The past couple of years, HBO Max has gradually removed several classic Cartoon Network series. For fans of shows like Powerpuff Girls, Scooby-Doo, and Ben 10, it’s been a rough time. But here’s some good news for you: those and more are jumping over to Tubi.
Pepsiman, who runs the curation YouTube Broken Saw, first clocked that several of the channel’s shows have recently gotten Tubi pages. Eventually, the streamer went and revealed the full list of shows it’s adding, cheekily saying it’ll enter its “cartoon era” on March 1. The first wave of shows on that date include the aforementioned Ben and Powerpuff, Justice League, Codename: Kids Next Door, and Ed, Edd, & Eddy—and you can see the full list of what’s coming here.
kicking off with these on march 1:
Animaniacs Powerpuff Girls Teen Titans The Batman Ben 10 (2005) Pinky and the Brain Justice League Batman: The Brave and the Bold Dexter’s Laboratory Ed, Edd ‘n Eddy Courage The Cowardly Dog Taz-Mania Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends…
This is exciting for a few reasons, the first being that it’s just good these shows exist somewhere. While some have gotten bumped to streamers like Prime Video, others haven’t been afforded the same opportunity. (At least, legally.) It’s also cool that several B and C-listers like Evil Con Carne and Loonatics Unleashed(!!) are getting some love. I haven’t thought about Mucha Lucha! in years, and its eventual arrival makes me want to.
Another reason it’s good? Tubi’s been a pretty good place for older cartoons to hang out; Looney Tunes did extremely well over there months after the transition, to the point that the IP has been given further life thanks to a recent TCM deal. So while it sucks that Warner Bros. is still going through some nonsense, it’s at least good that Cartoon Network and its history lives on.
Update: Saturday, February 14 @ 4:37 PT ET: This story has been edited to clarify the initial discovery of this information came from Pepsiman from Broken Saw.
For people who’ve made action-focused western animation a key part of their life, 2005 is an important year. It got off to a great start with Avatar: The Last Airbender, which helped get the non-converted into anime and serialized storytelling that felt mature to anyone in its intended target audience back in the day. At the end of that same year, the demographic got Ben 10, a show equally as important as Avatar but in its own way.
The debut project of animation studio Man of Action and first released December 27, 2005, the Cartoon Network series follows a 10-year-old kid named Ben Tennyson who finds an alien watch called the Omnitrix, which lets him morph into one of 10 aliens for 10 minutes at a time. With Ben, his cousin Gwen, and their Grandpa Max spending their summer vacation traveling the country, each episode had Ben use a handful of aliens to fight villains like monster clowns, secret orders, and other aliens looking to take the Omnitrix for themselves.
On its face, it’s a pretty simple idea for a kids’ show, but execution-wise, it was basically perfection. Man of Action’s founding team was comprised of American comic book writers and artists like Joe Casey and Duncan Rouleau, whose collective credits included Marvel, DC, and Image Comics. Once you know that pedigree, it’s just a matter of clocking what influences run through the show, like the Kirby Krackle or Kevin Levin being a mashup of Super-Skrull and Metamorpho. What made it work was the earnest playfulness that ran throughout, whether it was that still-catchy theme song or Ben’s aliens themselves. The way he slams that dial and transforms, who wouldn’t want to be something called XLR8 or Four Arms?
So it’s not surprising that Ben 10 became a big deal for Cartoon Network with a four-season run, three movies (one of which was live-action), and a tie-in video game. It’s also not surprising that it went on to become a franchise that’s gone on to include more films and games, toys, and three sequel series in Alien Force, Ultimate Alien—which turned 15 earlier this year—and Omniverse. For Cartoon Network, this was its Avatar: something geared toward kids but that also had the good sense to age up with its audience. With Ben, Gwen, and Kevin made into teenagers, viewers had their own Spider-Man, even before Ben’s teenage actor Yuri Lowenthal wound up becoming Spider-Man.
In fact, they had something better here: Ben was an original property and therefore its own source material. So unlike the animated adventures of Spider-Man, Batman, or other big-name heroes going on at the time, you could watch any Ben show and be constantly surprised on a week-to-week basis without having a nagging thought in the back of your mind about things being undone or interfering with things going on in other parts of the same universe. There was a lot that went on from Ben 10 Classic up to Omniverse, with continuity mostly maintained, and all of it in conversation as the shows hit about every major superhero comic trope or storytelling device when all was said and done. (A lot of that can be attributed to comic book writer Dwayne McDuffie, who co-developed and did a lot on Alien Force and Ultimate Alien up until his passing in 2011.)
That Ben 10 was such an ongoing success had the added effect of bringing more action-oriented shows to Cartoon Network’s lineup, whose output at that point consisted of short-lived originals like Megas XLR or Juniper Lee and the occasional DC series. But because of Ben, we got Generator Rexand Secret Saturdays. The former was Man of Action’s second animated series, set in its own separate universe and based off an old Image comic made by Casey, Rouleau, and Aaron Sowd. While Rex and Ben crossed over in the Heroes United special, the former didn’t have quite the same staying power as its predecessor. The same could certainly be said for Secret Saturdays, which began the same year as Alien Force and whose cast eventually appeared in Omniverse.
Neither Rex nor Saturdays was bad, and they might be worth a watch now, but their individual vibes didn’t entirely hit like what Ben had been providing for what was half a decade at that point. They also just didn’t arrive when Ben did. In 2005, superhero fever was taking over the world, and by 2008, the genre was actively making a go at becoming the dominant culture. Kids were eased into this thanks to Ben; Alien Force premiered days after the original showended, which was also weeks ahead of the first Iron Man and months before The Dark Knight.
It was (and maybe still is) an incredibly confident move on Cartoon Network’s part that led to a multimedia franchise that’s become part of its brand and allowed for Ben 10 to endure for so long. After a divisive reboot wrapped back in 2021 with its own respectable run—four seasons, a movie, two games, and specials that allowed for crossovers with both Generator Rex and its old self—Man of Action hasn’t entirely let go of its original creation. The studio’s apparently got comics in the works and will likely keep trying to get another live-action movie off the ground after the initial attempt failed, not to mention Rouleau has mentioned it could warrant an adult-oriented sequel in the vein of Samurai Jack or Fionna and Cake.
Such an idea feels antithetical to what made the original shows so successful, but what would Ben 10 be if it didn’t go out on a limb and see if that gambit worked?
If there’s one tradition I can count on every fall, it’s the annual rewatch of Over the Garden Wall. The leaves start changing color, pumpkins begin to pop up everywhere, and I start thinking about venturing into the Unknown with Wirt and Greg. Something tells me I’m not the only one. But this year is extra special — today marks the 10-year anniversary since the miniseries debuted on Cartoon Network, and there’s a new stop-motion short to celebrate it. The short, from Cartoon Network and Aardman Animations, features some of the show’s original voice actors, including Elijah Wood as Wirt, Collin Dean as Greg and Melanie Lynskey as Beatrice.
Over the Garden Wall creator Patrick McHale pitched the idea for the stop-motion special to directors Mikey Please and Dan Ojari earlier this year, Ojari told . All of the figures are hand-carved wooden puppets, and filming took place in miniature sets (including a “10-by-10 square meter forest”) that took two months to build. “The only thing that’s digital is the facial animation,” Please told FC.
The end result is really beautiful, and the perfect primer for your yearly return to the strange world of Over the Garden Wall. It’s available to watch now on and .
Just before the weekend started, the animation space lit up when someone suddenly leaked a lot of never-before-seen internal material from Disney. We won’t link to it, but included in that material is a sizable amount of stuff from the company’s TV animation slate across its Disney Channel and Disney XD networks that goes as far back as the mid-2000s. Gravity Falls, Owl House, you name it: if it’s got a sizable fanbase (and isn’t a Marvel cartoon), then it’s probably featured here in some fashion.
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Included in the leak were over 20 pilots, some of which were shows that’d been pitched, but ultimately never went anywhere. Similarly, there were also 40 show bibles—documents creators use to pitch their show, from the tone and characters to breakdowns for potential future seasons. Disney’s animated slate didn’t have quite the highs of Cartoon Network or even Nickelodeon, but what’s here may have you thinking about some shows you haven’t thought about in a while. (Case in point, they’ve got the bibles for Super Monkey Team HyperForce Go! and American Dragon: Jake Long in here, which may take you waaaaaaaay back.)
Setting aside how surprising it is that all this got leaked—and what’s more, whoever did it hasn’t stated why or who they are—what’s out there is admittedly interesting to go through. Fans of particular shows are going to get a lot out of those pilots and bibles, if only to see how these series evolved over time, particularly in terms of their art style. Even more interesting is to see what episodes these creators were pitching: in Gravity Falls’ case, most of these weren’t made, but you can see how parts of them—like Dipper getting into a golf war with Lil’ Gideon—were retooled into actual episodes.
For the creatively inclined, the show bibles are probably going to be the most worthwhile things to sift through. In reading through some of these, they’re quite extensive and can be a good guide to help you figure out how TV works, or even do a similar bible of your own for whatever you’re making. The Ducktales bible, for example, devotes multiple pages to each principle character’s interests, special skills, and core relationships with each other…along with how they’d react to a mummy.
Again, various websites and Twitters have gone through this stuff and put it out there for you to watch or read—and if you like any of these shows, or just animation in general, it’d be worth searching for. io9’s reached out to Disney for comment on the leak, and will update when a response is given.
John Krasinski and Paramount aren’t just bringing sound-seeking aliens to the theater this year. In May, the actor is directing (and writing) his first kiddie movie, the Ryan Reynolds-starring IF, which came to the Super Bowl with a new trailer on hand.
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The upcoming film, cheekily introduced here by “Krasinski” himself—definitely not Randall Park—stars Cailey Fleming as Bea, a kid who realizes that she can see imaginary friends, a trait she also shares with her neighbor (Reynolds). As he explains it, there’s a whole secret world of imaginary friends (or IFs), ranging from talking marshmallows on fire to more conventional ones, like a bear (voiced by Lou Gossett Jr.) or Steve Carrell’s big, fluffy purple guy Blue. It eventually falls to the two humans to find new children for IFs, since their original creators have all gotten older and forgotten or abandoned them.
If you watched Cartoon Network in the 2000s, this is going to be very familiar and likely remind you of Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. And like that show, this is probably going to hit hard with the younger crowd who probably haven’t seen much (or anything) focused on imaginary friends, and in quite this way. For the older crowd… who knows, movies like these live and die on the chemistry and humor. It’s got a sizable cast, which includes reliably funny people like Emily Blunt, Maya Rudolph, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Bobby Moynihan. It’s easy to imagine a movie with this premise and cast comes together fairly well, right?
We’ll know for sure when IF comes to theaters May 17.
Anime and manga publisher Viz Media just made a handful of really big anime series freely available to watch on YouTube. If you’re looking for a good entry point into some really prolific shows, this is an excellent opportunity to dive into some stone-cold classics.
The company has uploaded six of the hit shows it owns rights for to YouTube and compiled them into helpful playlists. Death Note, Hunter x Hunter, Inuyasha, Mr. Osomatsu, Naruto, and Sailor Moon are all there, most in their entirety, for your viewing pleasure. Notably, these are the Japanese versions of the shows with English subtitles, so if you’re a person who likes to watch dubbed anime, this might not be what you’re looking for. But if you like to keep it original, there’s a lot to dig into here. I’ve personally always wanted to watch Death Note after hearing about it through cultural osmosis over the years, and even though I tend to prefer dubs, this is too good an opportunity to waste.
Let’s run down each show:
Death Note
Death Note is the shortest anime on the list, with only 37 episodes across its one season. It centers around the titular Death Note, a notebook with the power to kill anyone whose name is written inside. A teenager named Light Yagami finds the book and uses it to kill people he deems immoral and unworthy of life; this string of seemingly unstoppable, random murders eventually draws the attention of L, an eccentric, brilliant detective, leading to an electrifying, supernatural game of cat-and-mouse.
Hunter x Hunter
Hunter x Hunter follows Gon Freecss, a boy attempting to follow in his absentee father’s footsteps as a Hunter, heroes who track down rare creatures, seek treasures, and hunt down other people as well. Hunter x Hunter is famous for being near universally lauded by all who watch it, turning them into proselytizing advocates who really, really think you should check it out. The show is one of the lengthier ones Viz has put up on YouTube, with 148 episodes available across its six arcs. But there are a few that are even longer. Such as…
Inuyasha
Rumiko Takahashi’s Inuyasha follows the titular half-demon as he joins a high school girl named Kagome Higurashi to recover the shards of a shattered Shikon Jewel. A huge hit on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block back in the day, the show’s seven seasons come in at 197 episodes.
Mr. Osomatsu
Mr. Osomatsu goes way back to the sixties, when Fujio Akatsuka’s comedic manga was a cultural phenomenon in Japan. This anime adaptation is much newer, dating from 2015. It’s worth noting that Mr. Osomatsuis the only show Viz has uploaded on YouTube that doesn’t include its entire run. The currently uploaded first two seasons of the animated family comedy show make up 50 out of the series’ 75-episode run.
Naruto
At 220 episodes, Narutois nearly the biggest time sink Viz has put up on YouTube. The five-season show makes up the first Part of Naruto, which follows the titular character as he attends a school to become a ninja. These 220 episodes are followed by Naruto: Shippuden, which is another 500 episodes, and another sequel show called Boruto that follows Naruto’s child. So you’re opening up Pandora’s Box if you decide to sit down and watch this one.
Sailor Moon
However, the show with the most episodes in this (initial?) wave of uploads is 1990s bishoujo phenom Sailor Moon, which comes in with a whopping 238 videos across its five seasons. It’s the classic Magical Girl anime, and follows a group of teenagers who turn into superheroes and do superhero shit. She’s the icon. She is the moment. And her show is all readily available to watch on YouTube, free of charge. (The handful of specials and later movies are not currently available, though.)
If you’re not an anime connoisseur, there’s some really great entry points here, but if you’re a real sicko and have already seen these shows, you now have a real easy way to revisit them. Speaking for myself, I’m about to cue up some Death Note. It’s time I finally checked it out.
