How Does Adult Animation Rate?
After Comedy Central, the showblock that has made the biggest splash in adult animation is the aptly titled Adult Swim on Cartoon Network. On Swim, high budget, off-network shows like Futurama and The Family Guy rub shoulders with outrageous, low-budget parodies of classic that turned Saturday morning characters into talk show hosts and trial lawyers.
“We knew back when we started that we had large audience outside the 2-11 demographic,” reflects Cartoon Network’s Mike Lazzo, svp of Adult Swim. “Because we did not have a lot of money to make original programming at that time, we started going into the library and repurposing shows because it was quite inexpensive to just rewrite existing animation.
“When Space Ghost Coast to Coast went on the air there was no adult block. It just sort of sat out there on Friday nights at the beginning. In essence, it was the first show we ever made aired outside in what we would call adult parameters, but because it aired at 8:00 pm on the west coast, we didn’t write racy material for it — we had to be careful that it was just kind of goofy.”
Space Ghost’s success led to the Adult Swim block. While the off-Fox cartoon sitcoms perform the best, Lazzo says the lower-budget, quarter hour spoofs deliver an equivalent bang-for-the-buck. “The quarter-hour shows — Space Ghost, Brak, Sealab and the rest probably get half the audience of Futurama or Family Guy, but at one-tenth of their budget.
“The shows are designed to be an inexpensive laboratory. We can produce 10 to 20 episodes of them and because the budgets are not huge you can try different things, you can try ‘em faster, and if something pops you can put more resources against it.
The point of these shows is to try and find that breakout hit like Beavis & Butt-Head or South Park, or indeed a Simpsons, which began as an interstitial. We’re still looking for it, but right now Aqua Teens and Sealab are doing very well.”
On the subject of Spike TV’s animation block, Lazzo notes, “I don’t think any of their shows were bad, they were OK, but to some degree maybe not as compelling as some have been.” As for adult animation in general, he offers a note of caution to Cartoon Network’s competitors: “It’s a very hard thing to do — you can’t dabble in it. One of the great things about Cartoon Network is that it’s an animated environment — you have an audience that expects animation and looks forward to new animation. I think that’s far more difficult for programmers who don’t, who might just have a show or two. I just think it’s tougher for them to bring in or just convince their existing audience to watch a new show — although a great new show in any genre will be a great new show and people will watch it.”
With six broadcast networks and dozens of cable channels in the U.S., as well as hundreds of DVDs to choose from, fans of adult cartoons can watch great, not-so-great and downright bad animation pretty much any time they feel like it. Like any TV programming genre, the total number of series on the air may wax and wane. However, now that producers know they have a waiting audience capable of generating Simpsons or South Park-style profits, don’t expect adult animation to go the way of the dinosaurs anytime soon.
Joe Strike is a New York City television writer/producer with a lifelong interest in animation, and who remembers watching Astro Boy when it first aired in the U.S. His work includes numerous promotional campaigns and special events programming for cable outlets including Bravo and the Sci Fi Channel. He interviewed Disney animation director Mark Dindal in the November 2000 Animation World Magazine.
Printer-friendly version
Post new comment