Remember when they used to make animated series out of any hit franchise going? Mark Harrison does…
Let’s dive straight in…
Rambo: The Force Of Freedom
In an alternate ending for 1982’s First Blood, traumatised Vietnam War veteran John Rambo commits suicide. However, in post-production, director Ted Kotcheff and writer/star Sylvester Stallone opted for the canon ending where Rambo surrenders.
Had they kept the original, we certainly wouldn’t have four more Rambo sequels, and it might have dented the film’s viability for animated spin-off series as well. As it is, Ruby-Spears Productions created Rambo: The Force Of Freedom, a G.I. JOE-alike action series that ran for 65 episodes in 1986.
Battling the evil organisation S.A.V.A.G.E. (that’s Specialist-Administrators of Vengeance, Anarchy and Global Extortion when it’s at home), Rambo and his “toyetic” friends travel the globe, pausing only to play with animals and teach children how to be good. Stallone was reportedly not best pleased but continued pancaking enemy combatants in the live-action franchise up until 2019’s Rambo: Last Blood.
RoboCop and RoboCop: Alpha Commando
On a similar note, the idea of a RoboCop animated series feels worthy of the satirical TV adverts in the original film. And yet when Paul Verhoeven’s brilliantly violent actioner became a hit in 1987, Orion Pictures originally wanted a sequel to be targeted at the PG or PG-13 audience to maximise returns.
Co-written by Frank Miller, 1990’s RoboCop 2 landed squarely in R-rated territory, but Marvel Productions’ 12-episode animated series came out the year after the original and is designed as a gateway for younger audiences. Bullets are replaced by lasers and all that naughty language and adult content has been discreetly lost in translation. Oh, and it also brings Clarence Boddicker back as a recurring baddy, despite his demise in the movie.
Acceptable in the 80s? Well, the weird thing is that the show was revived a decade later, with many of the same writers as the earlier series. And 1998’s RoboCop: Alpha Commando was an even more kid-friendly version. This ain’t your dad’s RoboCop, because who needs “remember when RoboCop shot that one dude in the dick” when Alpha Commando’s Murphy has go-go-Gadget roller skates???
The Karate Kid
Cobra Kai may not be the most likely success story as a sequel series to the Karate Kid trilogy, but neither is it the unlikeliest. That would be 1989’s Karate Kid animated series, which sees Daniel LaRusso and Mr Miyagi on a globe-trotting quest to retrieve a magic shrine that’s always just out of reach.
Across 13 action-packed episodes, the formula was usually the same – Miyagi, Daniel, and Okinawan girl sidekick Taki find the shrine, beat up some baddies who are using its powers to stop them retrieving it, then let it slip through their fingers until the next episode.
The mighty Pat Morita provided opening narration for each episode, but a planned 65-episode run was waxed off after the initial order.
Beetlejuice
Michael Keaton and Tim Burton are currently working on the live-action sequel, but unusually, Burton was also involved in developing 1989’s Beetlejuice animated series. It picks up with Goth girl Lydia Deetz and her now-BFF Beetlejuice traversing the “Neitherworld” and tangling with its many supernatural inhabitants. Beating the odds for these shows, Beetlejuice the series ran for four seasons and a whopping 94 episodes, moving over to Fox Kids for its final run in 1991.
(Film Stories accepts no liability if you’re reading this aloud and have now said the aforementioned bio-exorcist’s name three or more times.)
Toxic Crusaders
OK, we take it all back – 1984’s The Toxic Avenger makes Rambo and RoboCop look like Bert and Ernie. During the rush for toyetic animated series marketed at kids in the late 1980s, Troma schlockmeister Lloyd Kaufman seized the opportunity to make Toxic Crusaders, which veers from the cult-classic revenge movie considerably.
The 1991 series gives “Toxie” a gang of merchandisable sidekicks, including a sentient mop, and puts them to work protecting the environment from the alien Smogulans. It’s all very Captain Planet And The Planeteers, which makes it a far cry from the source material, but it also has a more tongue-in-cheek approach to the cynically managed properties of the era. Kaufman and Troma still made a packet off the merchandise though.
Free Willy
Speaking of more cynical spin-offs with an environmental message, Free Willy uses the blockbusting 1993 family drama (and the reported $20 million up-swing in donations to Save The Whales as a result of its popularity), as a springboard for a sci-fi action series.
In the movie, young Jesse is a foster kid who finds an unlikely friend and a connection that transcends language. In the series, he can talk to Willy, and they fight eco-criminals and genetically engineered pollution monsters together. It’s not that different!
Aired between the original film and 1995’s Free Willy 2, the series doesn’t come up in either of the live-action sequels but then it’s difficult to know when to bring up your blood feud with an Ahab-inspired cyborg called The Machine when you’re saving the whales.
James Bond Jr.
“The name’s Bond, James Bond… Junior.” We’re not sure if it’s weirder that there hasn’t been more than one small-screen James Bond spin-off in the last 60 years, or that when there was, it was an animated series about 007’s nephew.
James Bond Jr revolved around the titular teenage hero and his scrapes with various relatives of characters from the Bond franchise. His sidekick is Q’s genius grandson I.Q., one of his enemies is Goldfinger’s daughter Goldie Finger, and other iconic henchmen like Jaws and Nick Nack become recurring characters throughout the 65-episode run.
Produced while Eon Productions was bound up in legalities leading to the long gap between Licence To Kill and GoldenEye, the series kept the franchise visible during its unplanned hiatus but hasn’t been revisited. Eon head honchos Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson have more recently stressed that James Bond won’t return to the small screen, and they’re instead developing a Bond-inspired game show called 007: Race To A Million for Prime Video.
Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series
There’s an overused Wayne Gretzky quote about going where the puck is going, both in hockey and in life. So, while duck shows DuckTales and Darkwing Duck were big hits for Disney in the 1980s, the hockey metaphor should probably have extended nicely to The Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series.
However, instead of animating the further exploits of Emilio Estevez and his hockey-playing youngsters from the live-action trilogy, this show follows a team of anthropomorphised ducks leading the resistance for their home planet, Puckworld, while also posing as human hockey players for the Anaheim Ducks.
In the year Space Jam hit cinemas, that’s just where the puck was going. However, this show is unusual in this list in that all 26 episodes are available to stream on Disney+. The same can’t be said for the much more recent live-action series, The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, which was removed as part of the service’s cost-cutting measures earlier this year.
Men In Black: The Series
With a stylised design that feels entirely in keeping with the weirdness of Barry Sonnenfeld’s hit franchise-starter, Men In Black: The Animated Series anticipates that film’s sequels quite well by restoring the status quo of Agent K as the mentor and Agent J as the eternal rookie. The main difference is that Agent L, based on Linda Fiorentino’s character, actually sticks around.
On screens just months after the film hit cinemas, Men In Black: The Series ran for four 13-episode seasons from 1997 to 2001. As with Ghostbusters and its various small-screen incarnations, there’s already a solid starting point for a TV procedural in Men In Black and, in hindsight, the series is often far better than any of the sequels.
Carrey On!
In 1994, Jim Carrey became a global movie star with a triple-whammy of smash-hit comedies released within 12 months – Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb & Dumber. But did you know that all three movies had animated TV spin-off series on the air by the end of 1995?
You can see the logic, but Carrey’s screen presence is already so animated it’s hard to know how they could make it any more cartoonish. In any case, the star didn’t reprise his roles, which were filled by voice actors Michael Dangerfield, Matt Frewer, and Rob Paulsen, respectively.
However, Ace Ventura and The Mask aired back-to-back on CBS and, in 1997, the two shows had the most ambitious crossover in TV history – eat your heart out, Marvel!
Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles
Re-animating Paul Verhoeven-directed sci-fi satires seemed to work pretty well for RoboCop, but it’s a smidge more problematic with Starship Troopers, a film that brilliantly sends up the fascism and fetishism of the Robert A. Heinlein novel that inspired it. Turning it into a cartoon uncritically reinstates all of that. And as with RoboCop, there’s no adult content, just good old commercialised military propaganda.
More popular with Heinlein’s fans than the movie version, the series follows the titular Roughneck platoon on missions to squash bugs in the name of Earth’s Strategically Integrated Coalition of Nations (SICON). Ambitiously, the series was made with 3D computer animation, at a point where the technology and budget weren’t really synching, and the show was squashed after one season, much to the chagrin of its fanbase.
Clerks: The Animated Series
Did you know that there was an unsuccessful 1995 pilot for a Clerks sitcom, in which Jeff Anderson unsuccessfully auditioned for the role of Randall? Well, some time later, Kevin Smith collaborated with Seinfeld producer David Mandel to spin-off one of the earliest adult animated sitcoms, and it’s much better.
Buffeted around the schedules on first broadcast in 2000 and cancelled after just six episodes were completed, Clerks: The Animated Series is wackier than the ultra-lo-fi film that inspired it, but the writers and the original cast have fun in a more creatively liberating medium.
The series’ formal inventiveness is exemplified by its sitcom clip show episode, which was only the second episode, so there’s only one memorable clip they can repeat. Well worth seeking out, this one.
Star Wars Detours
From The Clone Wars to Visions, there are plenty of animated Star Wars spin-offs to be getting on with, but one of the casualties of Disney’s 2012 acquisition of LucasFilm was Star Wars Detours. Starring a mix of Star Wars actors reprising their roles and comedians playing new characters, the show would have had a more comedic tone, in line with Robot Chicken.
Writers included Seth Green, Jane Espenson, and Rachel Bloom, and 39 episodes were completed when Disney unexpectedly pulled the plug on the series, citing brand management ahead of its sequel trilogy. One of those episodes leaked online in 2020, but otherwise, the series has never seen the light of day.
Fast & Furious Spy Racers
And finally, we remind you that the trend is far from over – alongside Spy Kids: Mission Critical and Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, Netflix also produced six seasons of a Fast & Furious animated series while we weren’t looking.
Spy Racers finds Dominic Toretto’s younger cousin Tony and his friends running missions that the live-action crew are too high-profile to undertake. So far, so James Bond Jr, but this has the added benefit of Vin Diesel lending that unmistakable voice to the first and final seasons for cameos as Dom.
And with its focus on “The Agency”, which plays a much larger part in Fast X, this is the rare example where the parent franchise seems to be heading in the same direction as the Saturday-morning-cartoon tone of the spin-off series. And franchises don’t get more family-friendly than this.
