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Googling for animated orca hybrid suggests TigerSharks
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It wasn't that. Although the description makes it sound like something superheroic I think it was a little more earnest than that. There was definitely a strong ecological vibe to the whole thing, and I'm fairly certain it was set on Earth.
Edited by RetrogradeRenegade
The only thing I can think of is Street Sharks, but I know that isn't it since the orca man was a bad guy in that one.
Oh, after a lot of trawling I managed to find it myself. It was called Prince Of Atlantis, only had 20 episodes made and was only shown in Europe. And all the tapes were subsequently lost so you can't even find the intro on Youtube. It is apparently lost forever.
Oh, good. I was beginning to worry that my memory had somehow failed me, because there seriously wasn't a cartoon in the 90s that I didn't watch.
I think this should be a simple one. It was a cartoon, one of the ecologically-aware ones about some kind of ocean research facility. The main character was a remarkably ripped scientist who drowned in the first episode and was turned into an orca-human hybrid thing so he could breathe underwater by a rather annoying underwater merman child, who looked just like a sea monkey. I recall he would turn into the orca thing whenever he came into contact with water, whether he wanted to or not, and there were probably some evil polluting corporate types as well.
Edited by RetrogradeRenegade