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spiderbraids(With apologies to Paste Magazine's It Still Stings :-))
Animation moves on, but we haven’t. In Well, That Happened, we relive animation moments that we just can’t get over. You know the ones, where months, years, or even decades later, it still provokes a reaction. We’re here for you. We rant because we love. Or, once loved.
(This rant is more or less an expanded version of the Owl House section of "Giving a hoot about good animated stories")
When I first heard about the upcoming existence of The Owl House, I'd assumed it'd be a silly little sitcom-type cartoon about an owl family (like Harvey Beaks or, with apologies to TVTropes, The Loud House with owls), or even an Americanized version of The Owl and Co... The first indication I got of the show not being an avian-based animated sitcom was when a member of the Star vs. the Forces of Evil sub-Reddit asked for an admin job at the sub-Reddit for the new show with a re-edit of a scene from Star vs. which featured an owl emblem-thingy, which would have seemed out of place in a conventional sitcom, superimposed on to a glass of water... And I also remember seeing an image of three characters sitting back-to-camera on a witch's staff, and thinking it was about a girl living with owl creatures (well, it turned out the back of Eda's hair only looks like an owl ;-))
Anyways, the series showed up, and I'm sure I must have stumbled across news and reviews of the show about the time of the second or third episode, and as it happened, I had to start working from home for obvious reasons about the time the show premiered in Asia, so I was able to catch the show... Despite not being a fan of either of the previous shows its creator Dana Terrace worked on (Gravity Falls, Ducktales 2017), I managed to fall in love with the show quickly, and I'm not fully sure how that happened, but I suspect that given I've been a fan of Winx Club since pretty much the get go, I found it surprisingly compatible (I know that I often found myself thinking that this show had the vibe a "mature" Winx Club should aim for) We fans watched the story with interest as it unfolded while trying to work out the characters' mysteries, and it was clear that this show came from someone who really loves storytelling... She even has a main protagonist who loves storytelling, as one of the first things that protagonist Luz says in the show is "I like editing anime clips to music and reading fantasy books with convoluted backstories", and in another episode, she tells some random NPC type character "Your vengeful backstory is so compelling" and yet another episode sees her excited to hear an Eda backstory about her high school years... Dana even managed to get a few jabs against a certain boy wizard along the way (Luz's rant about the Golden Snitch is, well, golden :-)) The LGBT rep was never really an issue for me (sure, it was nice to have, but the story was always more important :-))
In May 2021, a month before season 2 premiered, Deadline Hollywood announced that the show was renewed for a third season of three 44-minute specials, and Dana would later clarify that those specials would mark the end of the show, instead of serving as maybe a bridge to a full final season, because it "didn't fit the Disney brand"... Of course, many speculated that the shortening had a lot to do with the LGBT rep, but Dana made it clear in a Reddit "AMA" that it had everything to do with one of the Disney business people deciding that the show didn't fit Disney's brand because it was more mature and serialized (Dana: "BARELY compared to any average anime")... And to me, that's almost more insulting than cutting it short because of the gays, because a) the whole mature and serialized thing is exactly why it was more compelling than stuff like Big City Greens or Molly McGee, and b) that pretty much limits the kinds of stories you can tell on Disney Channel to mostly small-scale narratives (country kids having fun in the big city or a happy-go-lucky kid hanging out with a grumpy ghost, vs trying to figure out what endgame the evil emperor has planned)... That said, it's sort of understandable, because the real money for kids' networks has always been in reruns, and with Greens and Molly, you can just "pick up" an episode and not have to worry as much about not understanding where you're at in the story right now... And before you ask, reruns of Gravity Falls and Amphibia were also a thing, but those shows have more relatively self-contained episodes in their first seasons than The Owl House does (examples: Mabel sneaks backstage at a boy-band concert; Anne renovates Wartwood's run-down diner); in fact, most other comedic serialized cartoons tend to run about a season's worth of self-contained episodes before getting into more overarching narratives (Star vs. is another good example... though the story they were telling itself is a topic I'd rather leave to someone else to rant about :-))
The fans couldn't even complain about the show not getting enough viewers either, as Dana noted that "Our ratings were GOOD for a channel show during the streaming wars"... This link shows that The Owl House frequently hung around the 500k viewers mark in S1, ultimately averaging 450k for the season, while season 2 of Greens (which aired that same year) had pretty much the same performance, right down to the average viewer count (okay, Greens' is slightly higher, but not by any really significant measure) In other words, we didn't so much as let this gem slip through our fingers, as much as Disney Channel smacked it right out of our hands while telling us to watch Greens (now in its fourth season) instead :-\
She even revealed that they'd actually internally made the decision just before the S1 season finale, which to some people, cast doubt upon the idea that it had nothing do with LGBT, since what happened just before the S1 season finale? Grom, aka the moment Lumity became official :-) They didn't even let the show be put up on Disney Plus (arguably a more suitable arena for serialized shows) to gauge viewer counts there first, which almost makes their "no more serials" reason feel more like a convenient excuse, so between that and certain bills that were passed in Florida, there are some people who still don't fully believe the official reasons :-\
There were arguably other external circumstances that led to the show being cut short, such as Disney not being able to properly gauge the show's fan base... Remember when I mentioned the "obvious reasons" I had to start working from home? Well, those same reasons stopped the Disney Channel Fan Fest, which had been held at Disneyland for the previous two years, from being held in 2020 (...or for that matter, ever since) The Fest would have been, if nothing else, an opportunity for Disney to properly gauge fan reception for the show... Given it would have been held in early May, though, at that point we would have just finished the first half of S1, at which point I doubt sane people were seriously shipping Lumity yet (then again, fans aren't always the sanest people ;-)) But anyways, the pandemic killed all in-person cons (read: opportunities for fans to show their love directly to the people in charge) for the next two years (and also caused Disney to lose quite some revenue, another reason for the shortened third season), and on top of that, thanks to measures introduced at YouTube around the time of the show's debut that prevent comments from being left on videos for kids, like, well, anything posted by the Disney Channel, fans couldn't even interact with videos of the show the same way they did with Gravity Falls... and in any case, it seemed like Disney were thinking online fans aren't real fans (warning: strong language), because they only began to acknowledge the fans after New York Comic Con 2022, where The Owl House got to do a panel there just before the start of the abbreviated third season... It's never easy to say goodbye to your fans, and more so when it's also the same time you're also saying hello :-\ (Okay, to be fair, they did also appear at the following year's New York and San Diego Comic Cons, but still...)
After the series finale, Dana and the writers revealed that they had to start reworking the story from the S2 mid-season premiere onwards, and to their credit, the writers managed to tie up most of the existing threads quite well, the story they presented was satisfying, the story elements that we know didn't even exist before the shortening (such as sending the Hexsquad to Earth) were interesting, and Dana even got a few jabs at the shortening in (Luz commenting that she doesn't have time for 20 more adventures just a few eps before the S2 finale, say) but still, there are some loose ends that they didn't have time to tie up or get into, and that's even without seeing anything the crew wrote... For starters, there are 9 main coven tracks, and therefore 9 main coven heads, and yet we only see 5 get named on screen and have actual dialog :-\
(Speaking of which, Dana revealed the names of some of the characters who don't get named on screen; guess which of them does not belong to one of the unnamed coven heads:
- Vitimir
- Emmiline Bailey Marcostimo
- Hettie Cutburn
Answer in a few paragraphs)
More notably, relatively early in the first season, a creature known as the "Bat Queen" has Eda and King babysit her children, and it eventually ends with her dropping by herself to give them money and a unique whistle, saying: "For troubles, Eda is owed one" A few episodes later, it's revealed that she's a Palisman (the show's version of witch familiars) who has no memory of her previous owner, whom Luz promises to find... Now, anyone who's ever been familiar with these kinds of stories will expect the whistle to come into play later, and for the whole deal with her previous owner to be important :-)
Flash forward to season 2, where the BQ returns to offer up Palismen for adoption (besides being a Palisman herself, she also takes care of abandoned Palismen), and Eda offers the whistle in return... only for the BQ to say "Save it for another time, this was my pleasure" So we continued to anticipate the story about her previous owner to return at some point, while also speculating away on how the favor would ultimately be repaid, because... well, why mention the favor again if you're not going to ultimately repay it? At least with the favor, we held out hope all the way to the finale, expecting Eda, or maybe Luz, to blow the whistle, causing the BQ to, say, bring in an army of Palismen to help in the final battle against the evil Emperor (even if it wouldn't make much sense, given that he's been shown to eat Palismen) It's not like they forgot about her either, since Amity brings her up during the final season: "Remember what the Bat Queen said. To connect with a Palisman, you need to express your deepest wish", and she even appears in the final epilogue montage (and incidentally, it doesn't make much sense for Amity of all people to bring the BQ up, since not only she never interacted with her, she's not even in 2 of the 3 eps where the BQ had a speaking role :-\)
In both the cases of BQ and the coven heads, Dana and friends' post-finale chat revealed that they had indeed intended to do more with these elements, which of course they would have :-\ They added "I think it's pretty easy to see what we had to prioritize and what we unfortunately had to deprioritize." Dana has been on record as wanting fans to focus on what we got instead of what could have been... That said, there's a sense of "what we were supposed to get" with the latter, especially given that (at least with the Bat Queen and her whistle) they'd already hung up the gun on the mantle, so to speak, so you can't really blame the fans for wishing Disney would have at least let the story run its proper course, serialization be d@mned :-\
(Random personal crackpot theory: I'm guessing that The Owl House people recorded the sound of the whistle in advance in anticipation for the payoff of the favor, and when they found out they weren't going to get to have the payoff, they just reused it for Raine's whistling... which just so happens to come up for the first time in the S2 mid-season premiere, when the story had to be rewritten)
Other things they've said they'd wanted to explore: More about Caleb and Evelyn (witch hunter and his witch girlfriend who play a major role in evil Emperor's backstory; fans have theorized that Eda is one of their descendants), giving Luz a quinceañara (rather than the "make-good" in the epilogue, something that would make her Latina heritage clearer than just the occasional use of Spanish), an origin story for Hooty (wouldn't be the first time that a show got shortened before it could properly explain the origins of one of its important characters; that said, Dana mentioned at New York Comic Con that they did manage to sneak in a hint at that origin in S3, which turned out to be a design detail suggesting that Hooty is an eye parasite of the Titan [!]), and revealing that two particular characters who, as it is, never even actually interact in the show are half-brothers (!) There's also the matter of Stringbean the snake: Why introduce her as a shapeshifter in the penultimate episode when she only uses it once to put a cut in the Collector's tongue in the finale? :-\ (They don't even have the same excuse that, say, Victor and Valentino did with Xochi and her green thumb, since V&V was expecting to get another season to fully explore it, whereas The Owl House were fully aware they were ending)
(Answer: Hettie belongs to the healing coven and Vitimir is from the potions coven [with quite nifty designs, even]; Emmiline is Gus' Palisman... Yes, one of the main kids in the show never had his Palisman named on screen, whereas we knew that Willow and Amity's Palismen were named Clover and Ghost from the get go)
One of the shorts released during season 1 ends with Luz telling King, "Buddy, let me tell you a little something about fan fiction." As per usual for anything with a reasonable fan base (and decent world-building's a plus too :-)), there's always fan fiction, as well as fan comics, to expand on the story... I preferred fan comics, especially Scatteradam and MoringMark's comedic comics :-) For example, although they had never originally planned to send the Hexsquad to Earth, both artists did plenty of strips revolving around the months they're said to have spent there... and there's a couple from MoringMark that take advantage of Stringbean's shapeshifting ability :-)
And given that we're well into the era of reboots and revivals, Disney Plus is getting a revival for Phineas and Ferb (to be fair, a non-serialized show), so who knows? Maybe Disney Plus will give Dana a chance to revisit the show and do it her way (at least one person on Reddit has even suggested a reboot starting from the mid-season 2 premiere) or maybe even delve into Eda's high-school years (another thing Dana wanted to do more, and the finale even has Luz say "Now that's a spin-off I'd watch" after hearing about Eda's time as a star high-school Grudgby player; in fact, Dana will not reveal some information because she hopes for a spin-off one day) Then again, a different revival that was supposed to be one of Disney Plus' big draws never got going because it was supposed to have a more mature story (sound familiar?)
Animation moves on, but we haven’t. In Well, That Happened, we relive animation moments that we just can’t get over. You know the ones, where months, years, or even decades later, it still provokes a reaction. We’re here for you. We rant because we love. Or, once loved.
(This rant is more or less an expanded version of the Owl House section of "Giving a hoot about good animated stories")
When I first heard about the upcoming existence of The Owl House, I'd assumed it'd be a silly little sitcom-type cartoon about an owl family (like Harvey Beaks or, with apologies to TVTropes, The Loud House with owls), or even an Americanized version of The Owl and Co... The first indication I got of the show not being an avian-based animated sitcom was when a member of the Star vs. the Forces of Evil sub-Reddit asked for an admin job at the sub-Reddit for the new show with a re-edit of a scene from Star vs. which featured an owl emblem-thingy, which would have seemed out of place in a conventional sitcom, superimposed on to a glass of water... And I also remember seeing an image of three characters sitting back-to-camera on a witch's staff, and thinking it was about a girl living with owl creatures (well, it turned out the back of Eda's hair only looks like an owl ;-))
Anyways, the series showed up, and I'm sure I must have stumbled across news and reviews of the show about the time of the second or third episode, and as it happened, I had to start working from home for obvious reasons about the time the show premiered in Asia, so I was able to catch the show... Despite not being a fan of either of the previous shows its creator Dana Terrace worked on (Gravity Falls, Ducktales 2017), I managed to fall in love with the show quickly, and I'm not fully sure how that happened, but I suspect that given I've been a fan of Winx Club since pretty much the get go, I found it surprisingly compatible (I know that I often found myself thinking that this show had the vibe a "mature" Winx Club should aim for) We fans watched the story with interest as it unfolded while trying to work out the characters' mysteries, and it was clear that this show came from someone who really loves storytelling... She even has a main protagonist who loves storytelling, as one of the first things that protagonist Luz says in the show is "I like editing anime clips to music and reading fantasy books with convoluted backstories", and in another episode, she tells some random NPC type character "Your vengeful backstory is so compelling" and yet another episode sees her excited to hear an Eda backstory about her high school years... Dana even managed to get a few jabs against a certain boy wizard along the way (Luz's rant about the Golden Snitch is, well, golden :-)) The LGBT rep was never really an issue for me (sure, it was nice to have, but the story was always more important :-))
In May 2021, a month before season 2 premiered, Deadline Hollywood announced that the show was renewed for a third season of three 44-minute specials, and Dana would later clarify that those specials would mark the end of the show, instead of serving as maybe a bridge to a full final season, because it "didn't fit the Disney brand"... Of course, many speculated that the shortening had a lot to do with the LGBT rep, but Dana made it clear in a Reddit "AMA" that it had everything to do with one of the Disney business people deciding that the show didn't fit Disney's brand because it was more mature and serialized (Dana: "BARELY compared to any average anime")... And to me, that's almost more insulting than cutting it short because of the gays, because a) the whole mature and serialized thing is exactly why it was more compelling than stuff like Big City Greens or Molly McGee, and b) that pretty much limits the kinds of stories you can tell on Disney Channel to mostly small-scale narratives (country kids having fun in the big city or a happy-go-lucky kid hanging out with a grumpy ghost, vs trying to figure out what endgame the evil emperor has planned)... That said, it's sort of understandable, because the real money for kids' networks has always been in reruns, and with Greens and Molly, you can just "pick up" an episode and not have to worry as much about not understanding where you're at in the story right now... And before you ask, reruns of Gravity Falls and Amphibia were also a thing, but those shows have more relatively self-contained episodes in their first seasons than The Owl House does (examples: Mabel sneaks backstage at a boy-band concert; Anne renovates Wartwood's run-down diner); in fact, most other comedic serialized cartoons tend to run about a season's worth of self-contained episodes before getting into more overarching narratives (Star vs. is another good example... though the story they were telling itself is a topic I'd rather leave to someone else to rant about :-))
The fans couldn't even complain about the show not getting enough viewers either, as Dana noted that "Our ratings were GOOD for a channel show during the streaming wars"... This link shows that The Owl House frequently hung around the 500k viewers mark in S1, ultimately averaging 450k for the season, while season 2 of Greens (which aired that same year) had pretty much the same performance, right down to the average viewer count (okay, Greens' is slightly higher, but not by any really significant measure) In other words, we didn't so much as let this gem slip through our fingers, as much as Disney Channel smacked it right out of our hands while telling us to watch Greens (now in its fourth season) instead :-\
She even revealed that they'd actually internally made the decision just before the S1 season finale, which to some people, cast doubt upon the idea that it had nothing do with LGBT, since what happened just before the S1 season finale? Grom, aka the moment Lumity became official :-) They didn't even let the show be put up on Disney Plus (arguably a more suitable arena for serialized shows) to gauge viewer counts there first, which almost makes their "no more serials" reason feel more like a convenient excuse, so between that and certain bills that were passed in Florida, there are some people who still don't fully believe the official reasons :-\
There were arguably other external circumstances that led to the show being cut short, such as Disney not being able to properly gauge the show's fan base... Remember when I mentioned the "obvious reasons" I had to start working from home? Well, those same reasons stopped the Disney Channel Fan Fest, which had been held at Disneyland for the previous two years, from being held in 2020 (...or for that matter, ever since) The Fest would have been, if nothing else, an opportunity for Disney to properly gauge fan reception for the show... Given it would have been held in early May, though, at that point we would have just finished the first half of S1, at which point I doubt sane people were seriously shipping Lumity yet (then again, fans aren't always the sanest people ;-)) But anyways, the pandemic killed all in-person cons (read: opportunities for fans to show their love directly to the people in charge) for the next two years (and also caused Disney to lose quite some revenue, another reason for the shortened third season), and on top of that, thanks to measures introduced at YouTube around the time of the show's debut that prevent comments from being left on videos for kids, like, well, anything posted by the Disney Channel, fans couldn't even interact with videos of the show the same way they did with Gravity Falls... and in any case, it seemed like Disney were thinking online fans aren't real fans (warning: strong language), because they only began to acknowledge the fans after New York Comic Con 2022, where The Owl House got to do a panel there just before the start of the abbreviated third season... It's never easy to say goodbye to your fans, and more so when it's also the same time you're also saying hello :-\ (Okay, to be fair, they did also appear at the following year's New York and San Diego Comic Cons, but still...)
After the series finale, Dana and the writers revealed that they had to start reworking the story from the S2 mid-season premiere onwards, and to their credit, the writers managed to tie up most of the existing threads quite well, the story they presented was satisfying, the story elements that we know didn't even exist before the shortening (such as sending the Hexsquad to Earth) were interesting, and Dana even got a few jabs at the shortening in (Luz commenting that she doesn't have time for 20 more adventures just a few eps before the S2 finale, say) but still, there are some loose ends that they didn't have time to tie up or get into, and that's even without seeing anything the crew wrote... For starters, there are 9 main coven tracks, and therefore 9 main coven heads, and yet we only see 5 get named on screen and have actual dialog :-\
(Speaking of which, Dana revealed the names of some of the characters who don't get named on screen; guess which of them does not belong to one of the unnamed coven heads:
- Vitimir
- Emmiline Bailey Marcostimo
- Hettie Cutburn
Answer in a few paragraphs)
More notably, relatively early in the first season, a creature known as the "Bat Queen" has Eda and King babysit her children, and it eventually ends with her dropping by herself to give them money and a unique whistle, saying: "For troubles, Eda is owed one" A few episodes later, it's revealed that she's a Palisman (the show's version of witch familiars) who has no memory of her previous owner, whom Luz promises to find... Now, anyone who's ever been familiar with these kinds of stories will expect the whistle to come into play later, and for the whole deal with her previous owner to be important :-)
Flash forward to season 2, where the BQ returns to offer up Palismen for adoption (besides being a Palisman herself, she also takes care of abandoned Palismen), and Eda offers the whistle in return... only for the BQ to say "Save it for another time, this was my pleasure" So we continued to anticipate the story about her previous owner to return at some point, while also speculating away on how the favor would ultimately be repaid, because... well, why mention the favor again if you're not going to ultimately repay it? At least with the favor, we held out hope all the way to the finale, expecting Eda, or maybe Luz, to blow the whistle, causing the BQ to, say, bring in an army of Palismen to help in the final battle against the evil Emperor (even if it wouldn't make much sense, given that he's been shown to eat Palismen) It's not like they forgot about her either, since Amity brings her up during the final season: "Remember what the Bat Queen said. To connect with a Palisman, you need to express your deepest wish", and she even appears in the final epilogue montage (and incidentally, it doesn't make much sense for Amity of all people to bring the BQ up, since not only she never interacted with her, she's not even in 2 of the 3 eps where the BQ had a speaking role :-\)
In both the cases of BQ and the coven heads, Dana and friends' post-finale chat revealed that they had indeed intended to do more with these elements, which of course they would have :-\ They added "I think it's pretty easy to see what we had to prioritize and what we unfortunately had to deprioritize." Dana has been on record as wanting fans to focus on what we got instead of what could have been... That said, there's a sense of "what we were supposed to get" with the latter, especially given that (at least with the Bat Queen and her whistle) they'd already hung up the gun on the mantle, so to speak, so you can't really blame the fans for wishing Disney would have at least let the story run its proper course, serialization be d@mned :-\
(Random personal crackpot theory: I'm guessing that The Owl House people recorded the sound of the whistle in advance in anticipation for the payoff of the favor, and when they found out they weren't going to get to have the payoff, they just reused it for Raine's whistling... which just so happens to come up for the first time in the S2 mid-season premiere, when the story had to be rewritten)
Other things they've said they'd wanted to explore: More about Caleb and Evelyn (witch hunter and his witch girlfriend who play a major role in evil Emperor's backstory; fans have theorized that Eda is one of their descendants), giving Luz a quinceañara (rather than the "make-good" in the epilogue, something that would make her Latina heritage clearer than just the occasional use of Spanish), an origin story for Hooty (wouldn't be the first time that a show got shortened before it could properly explain the origins of one of its important characters; that said, Dana mentioned at New York Comic Con that they did manage to sneak in a hint at that origin in S3, which turned out to be a design detail suggesting that Hooty is an eye parasite of the Titan [!]), and revealing that two particular characters who, as it is, never even actually interact in the show are half-brothers (!) There's also the matter of Stringbean the snake: Why introduce her as a shapeshifter in the penultimate episode when she only uses it once to put a cut in the Collector's tongue in the finale? :-\ (They don't even have the same excuse that, say, Victor and Valentino did with Xochi and her green thumb, since V&V was expecting to get another season to fully explore it, whereas The Owl House were fully aware they were ending)
(Answer: Hettie belongs to the healing coven and Vitimir is from the potions coven [with quite nifty designs, even]; Emmiline is Gus' Palisman... Yes, one of the main kids in the show never had his Palisman named on screen, whereas we knew that Willow and Amity's Palismen were named Clover and Ghost from the get go)
One of the shorts released during season 1 ends with Luz telling King, "Buddy, let me tell you a little something about fan fiction." As per usual for anything with a reasonable fan base (and decent world-building's a plus too :-)), there's always fan fiction, as well as fan comics, to expand on the story... I preferred fan comics, especially Scatteradam and MoringMark's comedic comics :-) For example, although they had never originally planned to send the Hexsquad to Earth, both artists did plenty of strips revolving around the months they're said to have spent there... and there's a couple from MoringMark that take advantage of Stringbean's shapeshifting ability :-)
And given that we're well into the era of reboots and revivals, Disney Plus is getting a revival for Phineas and Ferb (to be fair, a non-serialized show), so who knows? Maybe Disney Plus will give Dana a chance to revisit the show and do it her way (at least one person on Reddit has even suggested a reboot starting from the mid-season 2 premiere) or maybe even delve into Eda's high-school years (another thing Dana wanted to do more, and the finale even has Luz say "Now that's a spin-off I'd watch" after hearing about Eda's time as a star high-school Grudgby player; in fact, Dana will not reveal some information because she hopes for a spin-off one day) Then again, a different revival that was supposed to be one of Disney Plus' big draws never got going because it was supposed to have a more mature story (sound familiar?)
