Butch Hartman's shows

[Daikun]

Oaxis has kinda soft-launched.

[Dr. Insomniac]

These are just links to his YouTube videos. What's the point?

[Daxdiv]

People actually donated money to this...

[Dr. Insomniac]

I watched one of his "shows", and why?

[Dr. Insomniac]

So, yeah...



Why? If FOP's still a viable enough IP that they can milk money off of it, why a janky-looking sitcom like this instead of restarting the assembly line and cranking out more shitty seasons of the old show?

[Daikun]

Because they'd have to start paying Hartman again.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Would they? They wouldn't need to bring back Butch in any capacity. And with a few exceptions, cartoon creators don't make that much in royalties from their work.

[Daikun]

I was joking.

[Dr. Insomniac]

...once again, a new FOP reboot is in the works.

[Avaitor]

My first thought is "who on earth could possibly want this", but then apparently the live-action show won a KCA, so maybe there's still an audience for it.

[Dr. Insomniac]

It won a KCA, but it also got cancelled and pulled off Paramount+, so I don't know what the strategy is there for the franchise. Funny this is the third time the big idea to keep the IP flowing is "find a new kid for Cosmo and Wanda to be fairies to", like everybody at Nick's decided the worst part of the show is Timmy. Which isn't entirely wrong. A kid gets reality-warping fairies for over 10 seasons, and his life is still stuck in the same meandering status quo?

[Daxdiv]

According to the series bible, at least this new kid doesn't have an existing relation/connection with Timmy other than having Cosmo & Wanda. Though I do wonder how different the new kid will be from Chloe, since she did try to use her wishes for good as well & when it did, it blew up in her face.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Because adding Chloe ultimately didn't change the bigger picture, and it was still a status quo show where they had to repeat the "Be careful what you wish for" cliche to hell and back. There's only so many times you can pull out the monkey's paw trick without audiences going "Just wish for no negative side-effects on all your future wishes".

Honestly, I forgot what the appeal of FOP even was in the first place. It's one of those Nick shows I remember watching all the time as a kid but have so little nostalgia for that I don't even remember why I watched it besides having nothing else to do. At least with Danny Phantom, I can still get why people liked it since it's just Spider-Man with ghosts, but not FOP. I guess there's the whole "Here's this kid with a shitty childhood, now watch him get back at the people who wrong him by making wishes" hook the Oh Yeah shorts had, but like I said, status quo. Timmy could have wished for the worst possible thing to happen to Vicky, and we all knew they'd go back to normal by the end of the episode or movie, and everybody just gets a little worse with each season.

Like I know that's It's a Wonderful Life episode is despised, but it captures the general "Why should I give a shit?" malaise of the show. That Timmy sucks so much everyone around him would be a better person if he didn't exist. That the MC of the series is so unbelievably bad at learning how to better himself even when he has a leg up on everyone else thanks to having fairy godparents. And maybe kids like him are beyond helping.

[Daikun]

Because one failed attempt at a revival wasn't enough...

[Dr. Insomniac]

I don't know why they keep trying to squeeze anything out of FOP despite consistent failures. What, is there some insane clause in the contract saying the IP rights go to Butch if they don't make a new reboot every couple of years?

Guess I should mention I watched a leaked version of the pilot a while ago, and meh. Replacing Timmy with a new child was something you kinda have to do if you want FOP's premise to still work, since Timmy stopped being an average kid the audience could relate to and came off as a self-inflicting failure too stupid to figure out how to fix his life despite having wish-granting fairies, and the fairies went from quirky but genuinely well-meaning guides to layabouts who weren't "godparents" in any sense of the word, but the new girl Hazel doesn't correct the problem so much as go back to step 1. And you just end up repeating the same decay but with a different kid.

At least she's more tolerable than the ones from the sitcom?