Top 10 Darker Adaptations and Continuations of Kid Friendly Media
Some artists and groups feel like updating a cute and innocent work of children's media to a darker and edgier spinoff/continuation in order to get with the times. And that's why I've compiled a list of 10 darkest adaptations/continuations of kid friendly media.
In the mid-2000s, a lot of kid-friendly properties tried to look more dark and edgy and failed miserably. One notable example of this is Shadow the Hedgehog, a game much darker and edgier than most Sonic games which allowed Sonic Team to use elements otherwise inappropriate for the series (such as having Shadow say the D word).
This game sucks, but just the fact that this game was ever made blows my mind. If anything this game makes me laugh every time I see it.
That and it encouraged kids to seek out the DAMN fourth chaos emerald.
It's dark in a good way.
Most of the time, when games made for kids turn edgy it fails, but leave it to Super Paper Mario to not just succeed, but to remain memorable all these years later.
A spinoff of the popular Nickelodeon series Ren and Stimpy. I'm not gonna lie and pretend that Ren and Stimpy was actually kid friendly but the adult spin-off that premiered on Spike T.V. took the show to a whole level with all kinds of disgusting humor and adult themes.
The show itself was universally panned for being overly raunchy and unnecessarily crude. It has been listed as one of the worst cartoons/T.V. shows of all time. It was so bad that original voice actor Billy West turned it down because he was afraid it would damage his career, claiming it was one of the worst things he ever saw.
For some reason I used to think the title was Adult PARODY Cartoon, which actually makes more sense because there is never a party in the show.
The fifth and final season of animated series Samurai Jack premiering on Adult Swim. It is incredibly different from all the other seasons, as in the original series it was more tamed and had little to no blood. Then in Season 5 it suddenly showed lots of blood and a couple swear words here and there.
The more mature themes even extend to moments like Jack killing a human (his first live kill) and even trying to commit seppuku (a Japanese suicide ritual by disembowelment).
A cartoon short based of Yogi Bear made by John Kricfaluci the same guy behind Ren and Stimpy and Ren and Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon.
The biggest and funniest offender of 2000s kid media trying to lach onto the darker and edgier side is definitely Bomberman: Act Zero. It's where they took a cute mascot, gave him claws and chains, and threw him into a dystopic future where other bomberman fight to the death. The game itself was universally panned when it was released in 2006, with critics citing its awful controls, ugly graphics, tedious gameplay, forgettable soundtrack and laughably bad premise as its main flaws. It's gone on to be featured on a numbwr of Worst Video Games of All Time lists and is widely regarded as the worst Bomberman game in history.
Hey Shadow The Hedgehog haters, take a look at this one...
A 2005 action T.V. show based on/inspired by the Looney Tunes characters, which features descendants of them fighting crime in a futuristic post-apocalyptic setting in the year 2772.
Batman: The Animated Series is an American animated television series based on the DC Comics superhero Batman.A spinoff series released by Archie Comics. It is a horror series taking place in an alternate universe of Riverdale, this time focusing on blood, gore, psychological terror, social issues, implied incest, and other dark topics. While the characters in the original series are much goofier, their counterparts in this series are more realistic (Betty and Veronica's feud is portrayed as full-blown hate, Reggie goes from a likeable jerk to a homophobic douchebag, and Sabrina's aunts go from quirky and pleasant to ruhtless monsters).
Apparently people were sick of Archie Comics and its goody two-shoes nature and desired something more dark and grim. The series itself was successful and spun off into a completely different comic line called Archie Horror.
We're all familiar with this of course. Pretty much a sequel to The Hobbit, which was already written for children. The Lord of the Rings on the other hand was written much darker and more mature as Tolkien hated the idea of fantasy being marketed towards only children.
Twilight Princess is already a dark title in The Legend of Zelda series but the manga it was based on is a lot darker than the game. In book 1, the scene where Ordon Village is attacked by King Bulblin is a lot more graphic. In the game where Ilia and the kids simply get kidnapped as Link gets knocked out, in the manga they're tortured and beaten with Ilia getting shot with an arrow in the shoulder. King Bulblin then grabs her by the fave and implies that he intends to rape her. Then the bokoblins taunt a helpless Link who watches his friends get trauamtized, chop his arm off, and later drown him underwater (in which later the gods revive him and give him his arm back).
Another graphic scene involves Ganondorf who gets banished into the twilight realm for the crimes he committed in Ocarina of Time. In the game he's simply sucked into the realm, but in the manga his skin is ripped apart from his body while being sucked in, exposing his flesh and bones.
Inspired by the success of Afterlife With Archie, DC Comics decided to make their own dark spinoff series featuring different Hanna-Barbera characters, which had them drawn more realistically and set into dark and gritty situations. The first of them was Scooby Apocalypse which focused on Scooby (who now has an intelligence enhancing brainchip) and the gang fighting actual monsters.
The second being The Jetsons where it focuses on a future where technology has officially ruled humanity and removed everything human about us.
The third one being The Flinstones where it focuses on a lot of social economic issues.
The comics themselves have been sort of a mixed bag though and a little less usccessful than Afterlife With Archie.
No, MCU is for pre-teens and up, not little kids.
But let's look on the bright side! If we didn't have portal 2, we wouldn't have Cave Johnson's lemon rant!
In the Pokemon Adventures manga (the most well known manga of the franchise), it focuses more on violence, death, and even torture. For example, in chapter 14 of the original Pokemon Adventures manga, a Charmelon decapitates an Arbok. The Arbok's body falls to the ground bleeding as it helplessly twiches in pain. This is how the battles in Pokemon Adventures end, and not even the Pokemon themsleves get tortured, even humans sometimes get tortured as well.
This manga series features an Arbok having its tail SLICED OFF and has the Gym Leaders act much more evil than in the games.