Netflix Killed Their Original Animation Wing (And A Bunch Of Cool Shows)
In a move that confirms that it does care for its viewers, Netflix just saved us all a lot of time by canceling what might have been our favorite animated shows before they got started, instead of waiting until after you've grown attached to the characters like usual. Thanks, Netflix! On the other hand, they're not only making more episodes of Boss Baby but hailing it as an example of how all Netflix animated shows should be: complete junk that only gets good numbers because parents plant their children in front of them and let the entire season run on autoplay as they go do other stuff.
While fans of acclaimed, 100% Tomatometer shows like City of Ghosts and Centaurworld are left heartbroken by their cancellation amid Netflix torpedoing its entire original animation wing, others have been spared that trauma. For instance, a good number of comic book fans had been building up unsafe levels of hype for Netflix's long-awaited adaptation of Bone, which Deadline called "one of the Holy Grail properties among unadapted comic book classics."
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Bone, which has sold over 8 million copies in the US alone and won about two dozen comic book industry awards, is about three big-nosed cartoon characters trying to find their back to their village and getting lost in a vast fantasy realm in the middle of a vicious war. It's like if a bunch of Smurfs wandered into Lord of the Rings.
Cartoon Books
Bone, which was originally published over 55 issues between 1991 and 2004, has remained a best-seller since then and is the rare Young Adult series you can enjoy in middle school and re-read as an adult without thinking "I was such a dumbass to love this." In fact, multiple reads reveal the hidden layers behind the deceptively simple story and allow you to comprehend that the biggest badass in comics isn't Batman or Wolverine; it's Grandma Ben.
Cartoon Books
Bone creator Jeff Smith has been hesitant to allow Bone to be adapted unless it was done right -- in the late '90s, he famously turned down a $12 million offer by Nickelodeon because they wanted to dumb down the story and jam songs by N'Sync or Britney Spears in the middle of it.
The fact that he was enthusiastic about the Netflix adaptation was good news for the quality of the show ... and bad news for fans once it was inevitably canceled in the middle of a cliffhanger on season two or something. So, by pre-emptively pulling the plug and committing to only doing garbage animation for the broadest audiences possible, Netflix is doing us all a favor and saving us a lot of heartache. As the old saying goes, "'Tis better to have never loved a show at all than to have loved a show and lost."
The Boss Baby: Back in the Crib debuts on May 19, 2022.
Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok's heroic effort to read and comment on every '90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com.
Top image: Cartoon Books
