Over the last 50 years, adults and kids alike have been treated to some truly amazing comic book cartoons. Unfortunately, they’ve also been treated to some pretty atrocious cartoons that have not stood the test of time. Whether it was low budgets or unnecessary characters, doesn’t matter – they were bad, and today we’re telling you about the 10 Worst Comic Book Cartoons!
Videos by ComicBook.com
Even if you’re feeling super nostalgic, and some of these are near and dear to your heart, that’s totally okay. They’re still the worst
10. Super Friends
Starting off the list at No. 10 is Super Friends. Now Super Friends got slightly better by the time it became “Challenge of the Super Friends” and introduced the Legion of Doom, but before that – it was just super terrible. The show was incredibly cheesy, had no real villains, they weren’t allowed to fight at all, and for some bizarre reason, two teenagers named Wendy and Marvin, and a dog named Wonder-Dog just hung out all the time. None of the three had any superpowers, which was really off-putting considering Wonder-Dog was a dog who could talk!? Plus, this show was solely responsible for turning Aquaman into a superhero punch line.
9. Beware the Batman
No. 9 – Beware the Batman. Cool title aside, this Batman cartoon ran for one season in 2013 and that was more than enough. To it’s credit – it had some huge shoes to fill – It would never top Batman: The Animated Series. The Batman had already tried to offer something drastically different, like Joker with dreads, and so did Batman: The Brave and the Bold. So what could they do? How about make Alfred look like Lex Luthor and dropping Robin altogether and making Katana Batman’s sidekick instead. Lesson to be learned: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
8. The Marvel Superheroes
No. 8 goes to The Marvel Superheroes, the first Marvel animated series ever ran in 1966, and it was really more of a motion comic than a cartoon, because the animation budget was so low, they scanned actual panels from the comic books and then just basically animated their mouths talking. That, combined with some truly awful dialogue and voice acting made for a show that very few people enjoy going back and rewatching unless you’re like me, and want to marvel at how bad it was.
7. UltraForce
6. Wild C.A.T.S.
No. 6 – Wild C.A.T.S. While X-Men: The Animated Series based it’s animation off of the art of Jim Lee, this show was actually created by Jim Lee. But the show just doesn’t hold up the way X-Men does. It’s incredibly watered down compared to the comics, which is fine since it was geared towards kids, but then they seemingly made a bunch of other changes from the comics for no real reason, like the fact that Maul doesn’t have a human form. Also, it just wasn’t any good.
5. Iron Man: Armored Adventures
No. 5 is Iron Man: Armored Adventures. Everything about this cartoon was just a blatant attempt to cash-in on the success of Iron Man, which honestly, there’s nothing wrong with that, but they went about it the worst way possible: The CGI animation looks cheap, even for 10 years ago, and someone thought it was a great idea to turn Tony Stark into a polite teenager who gets along great with his father. And I hope the person who had that idea got fired, because that’s not Tony Stark at all.
4. The Avengers: United They Stand
If you missed this one, you didn’t miss much. Save for some cameo appearances, this was basically Avengers: The B-Team. No Cap, no Thor, no Hulk, no Iron Man. Instead, Ant-Man was the leader, and his team included Wonder Man, Scarlet Witch, Vision, Wasp, and Hawkeye. To make matters worse, their costumes were so atrocious, that most of them were nearly unrecognizable from the comics.
3. Swamp Thing
So how exactly do you turn one of DC’s darker heroes into a light-hearted children’s cartoon? Well you make his theme song a parody of the song “Wild Thing,” but just replace the word “wild” with “swamp.” Ta-da! Instant success! Add on a couple of sidekicks, and this cartoon completely robs Swamp Thing of everything that made the DC character so great in the first place.
2. Super Hero Squad
1. The New Fantastic Four
But the absolute worst cartoon has to go to The New Fantastic Four. Poor Fantastic Four, they just can’t catch a break anywhere. They actually had the audacity to swap out Johnny Storm for an annoying robot named H.E.R.B.I.E. What? That’s like removing Wolverine from the X-Men and replacing him with Alexa. The reason Marvel replaced Johnny is because they didn’t own the rights to the Human Torch. But an ongoing rumor suggests that they removed Johnny because they were worried about kids setting themselves on fire, which is ironic since that’s exactly what most people want to do after trying to watch 20 minutes of this cartoon.
