Some cartoons are hits immediately. As soon as they air, it seems like everybody is talking about them, and before long, the merchandise starts showing up everywhere. Then there are the cartoons that seem to vanish almost as quickly as they arrived. Maybe the ratings weren’t there. Maybe the network never quite figured out where they belonged. Sometimes a show simply gets caught between audiences, which is television’s polite way of saying, “Good luck somewhere else.”
The funny thing is that cancellation isn’t always the final word. A cartoon can disappear from the schedule and keep finding viewers years later. Reruns help. Home video helps. The internet certainly helps. But mostly, it comes down to people remembering something they weren’t supposed to forget. These four shows all had rough starts, and some barely had a chance to establish themselves before they were gone. Their reputations, however, kept growing long after the original ratings stopped mattering. Go back to them now, and that old “failure” label starts to look a lot less convincing.
Jay Sherman looked like the kind of guy who had already seen the movie and hated it before the opening credits finished. Which was convenient, because that was basically his job. The Critic followed Jay, a New York film critic who spent his days watching Hollywood movies and then explaining, usually at length, why they weren’t very good. Al Jean and Mike Reiss, who had already made their mark on The Simpsons, created the series, which premiered on ABC in 1994. It lasted 13 episodes before ABC pulled the plug.
Then Fox brought it back. And then Fox canceled it, too. That might have been enough to bury most shows, but The Critic had a pretty reliable source of material: Hollywood was going to keep making movies, and Jay was going to keep finding things wrong with them. The show had plenty of parodies and celebrity jokes, but it wasn’t just a collection of movie references. Jay himself was the reason to keep watching. He was cranky, insecure, opinionated, and completely convinced that his opinion mattered. In other words, he was a critic.
The audience for The Critic only seemed to get bigger after the show was gone. Reruns helped. Home video helped. And then there was word of mouth, usually from somebody who had discovered the show years after it had disappeared and couldn’t believe everyone else hadn’t seen it yet. That’s a pretty fitting second life for The Critic. Jay spent his career telling people what was worth watching. Eventually, fans started doing the same thing for him.
There’s a kind of comedy that makes more sense once you’re a little older. You start to realize that plenty of people have no idea what they’re doing. Mission Hill understood that. Andy French was 24. He lived in the city, had a job he didn’t particularly like, and was trying to figure out adulthood as he went. The people around him weren’t exactly helping. They were just as strange, awkward, and mixed up as he was. The series came from Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, who had both worked on The Simpsons. But Mission Hill had a different feel. The jokes were quieter. Conversations could wander.
The WB aired only seven episodes before canceling the series. Surprisingly, more episodes were produced and later shown elsewhere, including on Adult Swim. That’s where Mission Hill found the kind of audience it hadn’t been able to find on network television. And watching it now, the appeal is pretty easy to understand. Andy and his friends aren’t superheroes, action figures, or particularly successful people. They’re just young adults trying to get through the week. There are bad dates, bad jobs, annoying neighbors, and the occasional realization that the person you’ve been arguing with might actually have a point. It all feels oddly familiar. Mission Hill didn’t need a giant mythology to keep people interested. It just needed viewers who recognized the neighborhood.
Invader ZIM was never going to be the quiet one in the room. ZIM is an alien sent to Earth to conquer the planet. The problem is that he’s terrible at it. He’s terrible at following orders, too, and most of his plans tend to go wrong in spectacular fashion. Then there’s GIR, his robot companion, who is supposed to help with the mission but is usually more interested in food, making noise, or whatever else happens to catch his attention. Nickelodeon premiered the series in 2001, and while it attracted plenty of attention, the ratings didn’t hold up, particularly with the younger audience the network was trying to reach. Production problems didn’t help. The show was eventually canceled, with only 26 episodes completed from a larger planned run.
That should have been the end of it. Instead, Invader ZIM seemed to get more popular after it was gone. The strange character designs helped. So did the humor, which could be a little darker and weirder than what viewers usually expected from Nickelodeon. And then there was GIR, who had a way of stealing almost every scene he was in without even trying. Fans kept coming back to the show through reruns, merchandise, conventions, and online communities, and its reputation continued to grow. There were also the comic books. Nearly two decades later, ZIM returned in Invader ZIM: Enter the Florpus on Netflix. By then, the cancellation hardly seemed important anymore. ZIM may have been terrible at conquering Earth, but he turned out to be very good at sticking around.
Five episodes. That’s how long Home Movies lasted on UPN before the network canceled it in 1999. Five episodes isn’t much of a run. You barely have time to figure out which character is supposed to be the annoying one. But Home Movies was a strange little show from the beginning. Created by Brendon Small and Loren Bouchard, it followed eight-year-old Brendon Small as he made movies with his friends. His mother was divorced. His friends were a little odd. And then there was Coach McGuirk, a soccer coach whose qualifications for being around children became more questionable the longer you watched him. The conversations were loose and often rambled. Sometimes they seemed to wander into a joke without letting you know one was coming. That was part of the charm.
UPN didn’t find much of an audience for it. Cartoon Network did. The series was revived and eventually became part of Adult Swim, where its strange, conversational style suddenly made a lot more sense. Home Movies went on to run for four seasons and 52 episodes, which is quite a difference from five. It also turned out to be an important early chapter for its creators. Bouchard would go on to create Bob’s Burgers, while Small created Metalocalypse. None of that was obvious when Home Movies disappeared from UPN. At the time, it was just another canceled cartoon. Years later, it looked less like a failure and more like a show that had simply ended up in the wrong place the first time.
It seems like there are many great cartoons and movies from the past that are becoming more appreciated as audiences discover more entertainment history. These four series are only the beginning—what other cartoons do you think deserve to be mentioned?
