Cartoon Network continues to forget that its name is “Cartoon” Network (how long until they rebrand to Kart-une to get away from the stereotypes of animation associated with the word Cartoon?), this time teaming with Lionsgate for an “Ultimate King Arthur” style movie. The film will take the characters and basis of the legend and bring them into the 21st Century, with a heavier focus on the sorcerer Merlin. Lionsgate’s President of Production, Alli Shearmur, is well…producing, and the writer of Eagle Eye Travis Wright is updating the classic tale.
The more disturbing side of this is that live action “initiative” that Cartoon Network is now seeking. I make the SyFy related joke here, but at the network’s upfront for next year’s programming, less than half of the newly announced shows and movies are actually animated. I guess they haven’t seen the other 600 channels on TV that air primarily live action lately.
April 16th, 2009 at 8:07 am
Cartoon Network is just noticing the success of Hannah Montana, Jonas Bros., High School Musical, Aaron Stone, et al on Disney. They’ve learned how to create popular live action acts that kids eat up and Cartoon Network wants in on it.
April 16th, 2009 at 8:43 am
While I don’t like the live-action direction for CN, I can understand it. Cartoons are expensive to produce and/or buy, and the audience isn’t as large as it needs to be to 1) compete with other kidworks, and 2) keep up with the other TW cable networks. Cartoons simply can’t pay the bills.
And we’ve seen this kind of thing before, where a network establishes itself by creating niche programming, then expands their programming to include other things, and maybe they even abandon what got them so popular in the first place. We saw it with MTV, then VH1 and M(TV)2, where they were based on music videos, then expanded their programming and eventually dropped music videos from their pallet. And you know what, they’re more popular now than ever. We’ve seen it with Court TV/TruTV, now with SyFy and CN. Heck, even Toon Disney just rebranded itself to Disney XD, and I didn’t see anyone blink at that.
And Cartoon Network itself has been expanding it’s brand for years. It was originally conceived as a place to rerun old WB/HB/MGM cartoons, then expanded to new projects, dropped the older cartoons altogether, THEN expanded past its kids’ demographic (the horror!) to include the Adult Swim block.
Cut CN a break.