Archive Panic / Western Animation

• The Felix the Cat series has been around since 1919, so there's a lot of ground to cover if you want to experience the whole series. For animation, you have the original silent theatrical cartoons and the three Van Beuren era shorts (while many of the silent shorts are lost, quite a few survive and it can take a while to sit through the surviving ones), the 126 made-for-TV cartoons by Joe Oriolo (which run six to seven minutes each), a theatrical movie, the mid 90's TV revival cartoon series The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat (which lasted 21 episodes, with three shorts in all but a couple of them), the toddler aimed spinoff Baby Felix and Friends (which ran for 65 five minute episodes), and a 2004 direct to video Christmas special Felix the Cat Saves Christmas. The comics are where one will really start running into trouble—the Felix comics started in 1923, with the newspaper comics and comic books running a solid 40 year run up to the 1960's. And then you have the 80's newspaper comic crossover with Betty Boop to look out for (which has never been reprinted), and a short lived early 90's comic book revival. After that, you have a history book and some comic compilations, three video game tie-ins, the very obscure live action TV series Felix the Cat Live, and a monstrous amount of toys and merchandise to wrap it all up. Good luck!
• Arthur ran for 25 seasons, including 253 half-hours. That adds up to four days, and that's not counting the seven hour-long specials and the direct to DVD movie. The show started in 1996 with 30 episodes for season 1. The second season has 20 episodes, and the third season has 15 to bring the show up to the syndication-mandated 65 episodes. From season 4 in 1999 to season 19 in 2015, seasons have had only 10 episodes, and since season 20 in 2016, seasons had 7 episodes, somewhat softening the blow. As for the books, well, assuming your library has every single Arthur and D.W. book ever written, you'll need to camp there for a few weeks.
• The DC Animated Universe, in its entirety, runs at about six full days. Even if you cut out the easier-to-ignore spinoffs, Static Shock and The Zeta Project, you're still left with four days.
• The Simpsons:
  • The series has run for at least 34 seasons, including over 48 shorts, 684 episodes and counting, one film, and the crossover episode with Family Guy where that show's Griffin family ends up in Springfield and stays with the Simpsons. That makes over 173 hours, or one solid week without sleep just to watch them all. If you watched it for 5 hours a day, it would only take you a month to see every episode. All that Negative Continuity the show was critically derided for early on? A Godsend. Although there are subtle in-jokes for viewers that have watched for 25+ seasons, you do not need to Archive Binge in order to enjoy the show from any starting point. Seth MacFarlane tried to stop it with his Flintstones remake, but that fell through after FOX announced that The Simpsons was going to be renewed for two more seasons and MacFarlane discovered that there would be royalty issues with his proposed project.
  • At one point, FOX mulled over making a Simpsons channel, which would air nothing but this show.
  • FXX aired a Simpsons marathon in the US in 2014, starting at the third week of August. [1]. It ran for 11 days nonstop and featured all 552 episodes, plus the movie. Be glad that they left out the original Tracy Ullman Show shorts. And oh, it ended just a few days before the next season premieres on FOX. Hope you had fun staying up 11 days straight and (if you had to work) wasting 11 days of annual leave for this marathon!
  • In 2016, FXX did a similar marathon starting at Thanksgiving. This time, however, it left out the movie and only showed the first 600 episodes, which excludes "Trust But Clarify", "There Will Be Buds", "Havana Wild Weekend", "Dad Behavior", and "The Last Traction Hero". The first four aired before the marathon, while "The Last Traction Hero" aired on FOX during the marathon.
  • Many fans avert this by applying Negative Continuity to every episode following the "classic" run, with the cutoff occurring at seasons 9–11 depending on who you ask. Stopping at Season 11 finale "Behind the Laughter" (a commonly-cited candidate for the "real" Grand Finale) leaves the show generous but manageable at a little under 250 episodes.
  • And the video games. The Other Wiki says that the first two games came out on the arcade and NES platform respectively in 1991. A quick count reveals that there are at least 26 games out there. If you're going for the pinball games, be sure to set aside at least US$6000 and space where you live for two full-size machines. And while we're at the topic of other media, well, don't get us started on the comics and books as well- those crosses path with Crack is Cheaper on the grounds that you're dealing with monthly publications in print since 1993 (over two decades ago) where the comics are concerned, and the books have been rolling off presses since 1990.
• South Park has two pilot shorts, 307 episodes, two hour-long specials, and one feature film, running for 20+ years and not stopping anytime soon. There's also several video games, but the two RPGs are canon to the show and thus also considered necessary context for many fans.
• SpongeBob SquarePants has been going since 1999, with over 500 episodes of varying length and quality, three movies, 13 video games, 42 shorts, a Broadway musical, and no end in sight (even after the death of show creator, Steve Hillenburg).
• For the things that spun-off from the Disney and Pixar movies: there were 28 sequels made to the films that aren't part of the canon, not counting the Winnie the Pooh and Disney Fairies movies. There were also 13 spin-off series, including TaleSpin and Stitch!, totaling 775 episodes. As big as the canon is, if you really want to be through, you'll be at it for awhile longer.
• Another just slightly less daunting challenge is to marathon all of the original Disney theatrical cartoons. The original lineup combined amounts to 469 shorts total ^note  This does not include shorts initially released as part of a bigger feature, such as the shorts in The Reluctant Dragon, Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros and the '40s Disney package features that are part of the animated canon — which would add about 30 more shorts and that number shoots up to 562 when you include all of the silent Disney films (the Newman Laugh-O-Grams, the Alice Comedies and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit)^note  although only around 50 of the 93 silent Disney films survive, are available or are known to exist—to watch all of them in chronological order would take around 66 hours and 30 minutes, or two and 3/4 days without sleep. And that's not counting post-Golden Age shorts, tv shows and spinoffs, and feature animation appearances of the characters.
• The Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts, which altogether amount to over 1000 short subjects (that's the ones from 1929's "Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid" pilot to 1969's "Injun Trouble" starring Cool Cat). Even just watching all the shorts released on DVD (or streamed on HBO Max) so far will take you around 3685 minutes, or two and a half days of viewing. Check out the filmography page to see for yourself.
• Whereas a series like Woody Woodpecker has a much more manageable 198 shorts total. But that's just counting one series and not all of Walter Lantz's output, which amounts to around 617 short cartoons. Mickey and Bugs have starred in about the same number of shorts as Woody.
• The Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series ran for 192 shorts, and even counting the shorts that are still missing, there's still many of them that exist in some form, and it would take a while to watch them all.
• Fleischer Studios:
  • Overall, the company made 629 cartoon shorts and two animated features, from 1918 up to their demise in 1942. Even discounting all the missing Out of the Inkwell shorts and other misc. silent films they made (of around 112 are known to exist), almost every other cartoon short they've made still exists in some form, and they made quite a few series.
  • Popeye ran for a massive 232 theatrical shorts (109 of which were made by Fleischer Studios, the rest by its successor, Famous Studios), and that number gets even higher when you count all of the made-for-tv cartoons he starred in.
  • The Betty Boop filmography isn't much of a breeze either; she made 20 appearances in the Talkartoons series before it morphed into her own series, which ran for 90 cartoons, and she also made appearances in 17 of the original Screen Songs shorts, and add two made-for-tv specials and a newspaper comic to all that.
• The Famous Studios filmography isn't anything to snuff at either; 577 theatrical cartoons total, and 177 made-for-tv cartoons as well.
• Terry Toons made some of the most prolific output of all the Golden Age studios. To start, they made 489 sound theatrical cartoons, which doesn't seem so insurmountable on its own—but then add all 673 of their made-for-tv cartoons, and that number balloons to something that puts even the Looney Tunes filmography to shame—1,162 shorts.
• The Columbia Cartoons library is pretty big, too. There are 369 shorts from the Charles Mintz era alone, 104 theatrical shorts from the UPA era, and then five made for tv cartoon series, two tv specials and two animated features, and a lot of animated commercials.
• The Van Beuren Studios library consists of 189 sound cartoons, and 347 silent cartoons (although it's not known how many of the latter still exist).
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The 1987 series? 193 episodes. The 2003 series? 156 episodes. Plus the Turtles Forever movie, which crosses them over. The 2012 series finished its run at 124 episodes with one hour-long spin-off special. Another TMNT series from Nickelodeon, Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ran 39 episodes and will receive a movie on Netflix. And that's only the western animated series. There's also the live action Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation, the seven theatrical movies, the Japan-exclusive Legend of the Supermutants anime, the original comics, the comics based off the cartoons, and the video games.
• The Fairly OddParents!, being the third-longest-running Nicktoon, has 161 half-hour episodes, twelve movies, and eight video games.
• Rugrats lasted nine seasons with 172 episodes, making it the longest running Nicktoon until SpongeBob SquarePants took the throne. Add in the three movies, two direct-to-DVD specials, and two spin offs with 59 more episodes total, and it makes for quite a marathon.
• Scooby-Doo has had, since 1969, sixteen series (nearly 400 episodes), two theatrical live-action movies, ten video games, and over thirty television specials and direct to video features. To put simply, since it debuted, there has not been more than a three year gap between any new material, whether a series or a direct-to-video movie.
• Family Guy hit this by about 2011, at which point it had reached its 150th episode. Despite a comment that year from MacFarlane about ending the series, it's still in production, already reaching 400 episodes as of January 2023.
• MacFarlane's second show, American Dad! entered this territory in 2013, at which point it had reached its 150th episode. When the FOX network chose not to pick it up for the 2014-15 season, the show moved to TBS, and it has been renewed for additional seasons, already reaching 300 episodes as of December 2020.
• Hasbro's adaptations of their toylines have lead into panic for three of their biggest franchises:
  • Transformers has 25 cartoons totaling over 1060 episodes, over 900 comic book issues, 7 live-action movies, 19 video games, and 30 novels.
  • G.I. Joe is more manageable: 6 series with 227 episodes, 10 comic series totaling 500 issues, one animated movie, 2 live action movies, and 8 games.
  • My Little Pony: G1 had 2 series at 91 episodes, two specials, a movie, and 2 comics with 274 issues. G2 and G3 had numerous comics and animations, plus 3 video games. G4, being the longest-running of the previous three, has suffered this issue more than any previous generation. It includes, but is not limited to a series with 221 episodes, over 10 comic series totalling to 196 issues, a crossover comic book series with Transformers, a theatrical film, 8 shorts, 4 gaming apps, a card game, 12 chapter books, and 2 supplemental books. And that's not even counting the two spin-off's.
• Phineas and Ferb lasted a respectable 140 episodes (6 of which were an hour long), a TV movie, and a streaming movie five years after the end of its run. The creators' next show, Milo Murphy's Law, took place in the same universe and had appearances of many of its characters, with one eventually being a regular, though it only lasted 40 episodes.
• Because it became a Long Runner, Peppa Pig will need more than one barn to put everything inside.
• As we're gonna need lots and lots of Maps to put everything inside more than ten storages, Dora the Explorer suffered this.
• PAW Patrol, being one of Nick Jr.'s biggest Cash Cow Franchises, has over 190 episodes, 12 shorts, 3 feature-length specials, two theatrical movies, five video games, two stage shows, with one being viewable on Paramount+, and a spin-off show starring Rubble. So, if you did the math, there's currently over 2 days worth of canine rescues.
• The animated continuation of Mr. Bean suffered this.
• The Ben 10 franchise, which has been going since 2005. The original series? 52 half-hour episodes. Alien Force? 46 half-hours. Ultimate Alien? 52 half-hours. Omniverse? 80 half-hours. The 2016 reboot? 178 quarter-hour episodes with a total of 408 episodes across 23 seasons. Toss in three movies, two crossovers, and several shorts, and you have over five straight days of alien transformation action to get through.
• Regular Show aired 261 episodes in eight seasons from 2010 to 2017, as well as 15 shorts, the pilot and the Made-for-TV Movie, Regular Show: The Movie.
• Adventure Time aired 283 episodes from 2010 to 2018, as well as 10 shorts, the non-canon pilot, and the four direct-to-streaming Distant Lands specials. The more YA oriented Fiona and Cake adds another ten episodes, with a second season in the works.
• Being running since 2011, The Amazing World of Gumball ended with 240 episodes in six seasons. It also has the early pilot reel (the one that shows Ben Bocquelet's original idea of the show being about rejected cartoon characters going to a remedial school), the Waiting for Gumball mini-series (which is really just a remixed clip show), and a finale movie that's currently in production.
• Peanuts had more animated specials than any franchise in history, as the total number is over 50. They're usually about a half hour long.
• King of the Hill aired 255 episodes in 13 seasons on FOX from 1997 to 2009, with four episodes from the final season premiering in syndication in May 2010. This means that, in total, the series has 259 episodes.
• Thomas & Friends has been running since 1984, with a modern series beginning in the early 2000's. It has over 570 episodes as of 2020, plus a theatrical film and numerous feature-length specials.
• While it's nowhere as extreme as certain other examples, WordGirl has 130 episodes that are all about 26 minutes long, meaning it would take you over two days to watch the entire show in one go with no breaks. It'll take longer if you include the 30 original shorts that aired during Maya & Miguel (though thankfully, with them being shorts, they're a breeze to binge-watch) and the comic books.
• Teen Titans Go! has 289 episodes and one theatrical film as of August 2020.
• Bob's Burgers has been running since 2011, reached its 200th episode in November 2020, and a theatrical release initially scheduled for 2020, but because of the coronavirus pandemic, it was put on hold to 2022.
• Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood has 124 half-hour episodes as of June 2022, along with two movies. To watch all of the episodes without a break, it would take two and a half days to get through.
• Pocoyo: The original show has 184 episodes and 2 movies^note Pocoyo & The Space Circus and Pocoyo's Big Party, on top of there being at least two spin-offs^note Let's Go Pocoyo! and Pocoyo Planet.
• The German series Sandmannchen holds the record for most episodes of any television series, live-action or animated - 22,000+ and still going.
• Blaze and the Monster Machines has 128 episodes as of February 2023, and new episodes are still in production. To watch every single episode of this show, it would take 49 hours with no breaks.
• Bubble Guppies ended with 123 episodes. Watching every single episode without stopping for breaks would take almost 48 hours, which is two entire days.
• Between the original Animaniacs series, its reboot and its spinoffs Pinky and the Brain and Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain, there are 213 episodes, meaning there's nearly 81 hours of cartoon antics to catch up on. And that's not counting the movie, the bonus features on the DVD releases, the comics or the live touring show where the cast sings songs from the series.
• Fireman Sam originally ended in 1994 with a humble 33 episodes, eight per season plus the Christmas Episode. However, when the series was revived in 2005, and later rebooted as an All-CGI Cartoon in 2008, it turned out to be a smash hit, running to the present day with over 300+ episodes across 15 seasons, with a 16th reportedly in production. Watching the TV series in its entirety would take about 58.5 hours, or two days and 10.5 hours. Of course, that isn't including the five hour-long movies, the books, or any of the live stage shows...by the end, you'll know the fire safety handbook by heart!
• VeggieTales has 50 direct-to-video episodes, four spin-off series and two movies. Between all this, it would take a person nearly three and a half days to finish the franchise. And that's not counting the books or podcast based on the series.

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