Friday, May 4, 2018

Saturday Morning's Forgotten Heroes: Kong: The Animated Series (2000)

Nearly 35 years after his first animated series premiered, King Kong returned, but now in the simpler titled Kong: The Animated Series, which aired initially on Fox for a short time in 2000, then was farmed out to Fox Family (now Freeform), and bounced around after its lone 40 episode season.

This time, Kong is linked cybernetically to a young human, Jason, whose grandmother has invited the lad and his best friend, Tam, to Kong Island. There, Team Kong has to fend off the machinations of greedy Professor Ramone De La Porta. Well, you know how that goes.

Co-executive producer Stephanie Graziano had disbanded Graz Entertainment, and joined forces with a Filipino animation house, among others to develop this series. 2 DTV's came out well after the series ended, intended to cash in on Peter Jackson's reboot of the original 1933 movie.

In the episode, "The Aquanauts", Team Kong travels to Atlantis (!), which is based beneath Scotland (?), while De La Porta takes control of the Loch Ness Monster.


Contrived? Well, somewhat, which is why it ran just 1 season. Impatient Fox suits took the show off the air when the ratings didn't meet expectations.

Rating: B.

2 comments:

Steven Dolce said...

I recall Jetix airing reruns of this show back in 2005 to promote the release of Peter Jackson's remake by Universal Pictures. Good times.

hobbyfan said...

Yes, they did, and that was the last anyone had seen the show.