Every few years or so, a show will come around to transcend it’s medium and genre. One such show, that has broken barriers and elevated entertainment for children, premiered in 2003 and was called Teen Titans. It’s been about fifteen years since the superhero show was last seen on Cartoon Network, and fans have been clamoring for a sixth season ever since.
The television series ran from 2003 to 2006 and explored the themes of friendship, love, suffering, and redemption. Unlike most animated shows, the characters have been shown to grow and learn from their mistakes and find their own identity throughout the run of the critically-acclaimed series. Teen Titans was originally only slated for four seasons but was so popular among the viewers that Cartoon Network gave it a fifth season.
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Given its more mature themes that many Cartoon Network programs decided to abandon in favor of pure comedy, the show was able to stand out among the other competition, make a surprising impact on viewers, and not be shoehorned into a niche and forgettable category. Let’s take a look at why Teen Titans is the best Cartoon Network show (outside of Adult Swim) even to this day.
Its animation style is incredible
Warner Bros.
Even in the year 2022, the animation style of the series is still widely praised by the fans. It uses a unique blend of anime in a superhero genre that was something new for DC Comics fans. The show is able to balance funny anime gags with a stylistically natural and realistic environment, whereas most other cartoons would use more fantastical scenery and sillier visuals.
There is an artful style of how each frame is drawn, and its art is used to perfectly enhance the focus of the narrative in the world that the characters reside in. Its style can alternate between light-hearted and eerie depending on the mood, highlighting the thematic content in the narrative. It’s a beautiful landscape that can capture hearts and minds for generations and uses its style to magnify its sheer scope and splendor.
It has dark and mature themes
Speaking of its style, Teen Titans can get dark when the theme or setting accounts for it. Usually, when there is some type of revelation in a character, the cartoon landscape descends into a macabre-like portrait. While other cartoons are more jovial and juvenile in their subject matter, Teen Titans uses a dark identity to entertain and educate.
Its dark themes make the scenes in the show more intimate, and the darkness is used to draw its audience in, but what really makes it worth watching are the stories. In the episodes “Apprentice Part 1 & 2,” Robin is forced to work for his arch-nemesis Slade after the villain injects Robin’s friends with deadly nanites; these will kill them at any moment if Robin refuses to comply with Slade’s orders. The murky ethical and psychological themes in which these episodes, in particular, are entrenched add a sense of danger hoisted above the childlike, campy humor of the show.
Warner Bros.
Beast Boy is the best comic-relief
When people look through hilarious sidekicks on Cartoon Network, Beast Boy, or Garfield Logan, will always remain on top. While Dee Dee from Dexter’s Laboratory was too annoying and obnoxious to be funny, and Mordecai and Rigby from Regular Show fed off of each other in terms of comedy, Beast Boy was a unique character in that he was the only member of the Titans who took his job with genuine hilarity.
Having one comical character in a sea of more serious team members makes his persona more memorable and his jokes more appreciated as the others are more no-nonsense types of superheroes. This kind of perfect set-up for comic relief helps create a contrast which brings levity when needed but allows for seriousness as well.
The action was on a whole new level for Cartoon Network
Before the Marvel Cinematic Universe blew everything up, Teen Titans had action sequences that could easily rival the superhero movies of its day. Usually, when an episode begins, the Titans are already in full attack-mode and clobbering a villain who might end up being a pain in the neck for the team in the third act. Unlike action sequences in other Cartoon Network programs, the action pushes the storyline here, and may sometimes be the crucial cold open to an important detail later on in the episode. Either way, there are definitely enough explosions and hand-to-hand combat to keep audiences entertained, and the sequences are coherent and plot-driven enough to stand out from other animated action.
There is character development
The thing that truly makes this amazing show stand out from the rest of Cartoon Network’s original programming, though, is that it has story arcs which develop the characters as the series progresses. Each season of Teen Titans essentially centered around the growth of a different Titan.
The first season dealt with Robin’s obsession to try and take down Slade, realizing at the end that they were more alike than the boy wonder realized. The second season was about a Titan newcomer named Terra who was taken in by the Titans after witnessing her abilities. She betrays them and joins Slade, but is redeemed when she defeats Slade and sacrifices herself for the Titans and, especially, her love interest, Beast Boy. The third season focused on Cyborg and his journey for acceptance. The fourth season was a more detailed arc of Raven and how her father Trigon birthed her in order to end the world, and the fifth season shed light on Beast Boy, who finally defeated his nemesis the Brain when the villain made an assault on his former team Doom Patrol.
Each character was unique in their own way (enough for them to garner a live-action update) and provided something valuable to the team. As a result of this and the rest of the dark but funny, brilliantly animated action series, the characters entertained millions and remain the greatest original show on Cartoon Network.
