Adapting TV to Cartoons

< Back to Adaptation series library

Understandably this is a little difficult to express. Because of how investment works it wouldn't make much sense to recreate a live TV show into an animation since animating must be more expensive than paying for actors, a set and equipment with staff.

Although despite this, the 80s and 90s were very much a different time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animated_spin-offs_from_prime_time_shows

This is a list of Prime-time TV shows that had cartoon spinoffs.

Shows like the Addams family and the A-Team got spinoffs either for the comedic popularity (Alf for instance) or for the adventure and moral perspective. All of which would be popular to children.

The Addams family cartoon

The Mr.T cartoon

The Alf cartoon

But this was mainly making a cartoon from a TV show for the sake of it. Why? Because it was popular and would make more money by broadening the demographic rather than making more interesting material to present. And even though this doesn't necessarily apply to all of these late 20th century cartoons (or even anything now) such as Mr.T or the Robocop animated show since they're built around adventures, they usually play out blandly and without soul since they aren't fleshed out stories. No story ark. Just another day of Bad guy tomfoolery.

However some TV to Cartoon adaptions do have more effort put into it but usually because they're just one-offs.

Introducing the Doctor Who special, Dreamland!

It was a one-off special of a Doctor Who adventure animated in 3D. I personally enjoyed this because of how it stood out. And because it had David Tennant in it. The all-time best Doctor for his overall level of handsome, personality/acting abilities and fantastically written character development. It's so good I imagine his scenes whenever "BBC Drama" shows up on screen during Doctor Who specials.

Considering adaptations of TV shows into Cartoons, there a far less cases that there's a scene by scene copy of an episode rather than just more stories in the same universe or with the same characters.

Saying this it's usually better to keep on writers from the TV show.