The Maturity of Kids' Shows

As you may have noticed, I haven’t updated in a while. There are more than a few reasons for this, but the most obvious of them is, well… it’s 2020. Which means high anxiety and low productivity, as well as an extreme lack of movies coming out. I never got out to see Tenet, and if Christopher Nolan’s big-budget psychedelia couldn’t get me into to brave the movie theatres, you can bet the likes of New Mutants didn’t either. I also didn’t really watch a lot of movies over the summer myself, mostly preferring reliable comforts. And I didn’t find myself having the time or energy to write an article on anything – nothing felt particularly pertinent.

So, in the spirit of not doing anything pertinent, I decided to write about two kids' shows that aired in the 2000s.

This article was notoriously hard to find good stills for.

See, while I haven’t watched a lot of movies, I was finally coaxed into watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. I can prominently remember the show airing smack in the middle of my childhood, merchandising and all, but I never really paid it much mind. Despite my ignorance, Avatar became something of a cultural touchstone for much of my generation. The idea of elemental bending is almost as ubiquitous of a classification tool as the Hogwarts houses. Uncle Iroh was an oft-quoted mentor for a lot of friends. And, especially coming off the heels of the latest Star Wars movies, Prince Zuko was the standout example of how to write a redemption arc. These characters were baked into my subconsciousness, even despite how divorced I was from the source material. For a lot of the people of my generation, Avatar was the pre-eminent example of how to write kid’s television – it was mature, and it was smart. But most importantly, it had heart.

Avatar ended in July 2008, and in August of the same year, The Clone Wars movie released as lead up for the show that was about to hit the airwaves. Again, I remember the promotional wind-up like nothing else. This was a big-budget Star Wars television show, utilizing entirely 3D animation. I saw that movie in theatres, and there was a surreal joy in seeing my favourite franchise brought into a new style. The show promised to be big, focused on the front lines of this massive conflict. While Avatar ran for three tight seasons, The Clone Wars was on television for five, before releasing a sixth, truncated season on Netflix. For a while, that looked to be the end, but this summer a seventh, final season released on Disney+, wrapping up a few core character arcs of the show. Despite my adoration, I watched relatively little of The Clone Wars live on television. I only had janky country television, and so wound up catching most of the show via DVD releases. The show initially had my rapt attention, but it started to wain with the introduction of the Mandalorians, who were presented dramatically different than the rest of Star Wars canon had them at that point. The final straw for me was the introduction of Darth Maul. Again, being behind the network releases, I never actually watched the episode where the enigmatic villain returned from the dead, but middle-school me decided that ‘enough was enough’ and set aside the show.

Avatar can be really pretty when it wants but its aspect ratio makes it hard to incorporate into an article like this.

Both of these were shows that I, at one point or another, had distanced myself from. I eventually came back to watch the rest of The Clone Wars when it had been announced the show was leaving Netflix. Or, that, is, I pulled up a recommended watch list, and hit up the major arcs that everyone had celebrated. And, to my surprise, it was alright. The Maul stuff was actually good, and arcs like Umbara and Ashoka’s Season 5 finale were genuinely compelling. When season 7 launched, I was generally impressed – though despite how much I’ve grown apart from the old Legacy content, the current canon explanation for Order 66 is still stupid as hell. And Avatar? Incredible. Exactly as good as everyone has always said it is. Possibly even better. Zuko’s arc was everything that was promised, but Avatar also offered impressive subtle growth in characters like Katara and Sokka, and well-developed conversations about broken families and the impact war has on a person. But as I reflect on these two shows, one thing nags at me with an ever-present constancy.

I think The Clone Wars is just fine. There’s a lot it does alright, and there’s a lot it drops the ball on. Despite its long runtime, the first few seasons of the show simply aren’t that good, it doesn’t really pick up until three or four seasons in. Even then, it is still plagued with filler until the bitter end, featuring goofy arcs about silly droids who save the world. But a lot of the criticism against these flaws is met with the response, “well, it’s a show meant for kids. You can’t expect that much.” But paired against Avatar, which aired mere years earlier, that excuse falls apart for me. If anything, Avatar’s demographic is aimed more to younger audiences, and yet reaches a much more consistent level of maturity and sophistication. The Clone Wars feels like a war show that is simplified for kids; Avatar feels like a typical hero’s journey used as an avenue to tackle more hefty subjects.

Let’s break this down.

All of these characters are great but especially Boomerang.

Avatar: The Last Airbender opens with Katara and Sokka, two teenagers from the Southern Water Tribe who find a kid named Aang who has been trapped in the ice for one hundred years. He’s the promised Avatar, the most recent of a line of figures who can control all four elements, and save the world from the nationalistic Fire Nation. But… he’s also just a kid. These are all just kids, and they have the fate of the world hanging over them. Also, they’re being hunted by Zuko, Prince of the Fire Lord, who is on what is essentially a suicide mission to track down the lost Avatar in order to ‘regain honour’ and return to his father. He, again, is only a teenager, and while he’s introduced as an antagonist, it’s clear that he’s dealing with the weight of familial expectations and does not have a lot of agency of his own. I mention all of this, because Avatar rides a really fascinating line balancing its tone and its content.

The third episode of the show, “The Southern Air Temple,” shows really well exactly what I’m talking about. It starts as Katara, Sokka, and Aang are going through their typical shenanigans. Aang is excited to get back to his old hometown, but Katara and Sokka are nervous. When they get there the place is clearly abandoned, but Aang keeps up hope and shows his friends around the old temple and play airball. For a while, it feels every bit the fun kid’s show you might expect it to be. On the other side, you have Zuko’s deathly serious side-plot as we learn more about him and his childhood trauma and his evil father. His honour is challenged by a rival commander, and Zuko is goaded into a violent duel. For the first half of the episode, there’s this sharp disparity between the fun kids’ stuff and Zuko’s much more serious stuff. One gets the sense that ‘oh, okay, this main plot is for the kids while this side plot is more adult, I can jive with that.’ But, the show isn’t satisfied with that. Because before long, Aang has to directly confront the fact that his people are gone, wiped out by the Fire Nation. His old life is devastated. And Aang completely breaks down.

Judging by the lack of stills I could find, I think Avatar doesn't get enough credit for how evocative its simple framing is.

Avatar is a show about kids, absolutely. And it’s, in many ways, a show for kids. But Avatar is not ‘just a kid’s show.’ From the very beginning, it’s clear that these kids are going through very serious issues. Zuko is wrestling with his relationship with his father. Aang has to cope with the loss of his people, and with having the weight of the world shoved on him when he’s just twelve. And the show doesn’t let up – in fact, it only proceeds to get more mature and more serious. While the fun heart of the show never subsides, it proceeds to deal with themes of loss and growth with total sincerity. While on the surface the content may be focused on this group of kids, the tone is always honest to their experiences, never afraid to go dark when it needs to. There are military sieges and mental breakdowns and huge wars and they are all treated with the gravity that they deserve. And the struggles of these kids never feel exaggerated, or overblown, or underwritten, but they always feel real and important. Yet, at the same time, that seriousness never overpowers the tone either, or makes the show an oppressive slog to trudge through. Avatar reaches this impressive balance of tone that a lot of big-budget blockbusters fail to reach – I’m looking at you, MCU.

I could honestly do an entirely separate article on how the clones are treated in this show, good and bad. A lot of it would be me ranting about Order 66, though, and nobody wants that.

Meanwhile, there’s The Clone Wars. Except for Ashoka Tano, who is introduced at fourteen, the show is dealing almost entirely with adults. Our primary characters include Anakin, Obi-Wan, Padme, Palpatine, Yoda, and Rex – these characters are political leaders, military commanders, Jedi, etcetera. Like Avatar, The Clone Wars is primarily centered around a massive war, this one reaching a galactic scale. When we’re not on the front lines of the war itself, we’re in the senate chambers, or dealing with trade routes or neutral parties. The second season was marketed as having some focus on bounty hunters – y’know, mercenaries for hire. So, clearly this is a show for adults, right? It sounds very Band of Brothers or The Expanse or something as such. Au contraire!

Despite the more explicitly mature content, The Clone Wars is almost explicitly directed towards kids. Every episode opens with a fortune cookie-esque moral that is an explicit statement of whatever theme the episode is aiming to have. What’s more surprising, is that the choices and decisions of these supposedly mature characters also seem to be rendered as simply as possible for its audience. Take this show’s third episode, “Shadow of Malevolence.” In an homage to the classic war film, Hunt the Bismarck, Jedi Warriors Anakin and Plo Koon are hunting down this new enemy warship, the Malevolence. Anakin takes a single squadron of bombers to destroy this ship, with no protection. Like, tactically this is bonkers but sure. Not satisfied, Anakin takes blatant risks with this plan, losing half his squadron along the way. The bad guys are similarly incompetent, constantly taking out their own troops just for giggles. Anakin changes the plan last minute when Ashoka, his fourteen-year-old apprentice, points out that he is getting everyone killed. He decides to cut his losses, take out the main weapon of the Malevolence, and then escape. The episode claims to be about learning to be wise, but the episode ends with Plo Koon saying that Anakin is “an impressive leader” even while Anakin takes credit for Ashoka’s advice. These are our heroes. Half of Anakin’s squad dies with little fanfare, and Ashoka becomes our moral viewpoint for having even the slightest modicum of concern for anyone besides herself.

I think a lot of director Dave Filoni's success is based on how well he replicates the look and feel of Star Wars. Oh, by the way, Filoni worked on both of these shows.

It is understandably a little uncharitable to put these episodes in direct comparison, but this tonal disconnect is pretty standard to The Clone Wars. Despite wanting to be about war and politics, the consequences of the protagonists are frequently treated in this laissez-faire matter. While Avatar swiftly gets down to the depths of how our characters tick, The Clone Wars almost always seems content to stay at surface level. Characters in legitimate life-and-death situations act with casual flippancy for human lives, and we’re expected to root for them. Even as the show grows and matures, it always feels this need to appeal to the lowest common denominator. For every arc like the Umbaran episodes, which does explore some of the more harrowing aspects of war, there are two more arcs in the vein of D-Squad, a sequence of four episodes about… goofy robots… winning the war. Political espionage is tackled with all the heavy-handedness of a Sesame Street episode; one blatant example comes from the season 3 episode “Corruption,” in which the main character deal with the rotting infrastructure of their political system by uttering the word ‘corruption’ every two minutes so that the kids at home can track its very basic theme, which is that good people shouldn’t give in to peer pressure, I think. The content of the show aims to be adult, but the tone all-too-often feels juvenile.

And again, I want to reiterate that I think The Clone Wars is fine. Just like I think The Mandalorian is fine. But these shows get heaped with praise, and it baffles me. Perhaps it's simply the drought of Star Wars content, or perhaps the franchise is destined to stay in a Saturday morning level of comfortability. And I do think there is genuine excellence within the series, but that greatness is a shiny needle within a very mediocre haystack. This irks me when shows like Avatar reveal that there is so much more to offered from ‘kids television.’ Avatar is a show about kids that always pushed its audience to think about mature, serious issues. The Clone Wars is a show about adults that always feels like it’s catering to kids. What exactly is the deal, here? Well, I think it’s fundamentally one about structure.

The Clone Wars gets insanely pretty in its later seasons.

There is one, essential, primary thing that separates Avatar from The Clone Wars, and that is the form of its storytelling. Avatar is a tight, three-season show the follows Aang as he masters the four elements on his way to fight the Fire Lord and end the war. The Clone Wars is a sprawling, seven-season anthology that loosely is about Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ashoka but is really about whoever the show deems is important that week. Some episodes will center on the clones. Some will center on this specific Jedi and the battle they are in. Some will explore a given problem that the Senate is having. And some will have Jar Jar Binks pulling whatever shenanigans he is pulling. The show isn’t even wholly linear, bouncing around the timeline a lot in its first few seasons without any actual indication that it’s doing so. Ostensibly, this can work. I like the idea of a show that wants to give a top-down view of war. But it comes with an immediate set of flaws. Mostly, it is complicated. It reaches for a kind of David Fincher level of sophistication, but without the precision to make it work. We unapologetically hop across the chronology with little indication as to why we do so or where we are at any given time. Multiple episodes are tied around senate shenanigans that could be genuinely compelling if they didn’t contort complex grey areas into black and white problems for its heroes to solve. I’m just genuinely not sure who this show is for. Again, content, tone.

Moreover, this top-down, chronology free structure hampers any semblance of character direction. I mean, think about the idea of trying to track the development of a character across zig-zagging timelines. Then, try to think about tracking that same development when that character is only ever in half the episodes. Honestly, the most obvious cue that these characters are changing at all is that they are physically aging over the course of the show. And I don’t mean to imply that these characters don’t develop – a few of them certainly do. Ashoka goes through radical growth as a character. Anakin gets some decent ground, teetering more towards losing faith in the Jedi. Obi-Wan… uh, there’s that bit about his old flame, Satine, I guess. That’s character development, I think. I want to say Rex has character development but I don’t know where I would point to.

I don't really talk about Toph at all in here but Toph is also great. An incredible way to create a powerful character with clear, sensible, and exploitable weaknesses.

Compare this to Avatar. Across three packed seasons, everyone in its rather sizable main cast goes through an insane amount of development. Zuko oscillates between alignments constantly, but it always feels fully justified, and his goals are always entirely clear. Katara and Sokka both completely transform over the course of the show, and yet always feel entirely in-character. I confess that I wish that Aang had a little more to chew on as a character – he gets several compelling points of tension as a character, but they mostly bubble below the surface. Notably, Avatar packs a wide supporting cast, who all feel like lived-in characters, despite often only appearing for a smattering of episodes. Jet is a great example, someone who’s motivations are clear, and yet complex enough that he can serve multiple roles throughout the runtime. Unlike The Clone Wars, the cast always feels competent and sensible, and when they do make less-than-ideal decisions, they still make sense for the characters making them. More often than not, we get to see these kids learn and grow from their mistakes in real-time. The biggest thing here is focus: Avatar takes place over a relatively short period of time, and never strays too far from its main leads. It’s incredibly efficient, but in a breathless way that feels wholly natural.

This show really should have just been about them.

The Clone Wars’ seventh and final season seems to finally take stock of its core problems. Forgoing the wide-ranging plot, it hones in on a few select characters in order to finish well. It picks Ashoka and Rex, both characters created for the show, and the two characters we’ve probably seen the most of. While there are minor issues that I have with that season, it does an excellent job of locking into the perspectives of these two characters and taking us to the end of the war with them. And it is so much better for it. Season 7 is easily the best in the series if only because it is focused. It doesn’t waste episodes on droid shenanigans or the actions of characters who don’t matter to us and who won’t appear again. And as such, the stakes feel much more real, and the storytelling is that much more compelling. We aren’t busily jumping back and forth between plots or characters, we’re able to live and breathe with these two individuals. We get one arc focused on Rex starting to grapple with loss and family. We have an arc focused on Ashoka working out her new identity, and how to live in the real world (an arc that is good, by the way, despite what people say). Finally, we get to see them together, facing the end of all things. The Siege of Mandalore arc is this show firing on all cylinders, on every level. It's big and bombastic, but most importantly, the drama is all driven by these two people who we have come to love.

I really don’t understand why The Clone Wars didn’t treat its characters with this much dignity from the start, and my only answer is – they underestimated their audience.

Unsurprisingly, I have much less trouble finding Spider-Verse stills.

In general, I’m starting to come around to the idea that the terminology of ‘kid’s shows’ is an oversimplification. I think of some of my favourite movies: Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, Howl’s Moving Castle; I think of all the great modern Pixar movies like Zootopia and Inside Out – these are all directed towards younger audiences, but ought we call them ‘kid’s movies?’ I’m not convinced. I feel like that nomenclature is what creates shows like The Clone Wars, where more often than not depth and characterization take a backseat to ‘look, fun action!’ These are shows that trip over themselves trying to cater to their audience, rather than have faith that younger audiences can actually connect the dots. We’ve proven time and time again that we can tell stories that are accessible to children but are still incredibly mature. C.S. Lewis had that very goal when writing The Chronicles of Narnia. These are stories that never speak down to their audience. Rather the opposite, works like these frequently take the problems of teens and children and treat them with the utmost severity, insisting that these are legitimate, natural problems that should be acknowledged seriously. They don’t shy away from big topics or hard choices, rather, they embrace them.

I’m not out here to say that The Clone Wars was a bad show. That's wouldn't be true. It's a show that was under enormous pressure and managed to do a lot. Many of the later arcs are really something else. But the scattered nature of the show just doesn't do it for me. I think it's fine, but it could have been much more than that. Ostensibly, I stopped watching The Clone Wars as a kid because it was ignoring my precious canon. But realistically, I stopped watching because there was nothing that was holding me in. There was no incentive to keep going. This conflict doesn’t change or evolve, the characters aren’t challenged. The reason you can air that show non-chronologically is because it really doesn’t matter when or where anything is happening. Just have fun and enjoy the ride. That’s what kids want, right?

I expected Appa and Momo to be goofy animal sidekicks that I would have to endure - I was not ready for how much pathos this show would pull out of two fluffy creatures.

Avatar proves to me that a ‘kid’s show’ can be so much more than that. That kids can learn about fear, and trauma, and heartbreak, and restoration, and that these can be normal, healthy conversations. And that you can do all of that within a story that has a lot of fun. Avatar isn’t some deathly serious show, but it knows when to enjoy itself and when to be sincere. It believes that kids can handle those sorts of conversations and that they will be better for taking such rides with its characters. I fear that’s something that The Clone Wars didn’t learn until it was far too late.