Cartoon Corner – Teen Titans Go!

Fandoms can be weird places sometimes. Let me explain...

_Teen Titans _was a superhero cartoon (‘capeshit’, as my flatmates call it) that ran for five seasons from 2003, based on the long-running DC comic book of the same name. It was fairly popular, with above average writing and characters for its time. I was, of course, the perfect age for it when it came out, and for a while it was my favourite show. It balanced drama and humour, with interesting characters and stories, and a lot of it still holds up today.

Around three years ago, it was announced that the show was being ‘revived’ as a series of one-minute shorts called New Teen Titans, with a more ‘comedic’, light-hearted tone, with all of the original cast returning. This was met with much excitement from the comic book nerds like me, since we’d grown up with the original show and had fond memories of it.

Then two things happened at around the same time:_ Young Justice_, a very popular cartoon with a similar premise to Teen Titans, (both were based on overlapping comics characters) was, frustratingly, cancelled.

Next, it was announced that the New Teen Titans shorts were to become a full series, called Teen Titans Go!, again with the original voice cast, and again with less of a narrative focus than the original (and with cheaper looking animation). The subtext was clear: Cartoon Network didn’t like _Young Justice’_s adult themes and more complicated stories (they weren’t that complex – it was still aimed at twelve year olds). Instead, they wanted the simpler, goofier, cheaper show.

The fandom didn’t like the cancellation, and a consequence was a big backlash against Teen Titans Go!, despite us all being previously excited by the return of the Teen Titans to our screens. It seemed as though a lot of the (justified) anger at Cartoon Network spilled over into hate for the new show, which hadn’t even come out yet.

Then when it premiered something weird happened: it was really funny. It had a unique energy to it that drove each episode. The plots were goofy and outlandish, and the humour, while childish, often had me laughing along like I was a twelve year old, and I mean that in a good way. The original show had some great comedic moments, but it ultimately wasn’t a comedy and had an overarching narrative, and so couldn’t get away with a punchline where, for example, the main character dies of old age. Teen Titans Go!, was not bound by this limitation, took the characters all over the place and had a great time doing it. Scott Menville, the voice actor of the group’s leader, Robin, gave such an unexpectedly funny performance that Robin’s personality was changed by the writers to match it, turning him from the group’s serious, badass commander into a hyperactive, egotistic, neurotic control freak, and it was hilarious. We would never have known he had it in him.

And yet, the fan backlash persisted. People refused to watch “the show that killed Young Justice”. “They changed it, now it sucks”, they were saying, essentially. Some fans even brought out the tired cliché of “they ruined my childhood”, as if the fact that a new version existed somehow diminished the old one. It was a classic example of the fans’ overinflated sense of entitlement, in my humble opinion.

Thankfully, finally, the show now seems to have found the following it deserves. The Comic-Con panel, for example, was packed full of excited, cheering fans. The creators even generated hype by announcing a Young Justice crossover! In the end it was all really a weird story on the themes of fandom and nostalgia-based entitlement.