Canceled animated sitcoms of yesteryear

When an animated show gets canceled, sometimes it develops an ardent cult following that keeps the show alive. Such is the case for long-since dead shows like Invader Zim, Home Movies, and the recently-revived Futurama.

But not all shows are so lucky.

Allen Gregory
The show had an excellent pedigree, and it prominently featured two gay dads. How, I ask you, can a show featuring two gay dads be so ragingly homophobic? Frequently described with terms like "universally reviled," this show is notable for an ongoing subplot in which the seven year old main character is constantly attempting to woo the overweight, elderly elementary school principal.

Before it aired, I was rooting for Allen Gregory. Pre-Bob's Burgers, it was the first new non-Seth-MacFarlane animated show on FOX in ages. But the show was so awful, so blandly offensive, that all it succeeded in doing was making me dislike Jonah Hill. (A sentiment I carry to this day.)

Availability: at one point you could buy the show on iTunes but it was "eventually taken down due to low profit." No DVD release is planned.

Image copyright The PJs/20th Century FOX Television

The PJs
This stop motion show was created by Eddie Murphy and set in the projects. It won three Emmy awards despite being spectacularly racist. The PJs may have been created by a black dude, but I submit for your inspection the claim that just because the guy cramming every single black stereotype into a single show is black, that doesn't make it okay.

Worse, the show was notable for its un-funniness. At its heart, this is a show that tried to juxtapose "screwball comedy" with "crushing generational poverty in a hopeless, filthy, squalid public housing project." It's theoretically possible to pull off something like that with enough self-awareness, but in every possible situation, the show went straight for the zany slapstick.

The main character of the show was Eddy Murphy voicing Thurgood Orenthal Stubbs. Stubbs was the caretaker of the dilapidated housing project, and the running joke was that he was as stupid as he was lazy and unmotivated to fix the problems in the building. Just thinking about The PJs makes me want to kill myself.

Availability: All three seasons are available on DVD.

Image copyright Napoleon Dynamite/20th Century FOX Television

Napoleon Dynamite
The biggest question to be asked of this show is, "Why?" Why extend the Napoleon Dynamite brand with an animated sitcom eight years after the movie was released? I suspect a lot of people had forgotten about the movie entirely by the time this animated show was announced. I know I had.

The best thing I can say for the show is that it reunited all of the actors from the original movie to do the voices for their characters. I didn't care for the original movie, and I didn't care for the animated show either. It was too enamored with its own weirdness at the sake of making any kind of sense, and I was never sure if I was supposed to like the characters or laugh at them.

Availability: None to date.

Image copyright Capitol Critters/ABC

Capitol Critters
This 1992 show was ABC's attempt to ride the wave of Simpsons popularity by giving the public what ABC thought they wanted: a sassy animated show about grown-up issues. Unfortunately they missed the mark entirely and ended up creating an un-funny take on Washington D.C. politics where the black people are roaches that speak in broad Nu Yawk accents.

Let me hit that point again for extra emphasis: This is a show that cast all the black people as roaches.

A bigger problem is the show's baffling lack of jokes. I mean that literally. I just watched an eight minute clip on YouTube and I did not see a single thing that I would identify as having been intended to be funny.

Availability: Apparently none, although there are a lot of clips on YouTube.

Image copyright Clerks/ABC

Clerks: The Animated Series
This is a show that exemplifies wasted promise. Like Napoleon Dynamite, it aired long after the original movie had come and gone. Worse, the gap between 1994 (Clerks) and 2000 (Clerks: The Animated Series) was a huge one, culturally speaking. You would be hard pressed to bridge it with a bland little television show like this one.

To make matters worse, ABC aired the episodes out of order. This was a pretty big problem, because episode #2 was a play on the classic flashback/clips episode, using only clips from episode #1. Unfortunately ABC aired episode #4 first, then #2. Thus, viewers were treated to a flashback episode that was flashing back on an episode that had not yet aired.

Availability: Available on DVD.

Main image copyright Allen Gregory/20th Century FOX Television