And You Thought It Would Fail / Western Animation

• Adventure Time's pilot was created for a shorts program meant to air on Nickelodeon. The pilot was uploaded online before the program premiered and received positive attention, making Frederator founder Fred Seibert determined to get an Adventure Time series on the air. However, Nickelodeon repeatedly rejected Adventure Time for being too random and demanded numerous changes for them to even consider greenlighting it. Frederator ultimately ended its first-look agreement with Nickelodeon and pitched Adventure Time to Cartoon Network, who immediately ordered two seasons. Fast-forward a few years and Adventure Time is a Cash-Cow Franchise credited not only as being the show to rescue the channel from its Network Decay, but also as the genesis for more creative and serialized storytelling in television Western Animation as a whole, winning countless awards. This might be the reason why Nick chose to greenlight shows with "random" elements like Breadwinners.
• Arcane: With the controversy surrounding League's lackluster Sentinels of Light event and Hollywood's general aversion to video game adaptations, there were doubts from both fans and non-fans alike that Arcane would be able to succeed. However, since the premiere of Act 1, both League fans and non-fans agree that Riot knocked it out of the park, with some even calling it Riot Games' magnum opus. After the release of Act 1, Arcane sat comfortably at the No. 1 TV show spot in 38 countries, according to Flix Patrol's rankings.
• Many initially despised Batman Beyond for its premise alone (a future-Batman who wasn't Bruce Wayne or any of the Robins, but in fact a Canon Foreigner who was in high school), and even more the notion that it was set in the continuity of Batman: The Animated Series (with many seeing TNBA as a weak follow-up and wanting a true sequel series). Instead, it became far and away the most successful legacy adaptation for DC, embraced by audiences of both the classic and new Batman, and seen to sit side-by-side with Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns as a "future Batman" story with Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker in particular considered not only one of the best DCAU films (if not the best) but one of the greatest Batman and Joker stories in general, with many parts of it being adapted again in the Batman: Arkham Series. Terry McGinnis also came to be embraced as a worthy successor to Batman in the mode of Wally West and Kyle Rayner.
  • Furthermore, many Batman fans are dreaming a live-action adaptation, with Michael Keaton as the elder Bruce Wayne.
• Beast Wars made so many changes to the Transformers formula, and was expected to fail so hard, that the rallying cry of "TRUKK NOT MUNKY" is burned into all Transfans' minds. Turns out, the quality of the show probably saved the franchise from dying out and became the standard for what all future western-made Transformers would be based on.
• Bojack Horseman was initially seen as yet another dime-a-dozen lewd, crude and cynical animated comedy for adults. Coupled with the mediocre to outright bad reviews the first season got and it's a surprise that the show became one of the best reviewed of the 2010's. The initial reviews for the first season only covered the initial six episodes, meaning the main dramatic climax (and by proxy, the Signature Scene of the show in "The Telescope") weren't shown off to the reviewers.
  Raphael Bob-Waksberg: Funnily enough, we only sent the first six episodes to critics. Which, looking back, might have been a mistake. (laughs)
• Carmen Sandiego: When the first trailer premiered, it was praised for its appealing art style but otherwise expected to be no more special than any other reboot that was capitalizing on both millennial nostalgia and "wokeness" by turning a Villain Protagonist from the '90s into a hero. Thanks to positive word of mouth about its gripping plot and excellent characterization once it premiered, it quickly became one of Netflix's most popular animated shows and is largely seen as one of the best reboots ever.
• An animated series based on the Castlevania games seemed like it would be too niche to attract a sizable audience, if not suffer the usual reputation of game adaptations, nevermind that the idea had been shopped around and trapped in Development Hell for a decade, and during the production, it was widely known that the company behind the series fell from grace amongst gamers due to multiple controversies and while the fall from grace are mostly from the West, the show was more geared for Western audience. To nearly everyone's surprise, the show turned about to be a notable success with that was faithful to the source material while adding its own twists, featuring violence and dark themes that not only wasn't watered down from the games but also went further than any game had previously. The only major complaint was its short length, confirmed as a pilot for a longer story. Thankfully, its strong reception ensured it a second season a day after it went up, with it later confirmed that said season would be twice as long as the first one, answering the major complaint. And the success resulted two more seasons, with the fourth managing to be a Grand Finale for the current arc and there's a new season with new cast (owing to the Generational Saga nature of the original game timeline) on the work.
• A Charlie Brown Christmas was considered almost radioactive by CBS. To them, an animated special with actual children doing the voices, a jazz soundtrack, no laugh track, and a Bible recitation seemed a ludicrous recipe for TV disaster. Instead, it became the greatest Christmas Special of them all.
• Brazilian voice actress Monica Rossi said she hated working on the dub of Dungeons & Dragons, and would've never guess that show would become very popular in the country, and that she'd never guess that decades later she'd be asked about her work as Diana.
• The night The Flintstones premiered it received mixed reviews, with Variety calling it "a pen-and-ink disaster" in a particularly scathing article. The series went on to be a smashing success, lasting six seasons on prime-time television and becoming the first animated programme to be nominated for an Emmy. Nowadays, it is considered a classic.
• Lou Scheimer recounted through interviews that the major networks passed on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983), skeptical of it being a success. When CBS, NBC, and ABC turned it down, he decided to have it air in the first-run syndication through various independent TV networks across the USA — a move unheard of at the time. When the show turned out to be a smash hit, Scheimer recalled that the major networks became angry and wouldn't speak to him.
• When Kamp Koral was announced, the reception was rather negative due to the perception that Stephen Hillenburg didn't want a Spinoff Babies series to happen. According to Paul Tibbitt here, Hillenburg said to him, "You know, one of these days, they’re going to want to make SpongeBob Babies. That's when I'm out of here." When the sneak peek was released, many people criticized the animation for being too outdated and ugly. However, when it was released, the show garnered high ratings and was greenlit for a second season.
• Eddie Selzer, the second producer for Looney Tunes, was notorious for this, to the point that the animators typically worked off the assumption he was never right about anything and did the opposite of what he suggested. He claimed that a certain romantic French skunk wasn't funny, only to accept the Oscar for the Pepé Le Pew short, For Scent-imental Reasons. He claimed that bullfights weren't funny either, causing Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese to create what ended up becoming one of Bugs Bunny's more memorable cartoons, Bully for Bugs. He also felt that the Tasmanian Devil was too obnoxious of a character and ordered no more cartoons made featuring him. It wasn't until studio boss Jack Warner asked him to make more that he complied.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic had a lot stacked against it. To start, it was the next incarnation of a franchise that was not only viewed as the embodiment of the kind of saccharine garbage aimed at little girls that was ripe for all kinds of mockery, but a franchise that had undergone a steep slide in quality since its inception. What's more, this was to be a flagship show on the fledgling network The Hub, a channel co-owned by the toy company Hasbro. As a result, animation fans and TV critics (especially fans of the Craig McCracken-Genndy Tartakovsky group) thought it would be nothing more than a half-hour toy commercial, with some even calling it the herald of the end of the "creator-driven" era of TV animation and accusing its creator Lauren Faust of selling out and having no artistic integrity. Faust herself feared the show would flop and kill her career. Despite this vitriol, or perhaps because of it, the show was a hit with not only its target audience, but also a large Periphery Demographic nobody expected that broke it out of the Girl-Show Ghetto, boosting a dying toy franchise back into popularity and allowing The Hub (now known as Discovery Family) to be seen as a real contender to Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. Once everything was said and done, Friendship Is Magic got nine seasons, a spin-off series, books, and a theatrically released movie over the course of ten years and inspired a comic and manga.
  • Ironically, one of the key factors in the show's popularity was one particular such complaint. The sensationalist nature of the article "The End of the Creator-Driven Era in TV Animation," which infamously claimed, "Watching names like Rob Renzetti and Lauren Faust pop up in the credits of a toy-based animated series like My Little Pony is an admission of defeat for the entire movement, a white flag-waving moment for the TV animation industry" (the possibility that the show might actually be good apparently having never crossed the author's mind), attracted the attention of 4chan's /co/ board. Many who would never have otherwise watched a show aimed at young girls were driven by their subsequent curiosity to do just that, and the discovery that the show not only wasn't bad but was, in fact, excellent, led to its spread across the board, the rest of 4chan, and soon the entire internet.
• The Powerpuff Girls: The test screening for the first pilot was an absolute disaster, with children complaining about the unusual character designs and one even going as far as to say that creator Craig McCracken should be fired. Craig went to work redesigning the characters with more traditional features, but then-president of Cartoon Network and future [adult swim] founder Mike Lazzo reassured him that a negative reaction was better than a lukewarm reaction and that they shouldn't change a thing. The kid that called for his termination would later serve as the inspiration for the show's bully Mitch Mitchelson.
• A Christmas television special using stop-motion puppets was a strange concept on the part of NBC and Rankin Bass, the studio they hired to make Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Instead of being completely ignored, however, Rudolph proved to be a huge hit and a staple of the holiday season.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, a Continuity Reboot of the 80s cartoon show She-Ra: Princess of Power, went through a similar trial. Before it first came out, many weren't thrilled about this series due to the original's origins as a spin-off of He-Man while others found the new show's aesthetic more childish than the original series, but after the first set of episodes were released, it rapidly found an audience that appreciated the more serialized storytelling and emphasis on characterization compared to the original along with a more mature tone, with many calling this new series better than the original.
• The School Library Journal tore apart the original Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat book, saying it fell short of "the standards set by innovative artists working within the Chinese tradition" (whilst seemingly forgetting that the book's author, Amy Tan, is of Chinese descent), called the titular cat "strictly a commercial product" and then concluded it by saying the book was "hardly worth considering." We presume the critic who wrote the review had a heart attack when they found out it had been turned into a PBS Kids series.
• The Simpsons:
  • When Matt Groening was invited to pitch a series of animated shorts for The Tracey Ullman Show, he got cold feet and made up a pitch on the spot about a sitcom family with the names of his parents and siblings rather than take a chance on allowing his Life in Hell characters to be tied to a failure. When he first met up with the animators to work on the first short for the The Tracey Ullman Show, they reckoned that it would take around two weeks to complete... and that they would get about three weeks of work out of the entire project before it was shelved. Then...
  • Very few people expected The Simpsons to make a successful transition from skits on The Tracey Ullman Show to half-hour show of its own. Even Matt Groening was having doubts on its first season and was threatening to have it canceled since he was having issues with the animation. Despite that, The Simpsons remains the longest-running sitcom in America, a universal favorite (it's been dubbed and subtitled in a lot of languages), a Cash-Cow Franchise, and a critical favorite, both adored by the general public and critics.
• South Park started out miserably when Trey Parker and Matt Stone's tiny cult hit joke-animated short "The Spirit Of Christmas" got picked up for a pilot. The first episode "Cartman Gets An Anal Probe" was completed and submitted. It was pounded into the ground by test audiences who were baffled by the (intentionally) terrible animation, the juxtaposition of cute characters spewing vulgarities in steady streams (with the highlight being Kyle's heavily censored tirade towards the end), and the overall bizarre nature of the plot. It was deemed a complete and utter failure and Comedy Central was very unconvinced that South Park had any future, but still encouraged Matt & Trey to create a few more episodes such as "Weight Gain 4000". These too did not impress the network, and many people thought the show was directionless. With much hesitancy and uncertainty, they aired the shows. While mainstream critics even were very slow to warm up to the show, they eventually did, and it became a more impressive hit than Comedy Central expected. However, major problems and waning fan interest after only Season 2 (a season Matt & Trey have gone on to say was their absolute worst season) they figured that South Park was all but finished. During Season 3, they produced South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, while being faced with immense Executive Meddling from both Paramount and the MPAA, they figured the movie would flop miserably and would be their triumphant last hurrah. Instead, it was critically acclaimed and a box office success and brought more attention to the show. South Park's renewed contracts with Comedy Central took the series up to an unprecedented twenty-six complete seasons (and counting!).
• In the late '90s, a cartoonist went to Nickelodeon executives with a cartoon idea. The executives thought it was an absurd idea and thought it would never become popular. After having the pilot episode pitched to them though, the executives stepped out of the room because they were exhausted from laughing. They picked it up and it became extremely popular during its second and third seasons, spawning tons of merchandise and displacing Rugrats as the channel's most successful property. What was this cartoon? SpongeBob SquarePants.
• At one point during the development of VeggieTales, Phil Vischer sent the show's test footage to Nickelodeon after hearing they were searching for original animated shows for the fledgling network. The rejection letter apparently said Nickelodeon was not interested in producing computer-animated shows. It's likely the success of VeggieTales led to Nick greenlighting The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius.
• Before Unikitty! aired, many detractors expressed worry, especially considering it was advertised as being from people who worked on Teen Titans Go! (in reality, just the same animation development team, though Aaron Horvath is a staff member), but it has proven to be good to many people and profitable for the network.
• Ringo Starr routinely mentioned in interviews that he was skeptical about narrating Thomas & Friends at first, less because the concept seemed bad (The Railway Series books the show was based on had been a hit for decades) but more because he felt at the time children were laser focused on sci-fi action adventure like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe compared to Thomas' storybook world. He nevertheless relented and the show became a global hit.