potter, or else would condemn Harry Potter also.

As to Thundercats, I liked the reboot. But as to death in cartoons back in the 80's the original Thundercats started with them escaping Thundera as it exploded. Genocide in the 80's pilot too.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Harry Potter has made its way onto a number of banned reading lists (yes, they still exist).

okie, I'm sold and logging into the tivo website to schedule thundercats to record.

You've already missed the hour-long pilot. But the reboot is really good.

however, it WAS Rankin-Bass back in the day, which is well known for, among other things, psychodelic death scenes as a way of confusing the matter for kids

Interestingly yesterday a friend came up with the exact same suggestion.

"Why not make him like, you know, an actual DM?"

He is there to both provide adventure and help but also to antagonise, just like the job of a real DM, you help the players, provide nudges at certain points but your also the one selecting the monsters and puzzles infront of them.

He would be lord and master over all, he is the creator of the world, a God figure if you will as is hinted in the original series.

As for the characters...eh...I would probably still keep them as a group of friends, though who they are and why they got what class is up in the air in the moment in my mind.

Ah good old culture shock. The cultures in the original are barely fleshed out, if at all. Heck I'd go a step further and not just human appearance changes but complete races changes. What happens if you end up as a Dwarf or a Dragonborn or even a Kobold? You could have a character be a tiefling and have to deal with all the prejudice their race gets etc.

The quest for magical items is usually a good idea for atleast the 'movie pilot' i.e. the first 3-4 episodes which allows you to set up the characters and the world around them plus questing for a magical artifact is pretty much THE very first DnD game people experience right alongside 'fight big bad' storyline.

The whole race change thing also bleeds into this, after all someones got to explain to the Dragonborn when a good time to breath fire/lightning/whatever species dragon he/she is. Each could be dispatched to their respective races 'home city' to recieve basic training in the art of whatever their class is (fighting, healing, magic etc).

Agreed, in my OP I mention the show would need to have story arcs and with that character to growth, the monster of the week style works really well for syndication but it makes the experience very shallow since lessons learned from one week to the next never stick, the Cavalier, no matter how often he becomes brave, always reverts to a coward the very next episode.

Agreed I'd actually like them to HIT something.

However the problem comes down to this.

Medieval weapons.

Swords/axes/warhammers etc. deal rather gruesome wounds now Warhammers can easily just be a KO for anyone hit with them but swords, well your hacking of arms/legs. Though you could do ye olde bloodless combat which was the stable of 1960s Sword and Sorcery or Western films, people did die but it was kid friendly.

I actually like this.

Yep, 1st Ed Unearthed Arcana - It had the barbarian, thief-acrobat, and cavalier (of which the paladin became a subclass instead of being a subclass of the fighter)

but it is also true that all of those appeared in Dragon magazine well before Unearthed Arcana was released.