Question about rewatching The Pirates of Dark Water, did the ugly animation keep anyone else away the first time | Canceled Cartoon Rewatch

Victor Butler · 2026-10-07T02:25:04.907654+00:00

For years I would skip past The Pirates of Dark Water whenever it popped up in lists of canceled shows, because those 1991 episodes looked rough, all flat colors and stiff movement, and I figured a show that ugly could not have anything going on. Then a buddy in Sacramento handed me his old VHS taping of the first five episodes and told me to watch them back to back before I said another word. It turns out the murky look was the point, the whole world is slowly being eaten by this black goo and the art team let that dread soak into everything, so by episode three I was hooked. What really got me was how much story they packed into 21 episodes before ABC pulled it, Ren's crew feels like real people with grudges instead of toy commercials. My old way was judging a cartoon by three seconds of a YouTube clip, my new way is sitting through a full disc before I decide, and the change happened sometime last month. I still think the later episodes look better, but the early ones hold up more than I gave them credit for. Has anyone here made it through the whole run, and does the story fall apart at the end since they never got to finish it?

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Question about rewatching The Pirates of Dark Water, did the ugly animation keep anyone else away the first time | Canceled Cartoon Rewatch - Opinions Matter