At this point in the evolution of popular media, it's a cliché to say that everyone's run out of ideas. You need only take a look at a recent year-end box office list to see just how many major properties are getting recycled all the time, rebooted and remade and turned into something new simply because it has built-in name recognition for audiences.

That kind of thing has, in fact, been going on for quite a while. Remakes have been happening since the earliest decades of film history, but in the 1980s and 1990s especially, many breakout movies were immediately monetized as much as possible, adapted into toy lines and breakfast cereals and, yes, Saturday morning cartoons. Some of those cartoons caught on, becoming bona fide smashes in their own right — for example, it can be jarring to wa

See Full Page