"Overrated" is the nicest single word description I can use. It was terrible. I was in junior high or high school when it came out and had been playing D&D (and Traveller and Champions and Gamma World etc.) for a few years already and it was just bad. It had that jerky animation that looked bad even then. The premise was of course a riff on the many, many stories in fantasy where the main characters come from the modern real world into some fantastic setting - which is fine - but it was a bunch of kids! No one wanted to play kids in D&D! Plus at least half of them were morons!
Yes the characters are pretty terrible. The "barbarian" is the smallest kid and he ends up with a baby unicorn sidekick? The wizard is stupid. The cavalier has a ... shield? It implies he might be the protector of the party but he's insulting and cowardly? The ranger and the girls at least were taking an active role in things and not actively offensive. Then the dungeon master is an actual person in the world? What?
This leads into the single biggest problem my friends and I had with the show: It was nothing like a game of D&D. If you were going to call a show "Dungeons and Dragons" in 1983 we wanted to see something that looked like what you did when you were playing Dungeons and Dragons - not the players but the characters! Instead we got this sanitized weird thing that had trappings from D&D - mainly the monsters - but it was otherwise nothing like the thing it was named after. It was almost insulting as, well, this is what people are going to think D&D is like? Even then we got that you're trying to get more people interested in the game but the stuff that is happening on screen is nothing like what's going to happen in a new D&D campaign, or almost any D&D campaign really. It had the name but that's about all that it had.
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| One of the bigger fantasies in the show was that a company, say, Six Flags, would have operated a ride called "Dungeons & Dragons" in America in 1983 |
At the time I didn't know anyone who played D&D who thought it was cool or who really liked it. I know it has somehow turned into this nostalgia totem member-berry for D&D but honestly most of the people I knew back then who should have been at least interested in the show hated it. We were already dealing with the Satanic Panic BS and the highest profile D&D media thing was THIS? It wasn't helping. Now I don't mind tagging it every once in a while like the car commercial a few years ago or even dropping them into the background of a D&D movie*. I feel like its current level of popularity is misleading and mostly driven by people who were either a) not around back then or b)never played the game much or c) both. No one talked about it at cons at the time, no one talked about it at the hobby shops I frequented, and no one was talking about it at school on Monday morning. It was never that popular among D&D players when it was on the air.
For the sake of comparison with other contemporary cartoon shows Thundarr the Barbarian was a better example of what a D&D game would look like than the D&D cartoon? Might be D&D, might be better framed as Gamma World, but it was very RPG-ish. Hell, Scooby-Doo was a better example of an RPG-ish type cartoon! Episodic approach, traveling party of different character types, premise/investigation/conclusion structure ... yeah you could run a Call of Cthulu type campaign that looked a lot like that.
At one point years later I fell for it too. It had been years since I had seen it when the DVD set came out so I bought it and watched every episode and it just confirmed that it was awful. Back on the shelf.
A few years after that I got it out and started to show it to the kids and ... they thought it was weak too. I probably still have it around here somewhere but the odds I will show it to the grandkids are slim.
So to conclude: the D&D cartoon was a terrible representation of what D&D was (and is) about. It carries some level of nostalgia now for some reason and I believe a lot of that is being propped up by people who want to hang around "D&D" as a hobby and scene without actually playing the game themselves and this is one of the longer term cultural touchpoints they can reference and buy action figures from**. That doesn't make it important, or significant, or good. If you came across it as a kid and have fond memories of it hey that's cool. If you found it as an adult and have fond memories of it, well, I guess we can agree to disagree. For me, I have nothing really positive to say about it and hope it recedes into the mists of history.
* Oh look it's next week's topic!
** The fact that in 1983-84-85 they never made action figures for this show should tell you how much of a non-factor this thing was. It took 20-30 years of nostalgia and specialized nostalgia toy making companies to make anything from this show and that should tell us something too.
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