I hear a lot today about cartoon lengths and how long a cartoon should last. There's a dispute between length of seasons and how many seasons, and so on. The current opinion is that it is respectable for a show to end sooner than later so that it doesn't go on to become stale. I'm all for this idea, but not fully convinced that every animated show would benefit from this line of thinking.
Take for instance Gravity Falls and Fairly Odd Parents; two side of the spectrum. Gravity Falls is a well liked show in the prime of its life that is ending in under a month as just two seasons alone. It certainly feels like longer though because there's been months of hiatuses between almost every episode for the last season. Regardless, it seems that just when the show is really kicking in it is cut off, so it can be seen as what it was; just a briefly lived summer.
On the other side is Fairly Odd Parents, a show that has just started its tenth season and has hit a deadzone running. Fairly Odd Parents used to be a show I watched frequently as a kid, along with Jimmy Neutron, Spongebob, and Pokemon. Over the years Fairly Odd Parents' quality has really hit a decline and led to desperation. Mostly from, and I might be wrong about this, the fact that they sort of had a reboot of the show when they planned to stop it. Now days they're doing the normal things to elongate it; declining continuity, adding more characters, and becoming pretty desperate.
Out of everything, Fairly Odd Parents is probably the biggest support to the fact that a show should end when it naturally does. Yet at the same time it is possible for a show to end so early that it does hurt it in a way. Case in point; Over the Garden Wall.
Over the Garden Wall was a mini-series that lasted only a week long. The story was that Wirt, an awkward teenager with a knack for poetry, and Greg, his happy-go-lucky half-brother, are lost in the woods. They start coming upon strange people, strange events, and are being followed by some sort of beast in the woods who may be, or be connected to, a woodcutter living in the woods who spends his life making oil. They are joined by Beatrice, a talking bluebird who was once a girl but now cursed. Every episode was sort of its own mini story with an overarching plot. In one episode the group would be in a tavern, in another they'd be in a strange schoolhouse, then a village full of pumpkin people, and yet the Woodsman and the beast were always on their tail.
It was a remarkable show and I found it quite enjoyable. Living and growing in the woods it gives me a touch of nostalgia, and it also brings about my interest in adventure and fairy tales. It sort of reminds me of the game 'Gretel and Handsel' in a way as well. The scenery is nice, the characters are interesting, the voice acting is great, (I've always been a big fan of Elijah Wood and Christopher Lloyd), and yet it was over very, very quickly. A part of it also remembers Beatrice Potter tales... I'm not exactly certain why.
Unfortunately, while I love the show, I have to say that this is the biggest evidence that a show shouldn't end before its time. Just because you don't want a show to get rot doesn't mean that making it abnormally short will help things, and I fear that Over the Garden Wall's biggest flaw is that, through its few short adventures, it simply didn't have enough time to shine. What it did show was great and yet there was so much wasted potential that could've been had.
It's like when you go on vacation; let's say you pay for a hotel room for a full week. The area you go to has an amusement park, a water park, a casino, a shopping mall, a spa, ect. Yet because you don't have enough time you only go slightly into each area, explore a little, and then are forced to leave. While you saw a bit of everything in the end you sort of didn't have as much fun as you would've if, per-say, you went to one place and explored it fully. Then you could vacationed her again some other time and visited the other places...
Over The Garden Wall is that vacation of seeing what you could've done and explored, but being so out of time that you were rushed through. I wanted to learn more, I wanted to see more. Just because it gave us a complete ending doesn't mean that I feel like I had a complete experience.
The worst part? Over the Garden Wall most likely will fall forgotten in a few years. It is a damn shame, but as people start looking towards other shows they will think less and less of it, of something that had so much work put into it.
Wirt and Greg left the woods and yet here I stay; but when I look at the trees I just see the adventures that almost were. Goodbye, boys. I hope that you remember your adventures as you go back into the world you slipped out of. Sometimes you're not allowed to stay in the adventure; sometimes it's best if you don't even venture it at all.
Well that was depressing. -.- What was my point again?... Oh, right.
The Fairly Odd Parents got ten seasons, Over the Garden Wall got ten episodes, and Gravity Falls got two seasons. Just a couple of fun facts to share with your friends!
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