Published on 12:00 AM, December 06, 2018

How to make your own cartoon network reboot

While cleaning up your room, you might've stumbled upon a rugged cardboard box lately which had all of your drawings of wireframe cats from second grade that seem no different from Julian Marley's wig. As excruciating as it feels to deal with childhood cringe, these bony looking cats might've pulled off something all those inspirational posts from Instagram couldn't, your long-lost ambition of becoming an animator. Whatever the reason might be, you're in the right place if you want to join the wave of CalArts graduates and take part in the autopsy of another CN show that had a successful run.

First of all, since this is a reboot, your primary reference would be the original show that is allowing you to funnel your awful ideas into an already invested and dedicated fanbase. Analyse the art from the original show carefully and note down all the intriguing details. Now that that's done, pull out a big eraser, start aggressively erasing any detail that might give away the notion of depth, shading and so forth. What you should have in hand is a character that's so flat and so bland that it might fit into one of those flat icon packs on the Play Store one day. The colouring should be easy if you recall the colours you had used for fingerpainting back in kindergarten. If not, just make sure that they're bright and flashy and that they make it seem like the piece of paper you're working on had its HDR toggle turned on.

If the original show came with a story arc, you need to get rid of that as well. Instead of having dialogues that remotely make sense, fill it up with random toilet humour. After that, top it off with songs that repeat the same word over and over at least 47 times in the small span of two minutes. Three of those in each episode and the Korean animators that you've outsourced your work to should feel relieved as they'd have to put in less effort in the process. Your series would require one episode in which all the characters move away from each other but end up reconciling by the end of the episode since they had realised how much they mean to each other through a series of flashbacks, one bland Christmas special where all the antagonists turn into good people after receiving presents from the protagonists and another predictable episode in which the main protagonist disappears for hours, makes everyone else in the show apprehensive, only to return with a hand full of tacos at the end.

After your show gets picked up by the network, what remains is the scheduling. Grab a piece of paper and then draw a blank timetable. Like I mentioned earlier, it's highly recommended that you stay in touch with the basics of fingerpainting as it would be used in many aspects of show, the scheduling being one of them. Now close your eyes, dip your hand into a paint bucket and start smudging the piece of paper sporadically. Stop when you have covered 90% of the page.

If everything else gets executed flawlessly, your show is expected to reach its audience. That is, 10-year-old kids and 10-year-old kids only since big guys never watch cartoons unless their 10-year-old cousin pesters them over and over to watch something (anything that moves on these cartoon channels) with them. Congratulations, you have successfully murdered another show.