Cavalcade of Awesome

Welcome to Day 16 of AWESOME-tober-fest. Today is the end of werewolf TV week. Yesterday I discussed one of my favorite cartoons, Fangface. Today, I’ll be discussing another personal favorite, The Cartoon Adventures of Teen Wolf.

The Teen Wolf cartoon was based on the characters in the 1985 Michael J Fox movie, Teen Wolf. Many of the movie characters show up in the cartoon. Obviously we see Scott Howard and his father Harold.  Also showing up is Scott’s friend Stiles, Boof, Pamela Anderson and her neanderthal boyfriend Mick. However, only Harold Howard is voiced by the actor who portrayed him in the movie, James Hampton. A few other famous voice actors filled out the cast. Don Most (Ralph Malph) voiced Stiles and the legendary June Foray (The Flintstones’ Betty Rubble, Looney Tunes’ Granny/Witch Hazel, Rocky Squirrel/Natasha from Rocky & Bullwinkle) voiced Grandma Howard.  So the cast was solid.  Plus it had a kick ass theme song and a ridiculously ’80s opening with Teen Wolf listening to a Walkman.

I love this cartoon and that opening sequence so much that I use a still from it as my avatar/buddy icon on Twitter, Flickr and WordPress.

Obviously, being a big fan of werewolves, and also a big fan of the movie Teen Wolf, I was going to love this show.  Not surprisingly, the cartoon changed a few details from the movie. It added Scott’s entire extended werewolf family (see below), gave Scott a younger sister (he’s an only child in the movie) and making the fact that Scott is a werewolf a secret again.  I didn’t really have a problem with these changes because it added something to the show.  Making the werewolf thing a secret added a bit of drama that would be lost if everyone knew what Scott was.  I was able to go with it and still enjoy the cartoon.

The show aired from 1986 to 1987.  This encompassed two seasons, 13 episodes in the first, 8 episodes in the second.  The reason there are only 8 episodes in season 2 is due to a cartoon voice actor”s strike in late 1986 that halted production during the second season.  There was technically a third season aired, but it consisted entirely of re-runs.

Two VHS collections were released in the US. The first was titled Wolf of My Dreams and the second was All-American Werewolf (see below).

In the UK there was a 3 volume set of Teen Wolf episodes with funky artwork showing Scott transforming into the wolf across the three covers.

In Australia, they actually released the entire series on DVD which makes me jealous and pissed off at the same time because the set is in the PAL format. However, I do have a DVD player that is region free and theoretically converts from PAL, but I don’t want to buy this set and then they release American versions very soon afterward.  Plus, I haven’t technically tested my DVD player’s ability to convert from PAL to NTSC so I don’t know how well it works.  The picture may look like crap.  So I’m stuck staring at this DVD box art and seething with unchecked nerd rage and envy at the “Land Down Under”.

So, like I said, I wait. And watch the crappy conversions of Teen Wolf episodes you can find on YouTube. Yay.

Also, check out the blog Countdown to Halloween for more Halloween-y, bloggy AWESOMEness.

This entry was posted on October 22, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under cartoons, Halloween, holiday, monsters, TV shows, werewolf, werewolves with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2010, cartoons, Halloween, holiday, monsters, TV shows, werewolf, werewolves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.