Audience Alienating Premises in Western Animation.
- The Adventures of Kid Danger: An Animated Adaptation based on a then-still-airing TV show is not going to do very well in today’s climate. No thanks to countless Hanna-Barbera shows from The '70s, they’re almost always seen as cheap cash-grabs, which is why they are almost completely non-existent in the 21st century. Making things worse is that the series that this show is based on is rather divisive as well, meaning that the people who didn’t like the original show would immediately stay away from its Spin-Off. The show did very little to distinguish itself from its parent series, which justifies its existence even less. It was cancelled shortly after it aired due to being nigh-universally panned.
- Allen Gregory. The show is about a homeschooled 7-year-old played by Jonah Hill, who is forced to attend elementary school when his gay parents hit hard times, and thus has little idea on how to act like a kid. That could have worked very well... if not for the fact that both the title character and his father were unrepentant Jerkasses, especially to the daughter character (who was an unfunny and rather darkly played Meg Griffin ripoff). Not helping matters was the fact that one of the parents wasn't actually gay but rather gave in to a gay relationship because the other wouldn't leave him alone despite several restraining orders — this aspect already angered quite a few people in the gay community. It also contained a recurring subplot about Gregory attempting to date his principal, who is in her 70s, and his infatuation was portrayed far too sexually to be considered a Precocious Crush. The show reeked of Too Bleak, Stopped Caring, was met with poor reviews, and ended after just 7 episodes due to poor ratings. It says something when Fox hates it enough to erase it from their websites.
- Assy McGee is about a Cowboy Cop named Assy McGee, who is a talking ass. Unsurprisingly, it suffered low viewership that got it cancelled quickly, and it's one of the few shows [adult swim] treats with disdain. (Ironic enough, one of their longtime reruns also once featured a similar type of show in-universe, "Sherry and The Anus". And then there's Hamster Butt World...)
- It isn't hard to see BattleTech (1994) as having one of these. Besides being based on something with sprawling pre-existing mythology, it's set during the very beginning of the Clan Invasion, meaning a setting a new viewer had no chance to learn anything about was being invaded, by an enemy even people in the show had never seen before, upsetting a status quo new viewers would know absolutely nothing about. There were also the somewhat conflicting ideas of how it tried to stay true to the source by showing that war involves horrific destruction and also being kind of futile, while at the same time promoting itself by making war look awesome with having the soldiers piloting gigantic deathbots (there was even an action figure line). Something the younger viewers the show was trying to attract to the franchise probably had trouble reconciling. Despite ending on a cliffhanger the closest it's come to being followed up was having some of the characters later appear in series novels. As of the "Wars of Reaving" sourcebook it's been established in-canon as a giggleworthy propaganda cartoon.
- Beast Machines ran right into this trope. An Oddball in the Series, it tried to replace the timeless "warring robots that turn into vehicles/animals" premise with "technorganic beings against robots in a nature vs. technology battle". It also had a notably dark and serious tone despite being aimed at children and the heavily serialized nature of the plot led to a lot of Continuity Lock-Out. It’s been Vindicated by History (somewhat; there are fans that still consider it non-canon), but it wasn’t successful at the time and the planned sequel, Transformers: TransTech, was cancelled in favor of a total reboot.
- Beware the Batman struggled to gain fans thanks to its risky decision to not use any villains from Batman's iconic Rogues Gallery, instead using lesser-known or outright obscure villains from the comics; even characters like the Joker or Catwoman were rendered absent. As many find said gallery to be part of why Batman is so memorable to begin with, many Batman fans chose to ignore the series. It did manage to get some fans and eventually brought in some more classic villains, but it got the axe before its first season had even concluded, with its remaining episodes being burnt off in a late-night slot. The fact that it was also CGI also raised concerns at the time of its run, since the early 2010's were marked by a dissastisfaction towards CGI replacing 2D animation, doubly so as previous DC animated series had mostly been 2D and highly praised for their animation (though the contemporary Green Lantern: The Animated Series would prove popular in spite of that).
- Bordertown is about a police officer who works at the California/Mexico border for border patrol. Along with his family, he lives in a town at the border while having neighbors who are Mexican stereotypes. The premise alone came across as racist to many, especially with how controversial an issue illegal immigration and the treatment of immigrants at the border is. Since the show is about taking jabs at certain ethnic groups, people who are a part of said groups would not be interested, which limits the show’s audience by default. Combined with the show’s ugly character designs, it's not hard to see why it only lasted one season.
- What could possibly go wrong with Bubsy? A lot, actually. This cartoon is based on a video game series of the same name. The problem? The original games that the titular bobcat hails from are considered mediocre at best by the general consensus. As a result, it is easy for audiences to assume that the cartoon is terrible purely because it is associated with a brand with a less than stellar reputation. It never made it past its pilot.
- Disney Channel's The Buzz on Maggie, while generally liked by most of the people that watched it (a select few of which consider it a legit Cult Classic while most of the others merely consider it So Okay, It's Average), is a very stereotypical Slice of Life tween sitcom aimed at little girls that takes place in an overflowing garbage dump infested with sentient anthropomorphic flies and various other types of insects who may or may not have gained their anthropomorphism from prolonged radioactive fluid/gas exposure. These reasons lead to the show only lasting one season.
- Clerks: The Animated Series was an Animated Adaptation of a profane, low-key indie cult film with virtually no cursing and Denser and Wackier plots. It was a show that wasn't going to capture anything but the nichest of audiences (and especially didn't fit on a major network like ABC) and was unsurprisingly cancelled after only two episodes, though reruns on Comedy Central and [adult swim] made it a Cult Classic. One of the only reasons it was greenlit in the first place was because ABC wasn't doing too hot in the ratings at the time and were desperate for any kind of potential hit series... but in the middle of production, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? became a smash success for the network and they quickly buried Clerks to give that show an extra half-hour.
- The Cleveland Show did moderately well in most senses, but it was significantly maligned with this issue more than Seth MacFarlane's other shows. Being a Spin-Off of Family Guy, it was to take the series token black guy Cleveland Brown and basically make the same show, but "black", with a larger slant towards satirizing African-American culture... written by a team of largely white and Jewish creatives. The show ran for four seasons, but it's the first of MacFarlane's shows to be cancelled with zero chance for a revival (Cleveland and his new family since transplanting back into Family Guy), with a dominating criticism that by nature, it didn't endear itself to the black audiences it was simultaneously catering to and mocking, and non-black audiences just didn't want "Family Guy, but with a more niche demographic". Even MacFarlane seems to agree based on an extended fourth wall-breaking gag in the Family Guy episode of Cleveland's return:Joe: Who was your show's audience? Who'd you make it for? Some black guy who never met another black guy?
- Upon its premiere in Fall 2002, the MTV cartoon Clone High met its (pretty quick) demise because of this. Among other things, the fact that a member of the Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist cast is a clone of Mahatma Gandhi that is a Jerkass party animal actually led to protests outside of the Indian offices of MTV
because Gandhi is a very revered person over there and people felt insulted as a result. In the years since its cancellation, though, the series has become Vindicated by History and is now a Cult Classic considered one of the best cartoons of the 2000s, and it was announced in 2021 that MTV and HBO Max would revive the show for a 2-season order. Further, that character wasn't supposed to be Gandhi anyway; the whole point of his character is that he was always jealous of being in the shadow of his source. - The Critic could be this trope's codifier for the medium. It revolves around a Straw Critic — a fat, bald, acerbic, whiny loser — but portrays him sympathetically as often as not, particularly regarding his struggle against his boss's and popular culture's Anti-Intellectualism. The second season is Lighter and Softer; Jay gets a romantic interest with a Cousin Oliver attached. To the show's credit, it maintains its high level of humor and benefits from the more varied character dynamics. But even so, the show never truly found its niche; on ABC in Season 1 it didn't fit in with any of the network's "wacky family" comedies, and when it made its Channel Hop for Fox in Season 2 it would be Screwed by the Network.
- Da Boom Crew is an interesting case; it’s not that the show has a bad premise, but rather, that it uses its premise incorrectly. It’s about a group of kids who make their own video game, but one day, they get transported to a world that they claim is identical to the game they made. With that said, the show doesn’t seem to want to roll with this premise, since the kids don’t recognize anything that they see, despite technically creating it all themselves. This particularly bad plot hole made it hard for audiences to get invested, as did its constant Totally Radical attitude. It was quickly yanked off the air after only four episodes (although 13 were officially made).
- The Day My Butt Went Psycho!, the Animated Adaptation of The Bum Trilogy, was instantly met with vitriol the day it was announced due to its premise revolving around sentient butts. Nobody gave the show a chance, so it ended up getting shafted to Netflix for its second season. It certainly did not help that the original books it was based on fell victim to Adaptation Displacement, meaning few people at the time were aware of the fact the show was originally a series of books with the exact same premise and similarly heavy usage of Toilet Humour.
- Detentionaire. Revolving around a tenth grader who gets a year of detention for a prank he didn't do, and his encounters with numerous high school stereotypes in his investigations, many took no interest in the show's concept for sounding like like a high school Cliché Storm. Not helping was that the show's extremely tight continuity made getting into the series after its first episode nearly impossible. This may have contributed to the show's inability to find much of a market outside of Canada and Australia, especially in the United States where it got colossally Screwed by the Network, which led to the show's premature cancellation. However, the overwhelming majority of those who did give the show a chance have deemed it to be a top-notch series and it has become a highly acclaimed Cult Classic in the years since.
- Dungeons & Dragons (1983) has six teenagers who go on an amusement park ride only to be transported into a world of perpetual war, forced to become mystical warriors in order to fight an evil mage trying to overtake said world as well as defend themselves and their Team Pet, whose cuteness masks its true nature and whose presence repeatedly impedes the sextet from completing their mission or ever getting home. This made it too dark and depressing for kids, and older kids and adults also stayed away as they saw it as another "actiony cartoon for kids". Plus, it was more violent and expensive to produce than your average Saturday-Morning Cartoon. All these factors turned American fans off and the series was canceled before any real resolution occurred.note
- This is the reason Disney's Fillmore! was abandoned after one season. It's 70s Cop Show theme in a middle school setting was too confusing for the target audience which were children and pre-teens. And those mature enough to understand and appreciate the concept, weren't nearly enough to make up for the show's lack of ratings. However, the show for what it was became a Cult Classic over the years.
- Fish Police falls into this. In spite of starring colorful talking fish, it is loosely based off an adult 1980s comic. On top of that it is an adult cartoon produced by Hanna-Barbera, explaining why it only lasted 6 episodes.
- Gary the Rat, in spite of the talented and acclaimed Kelsey Grammer voicing the title character, still suffered from this. The plot has an Amoral Attorney transforming into his true nature of an anthropomorphized rat... for whatever reason. In addition to living in a Crapsack World where there is virtually no one to root for (except for his elderly and sickly mother, who he hates for unclear reasons), Gary remains a self-centered asshole for the most part, apparently taking nothing away from his experience. And whenever we're treated to a flashback with human Gary, his face is always conveniently obscured. The failure of this cartoon, along with that of Stripperella and especially Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" caused whatever animation block Spike TV was hoping to create to end up dead in the water and effectively killed any hope of Viacom launching an adult animation block for several years.
- Several critics and reviewers have pointed out this as the cause behind God, the Devil and Bob only lasting one season. The show sounded too religious for secular people and too disrespectful of God for religious people. The fact that it tries to do comedy with God but never really dares to go too far is a problem, as fans of edgy shocking comedy like South Park felt the show was too tame and fans of spiritual-based family-friendly shows thought it was too cynical. The fairly bland art style probably didn't help, either.
- This is what doomed The Goode Family from the start. It's a Spiritual Antithesis to King of the Hill, a show that works because the deeply conservative regions of the United States are well known in other areas of the continent (and probably the world), and those living in those regions are more flattered than anything to have a well-written sitcom set in the area. The Goode Family, on the other hand, is set in the strongly liberal Bay Area, whose culture is much more obscure and whose people felt insulted. As such, the humor and satire in The Goode Family was incomprehensible and the setting too surreal for most viewers, the only people whom it'd really appeal to being those familiar with the area and who either are dissatisfied with living there or can take a joke at their expense. It was yanked off the air as soon as its first season finished. Being put in a Friday Night Death Slot didn't help either.
- The premise of Grojband is that the title band's leader, unable to come up with his own lyrics, creates his songs by driving his bratty teenage sister crazy every episode and then stealing her diary for lyrics. Many balked at the show from the extremely unsympathetic-sounding premise, and those who were able to get past found an extremely offbeat, lightning-paced series with a lot of Surreal Humor, No Fourth Wall, and a Strictly Formula. The result was a very niche cult show with just as many people who deemed it one of the most stupidly awful and nonsensical animated series ever created as there were those who adored it as a brilliantly unique and creative show that was Too Good to Last. The divisive character designs of co-creator Todd Kauffman (who also did the character designs for the first season of Total Drama, another show that has received polarized reception for its character designs) added to this.
- Kaeloo never really did well in Australia. Most kids weren't allowed to watch it because of its adult jokes and late-night airings, and adults were turned away by the Funny Animal cast.
- The Little Muppet Monsters needing to live up to the far more successful Muppet Babies (1984) while being paired alongside it leaves this taste. As animator Scott Shaw! put it: "The concept of this second half-hour was neither simple nor particularly well-developed." Basically, these three Muppet monsters live in the basement of the Muppets home and have their own TV station that they use to broadcast shows, exclusively to the Muppets living above them. Failure to produce the animated segments on time resulted in it swiftly being cancelled after three episodes.
- Looney Tunes:
- Wanting to get in on the popularity of anime, Warner Bros. came up with Loonatics Unleashed which re-invented Looney Tunes characters as intimidating crimefighters in a dark cyberpunkish setting. Unfortunately, people who would've been interested in the Looney Tunes were turned off by the dark-looking setting and action emphasis, and people who wanted to see anthropomorphic superhero action were put on their guard by the fact that the characters were based on Funny Animal cartoons famous for zany slapstick. Due to backlash, the premise was changed into a much more standardized superhero cartoon that received mixed reviews at best. Further attempts were made to fix the show in the second season by lightening things even further and reintroducing nearly all the other classic characters, but despite that and angling even more obviously for another season, the show was cancelled after that season ran its course.
- To a lesser extent, this might also be the reason The Looney Tunes Show never became the smash hit the channel was hoping for. Sitcom fans were turned off by the Funny Animal cast and many Looney Tunes fans didn't care for the show throwing all the characters into the format of a sitcom set in suburbia. It didn't help that the first season wasn't sure what style of comedy it wanted to lean into or even the age of its target audience, meaning that by its more fully-realized and well-regarded second season, Warner Bros. was already working on a new Looney Tunes project to replace it.
- This is the reason My Little Pony Tales flopped. Fans of the usually fantasy-themed My Little Pony franchise found the Slice of Life elements dull and Cliché, while most Slice of Life fans couldn't get beyond the fact that the cast is all brightly-colored talking ponies. It's still a controversial topic in the MLP fandom decades later.
- Nina Needs to Go! is about a little girl having a Potty Emergency every episode. And we do mean every episode, despite the main character's equally common insistence that she's learned better than to let it become an emergency. It's naturally a very divisive show.
- Pelswick was unable to gain much of an audience due to taking too many risks at once. It had a paraplegic protagonist, which is a pretty big risk by itself, unfortunately, especially since it made the bold choice to have it not define his character. Then it was set in a Fantastic Comedy (the protagonist receives advice from a Guardian Angel only he can see), and some of the people who liked the reality aspect found the fantasy aspect confusing to the point they couldn't enjoy it, as well as having an unconventional art style which some people find off-putting in and of itself. For good measure, the show employed mature humor about political correctness and then aimed the series at kids, complete with a far-from-subtle Aesop structure that older people were turned off by. All of this resulted in being cancelled after 26 episodes and not released on DVD with a handful of fans (Funimation wanting to focus more on My Dad the Rock Star certainly didn't help matters).
- Penguins Behind Bars was a surprisingly serious prison drama... set in a world of cartoon penguins. One would think this would have a place on [adult swim], but even there, every other show outside of anime (which can be said about adult animation as a whole) was a comedy. The pilot aired once, was met with mixed to negative reception from baffled viewers, and never aired again.
- Fox's Peter Pan & the Pirates was a cartoon with some great writing and storytelling, that was surprisingly gothic and occasionally scary at times. Why didn't it do well? Well, it's about Peter Pan, and yet it takes itself deadly serious and has more mature storytelling than you'd expect given the source material. Hence, little kids who might be drawn in by Peter Pan got scared away, and older kids who'd enjoy the story took one look at who it's about and decided it was kiddy. The original novel was very dark in its way, as well (at the end, Tinkerbell is dead, and Peter is too childlike to remember, or care, who she was, for example), but thanks to Disneyfication, anything that returns to the spirit of the original alienates everyone.
- Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain was an unneeded retooling of the already-popular series, Pinky and the Brain, where the duo are forced to live with the least popular character from Tiny Toon Adventures. Two episodes from Pinky and the Brainnote were made to show that changing the show was a bad move, but the higher-ups didn't get the memo. It was clear that the staff hated working on the show as they put "It's what the network wants, why bother to complain?" in the show's lyrics and had Brain interrupt the end chorus saying "I deeply resent this". The show only lasted 13 episodes.
- The Prince (2021) is an American, Family Guy-style animated sitcom based off The British Royal Family, with the eponymous main character being Prince George, changed into a crass, adult-voiced Stewie Griffin expy. Right from the get-go, the show had to be delayed significantly due to many of the jokes already becoming tasteless, specifically the jokes of Prince Phillip as a decrepit zombie who constantly needs to be defibrillated, which — even if the real Prince Phillip didn't die at the age of 99 before the show's premiere — is the definition of a joke that wouldn't age well. The other two Royal Children, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis were also used as subjects of mockery. People just weren't interested in a show that uses three real children as the basis for a Shallow Parody of the Royal Family (given just how private the lives of three kids are and how publicly dysfunctional the rest of the family came to be in 2020-21, there's not a lot that can be meaningfully exaggerated), and otherwise, it's a low-grade knockoff of a tired adult animation formula. Given how remarkably surreptitious HBO Max was with its release (its actual release date was only announced the day prior), it's clear that even they knew nobody wanted to see a show about this and just wanted to just get it over with as soon as possible.
- The Red Ape Family is about the titular family of primates moving to Mars after Earth had been been over-run by pollution. That, in it of itself, doesn’t sound all that bad; the real reason that this cartoon rubbed people the wrong way is because it revolves heavily around NFTs, with the main apes even being based on the Bored Ape Yacht Club line of NFTs. Since the product that the show was trying to promote is a heavily controversial practice, this means that the show was bound to gain controversy as well. Audiences were highly opposed to there being a cartoon that promotes a well-hated practice, which explains why it was Quietly Cancelled after only three episodes (that and the funding drying up, as nobody was buying the NFT collection the show was selling - the complete crash of NFT prices not long afterwards didn't help either).
- Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" is extremely notorious in part because of this. It tries to simultaneously be a drama and an Animated Shock Comedy that takes every single vulgar, offensive and tasteless joke imaginable and takes them even further, and failing at both. The drama is too ludicrous and forced for viewers who might otherwise be interested, and even if they weren't, they would have still been turned away by the depravity and overall grossness on display. Meanwhile, the comedy crowd didn't find any of the jokes funny. Unsurprisingly, this led to its extremely short run. An episode-specific example is by far the most well-known and polarizing one, the episode "Ren Seeks Help", in which Ren engages in multiple highly disturbing acts of animal cruelty which are all Played for Laughs. So thoroughly was the audience alienation that even the announcement in 2021 that Comedy Central would revive the series once more was met with mixed reactions, simply because they had the same characters.
- Sam & Max: Freelance Police: The show's main humor is incredibly fast-paced dialogue to the point that adults can get lost, and unlike Animaniacs, there isn't much in the way of Slapstick to balance it out — the main duo are able to laugh off whatever Amusing Injuries they're subject to as if it didn't even happen. On top of that, it aired at a time when the Animation Age Ghetto was only just starting to be broken, so most grown-ups wouldn't have expected much from what was to them another duo of Funny Animals. Since the preexisting Sam & Max franchise was a Cult Classic even at the time, any veteran fans interested wouldn't be enough to sustain the show for more than a season.
- SheZow is an Australian/Canadian cartoon about a twelve-year-old Wholesome Crossdresser superhero. While the series became a minor Cult Classic, it never got a second season and faded into semi-obscurity after a very short run.
- This was a big reason why Spicy City is largely forgotten outside of a Cult Following. Being a very adult and overly sexualized cartoon in 1997 turned away mainstream audiences and critics, while its Tales from the Crypt-esque style with surprisingly well-written and deep plots didn't go over very well with most people who only showed up for the smut. While it actually got decent ratings, in the end, its audience was just far too narrow for it to ever even get a home release, and Ralph Bakshi refused to allow the network to fire his writing team and hire professional screenwriters (presumably to retool it into something more mainstream to avert this) which sundered any chance of it ever getting a second season.
- The Spike TV show Stripperella, despite being an ambitious experiment, didn't go too far on account of this trope - the animated comedy about a stripper superheroine, produced by Stan Lee and Pamela Anderson, couldn't find an audience - the superhero parody was too dweeby for the mature theme, and the sex comedy aspect was too crass when contrasted with the superhero plot. For modern audiences, there's also the Values Dissonance at play since the series relied heavily on semi-outdated stereotypes such as portraying the women as smart and competent while portraying the men as dim and perverted (for the most part, anyway).
- ThunderCats Roar, a Denser and Wackier reboot of ThunderCats (1985) in the vein of fellow Warner Bros. Animation series Teen Titans Go! (which it had a Crossover episode with). ThunderCats fans were outraged at the tonal shift, with a particular contingent upset that it wasn't a continuation of the 2011 series. Meanwhile, non-fans were reluctant to watch the series because said outrage discouraged them from trying it out, and children couldn't fully enjoy it due to it being an Affectionate Parody of the original 1980s show, which never got anywhere near the levels of Pop Culture Osmosis as other 1980s action properties like He-Man or Transformers. The early backlash resulted in its first season immediately becoming its last, long before it aired on television.
- The Wacky World of Tex Avery attempted to hit on the trend of renewed interest in classic animation (spurred on by shows like Animaniacs) by doing a show dedicated to and named after Tex Avery, one of the medium's biggest early innovators. Unfortunately, it backfired, because doing a show named after a man who had been dead for seventeen years couldn't help but look like a ghoulish attempt to piggyback off his legacy, and immediately placed it in comparison with all manner of classic cartoons that it bore little resemblance to and couldn't hope to live up to. Quite tellingly, the show only really saw success in territories where Tex Avery was less known.
- Yo Yogi! has this on multiple levels: The teenage demographic the show was aimed at would never give Yogi the time of day regardless of what form he took, and older fans would be put off by the show's attempts to be "hip." Needless to say, the failure of the show not only convinced NBC to stop airing Saturday morning cartoons, but it is one of the instrumental causes of the death of Saturday morning cartoons.
