Saturday, September 9, 2017

Rein-Toon-Ation: Jungle Cubs (1996)

Nearly 30 years after adapting Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book, Disney revisited the classic characters, but this time as Jungle Cubs.

This prequel lasted 2 seasons (1996-8) on ABC before moving to Disney Channel. Today, it sits in Disney's vaults, as they couldn't be bothered to dust off the series for airing after releasing a live-action remake of "Jungle Book" a year ago.

Episodes aren't available online at present. The voice talent includes a few of the usual suspects (i.e. Jim Cummings, E. G. Daily, Pamela Adlon, Cree Summer) over the course of the 2 seasons. All we have is the intro with a revamped version of the iconic "Bare Necessities", performed here by R & B legend Lou Rawls.



No rating. Never saw the show.

3 comments:

Silverstar said...

My local ABC affiliate aired this show at 6:30 AM on Saturdays, so when I wanted to see it out of curiosity, I had to record it. Upon seeing it, I can safely say that there's a very good reason why Disney hasn't shaken the dust off of Jungle Cubs: simply, because it wasn't very good.

Basically, Disney was just bandwagon jumping onto the then-hot 'babyfication' trend: turning established characters into babies or kids in order to appeal to today's youth. The de-aging of the characters didn't make them or the stories any better, plus there were no new characters or female characters for the girls to glom onto. Not a feather in the Mouse House's cap the way DuckTales or the Disney Afternoon shows were. In the end, Jungle Cubs was just dull.

Goldstar said...

This was just another pointless babyfication. As was the case with Tom & Jerry Kids, Jungle Cubs barely took advantage of the main characters being de-aged. Other than them being drawn smaller and having higher pitched voices, it was just more of the same, only this time without the benefit of having Mowgli as an audience avatar. Try to imagine The Jungle Book without Mowgli for a minute and you'll understand why this series didn't work.

hobbyfan said...

Not only that, guys, but this was 5 years after the flop that was "Yo, Yogi!" over at NBC, which should've been the end of the "babyfication" of established characters. Apparently, Disney was behind the curve.