User blog:TheDipDap1234/The Reason why I think Total Drama ENDED

You might have heard of it by now, but very recently, Tom McGillis, one of the creators of Total Drama confirmed on reddit that Total Drama and The Ridonculous Race are OVER. He explained why they decided to end the show but he didn't go into full detail. Well, here's my take on this, along with what I think about my favorite cartoon of all time ending.

Let's start with a little bit of history. Total Drama Island first aired in 2007 in Canada, and it did well enough to catch Cartoon Network's interest. Cartoon Network, at the time, was having financial struggles. They lost a lot of money because of some Boston bomb scare, to the point where CN's president stepped down and was replaced by somebody else named Stuart Snyder. CN decided to air Total Drama Island in 2008, and according to my research on Toonzone, it was the show that basically kept CN alive along with another show called Star Wars The Clone Wars (which very recently got revived for another season by Disney) in 2008. Total Drama Island performed incredibly well in the ratings, it was the number 1 most watched show on the channel that year. Why was TDI so popular? Incredibly easy to answer. The suspense and the overall concept and format of the show. At the time the only show that was similar to TDI was Drawn Together because they're both parodies of reality shows. Drawn Together was a parody of Big Brother while TDI was a parody of Survivor. However, TDI was very different compared to Drawn Together. For starters, it was a continuity heavy show where characters got picked off one by one. People were excited to see who will get eliminated next and tuned in to watch all the episodes to see that. What made TDI different was also the comedy. Drawn Together aired on adult networks from the start, but TDI aired on kids networks. At the time kids networks weren't afraid to show cartoons like that. They knew the viewers will be smart enough to understand the show's plot. CN was so desperate for views that they acquired a show that had censored naked teenagers, swearing and other adult jokes in it, and it worked. (Of course CN edited some of these out, but some of the swears were still left in). TDI stood out from all the shows that aired on CN with that concept and because of that TDI made money for CN, and made money for Teletoon.

TDA aired in the following year and that season was a little toned down. It took a lot less risks, but it still had a couple of adult jokes in it. Nonetheless, TDA pretty much performed the same as TDI did on Cartoon Network in US ratings wise.

Then TDWT came in 2010 and this is where things got messy. This was the year Adventure Time debuted and for the most part it beat TDWT in the ratings. Total Drama wasn't Cartoon Network's most popular show anymore and neither was the second. Regular Show also beat TDWT in the ratings. The season finale of World Tour also performed pretty poorly compared to how the finale of TDI performed. I think this made the creators and broadcasters like CN think that viewers weren't that much interested in Total Drama anymore, probably because it was starting to get a little repetitive. A lot of my friends stopped watching Total Drama around season 3 purely because it started to become repetitive for them. The show needed a change in order to become popular again which is why for season 4 they ditched the old cast and brought in completely new characters. A lot of the people in the fandom were turned off by this, but here's the funny fact. Revenge of the Island was a HUGE hit. The season premiere was watched by more than 3.3 MILLION people. That's a huge number. (TDWT's season premiere was watched by 2.2 million people while the season finale was only watched by 1.8 million people). It's unkown how many people watched the rest of the season, but Revenge of the Island's premiere was one of the most watched, if not THE most watched thing that aired in 2012 on Cartoon Network in the US!

ROTI's new cast clearly made people interested in watching the show again. Just some months after it finished airing, Cartoon Network itself decided to renew Total Drama this time for another season. They tried to take an interesting spin on the show. They ordered a 26 episodes long season, but split in half. One half has old contestants competing in it, while the other half has new contestants competing in it. They hyped the hell out of Total Drama All Stars, but the show couldn't take it's spot back as CN's most watched show of the year. Total Drama All Stars did well in the ratings, but not amazing. Shows like Adventure Time, Regular Show, and even Uncle Grandpa always got better ratings than TDAS and the season's poor reception by the fandom didn't help either. Why did it perform poorly? Who knows, but CN was definitely not a fan of the fact that it didn't perfom as well as expected.

Because of TDAS's mediocre performance, they decided to give TDPI a completely different treatment. Instead of airing one new episode every week, they aired new episodes every weekday. A lot of people hated this strategy, but here's another funny fact. It actually didn't affect the ratings. Not much are actually known about TDPI's ratings (for some reason that not even I understand) but from what I heard on Toonzone, the season performed just as well if not a tiny bit better than TDAS.

You would think CN would be done with Total Drama after this. The interest just wasn't there anymore and a lot of people stopped watching the show after All Stars, but no, CN still had an interest in the show. To shake things up, they decided to give Total Drama a spin-off series "The Ridonculous Race" which is a parody of the Amazing Race this time. Unfortunately, time wasn't kind to RR. Before it started airing, CN's president, Stuart Snyder, was fired and replaced by a different person named Christina Miller. Christine Miller for whatever reason decided to treat The Ridonculous Race like every other CN show. The episodes were uploaded to the CN App before they started airing on TV. Because of this, after the season premiere RR kept getting lower and lower ratings. The show aired at 5 PM when not a lot of adults are watching, and was later moved to 7 PM without making a promo about it or telling it to their viewers on their social media accounts. RR got less and less advertisements too. They were kind enough to promote the last 5 episodes of the season and not dump them to the App before they aired on TV, but the ratings stayed the same. No episode managed to perform better than the series premiere (which was watched by 1.6 million viewers). They also aired new episodes every weekday like they did with TDPI, but RR was nowhere near as promoted as TDPI was at the time. It's like they wanted to air the show and be done with it as fast as possible. The new president just seemingly wasn't interested in Total Drama. Some months after RR aired its season finale all of the episodes were removed from the CN app.

The show was put on a 2 years long hiatus. Most people thought Total Drama ended, and even the diehard fans started to lose hope. In 2017 however, an announcement was made. "Total DramaRama!". This time however, they changed EVERYTHING. This new Total Drama is another spin-off series, however, the format of the show is completely different. For starters, the episodes are now 11 minutes long instead of 22 minutes because every cartoon nowadays is 11 minutes long, even the continuity heavy ones like Steven Universe or the upcoming CN show called Infinity Train. There is no competition anymore, the characters are child version of some of the characters from season 1, and it has little to no continuity. It's just comedy now. According to an interview with Jennifer Pertsch, it was CN who wanted to bring Total Drama back, and they asked Fresh TV to age the show down to appeal to a completely new demographic. Why did they do this? Well, this is just a theory, but CN was probably just looking for a cheap cartoon that is similar to Teen Titans GO. Now, I am not saying that TDR is TTG 2.0, nor that Total DramaRama is cheap, but 2017 was the year TTG peaked in popularity to the point where they decided to make a theatrical film about it. CN was likely looking for similar cartoons to it, which is why they decided to pick up shows like Thundercats Roar. They most likely knew Total Drama was very popular at one time, so they decided to bring it back as a comedy show (which is similar to what happened to Teen Titans with TTG). The show is not 100% a CN original, and it's animated in Flash, so it doesn't cost too much money to make. It's a non-canon version of a cartoon that used to be their most watched show in 2008, 2009 and probably even 2012. CN just wins here. They had faith in the show, which is why they decided to promote it 1 month before it aired on TV. And it worked. TDR's ratings have been pretty good thus far and all the 9 episodes that aired on TV beat the new episode of TTG (CN's most popular show right now) that aired in August in the ratings.

All in all, the reason why I think Total Drama ended is because the broadcasters don't have an interest in it anymore. Seasons that got decent treatment like All Stars didn't perform well enough. RR was basically screwed over. The show's format just isn't something CN is looking for in their shows now. However, there's still hope for TD to come back for another season. Netflix! As Tom McGillis said on twitter, a new season can still be ordered by Netflix! So if you want TD to come back, ask Netflix to renew it for another season.

Well, this was a long blog. I am very, very sad that my favorite cartoon of all time is over, but i'm happy it lasted as long as it did. 5 seasons (or six if you count Pahkitew as season 6) and a spin-off is a lot, and i'm happy it got this many seasons even if I thought the newer ones weren't as good as the first ones. I'll still watch Total DramaRama because unlike many other people I think it's a nice, cute little show, and the only Total Drama related show still airing on TV, and the only thing that keeps Total Drama's brand alive. If Netflix ever decides to renew the show, or if Total Drama gets rebooted in the future somehow, i'll still happily watch it and support the show because i'm #TDTrash. Thanks for reading and I hope I didn't waste too much of your time.