The '90s Cartoon That Over 26% Of People Want Rebooted
It's hard to pick just one favorite cartoon from your childhood.
There's a reason you told your parents you wanted to watch cartoons. The medium lends itself their binge watching. Cartoons' brevity and the typical strategy of programming them in blocks allowed their differences in style and voice to contrast with one another. So much of the memory and the experience wasn't just about watching one show but the ones around it, too, letting them flow into another so that they could all wash over your tiny, impressionable brain in a wave of entertainment, cereal commercials, and incredibly catchy theme songs.
But tough choices are made every day, so Looper asked a group of respondents if they could pick only one classic '90s cartoon to bring back to the air in the form of a reboot, which would they select? The results had the madcap antics of everyone's favorite bumbling investigative cyborg, Inspector Gadget, go-go-gadgetcoptering above all the rest with more than 26% of the vote.
Why Inspector Gadget is prime for rebooting
Yes, if you're feeling pedantic, then it's true that the original Inspector Gadget series ran from 1983 to 1986, but the show remained in syndication throughout much of the next decade, meaning 90's kids got plenty of exposure to it. And yes, there is good news for those same pedantic people, because Inspector Gadget was rebooted in 2015 as a CGI-animated show. It's available on Netflix in the U.S., and a wide variety of other platforms internationally.
But look, there's a reason people want more of the character, even if they, perhaps, aren't even aware that there already is more. Inspector Gadget is a good idea for a character, someone with all the tools and hardly any of the competence. And, with continued advances in technology, it's perpetually ripe for updating. Think of how thoroughly our cultural notion of a "gadget" has changed since 1983, of how different ours concepts of portability and utility are now due to the mass adoption of smartphones. Inspector Gadget is essentially one of those, but in hardware rather than software. Maps and cameras and push-of-a-button meal ordering are useful, but so are personal helicopters and rocket-powered roller skates. When's Tim Cook going to announce those? We'll wait.
How did other 90's classic cartoons fair in the reboot voting?
Coming in a close second to Inspector Gadget, with 21% of the vote, was the classic Nicktoon, Rugrats. Those two finished leaps and bounds above the rest of the pack. Dexter's Laboratory came in third with 13% and man-child Johnny Bravo received the fourth-highest tally with 10%, putting him just a couple of votes above Hey Arnold, also with 10 %. Bringing up the rear were Doug with just 8% and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters with 6%.
Five percent of respondents voted for the "Other" option, with many of them electing to use the blank they were meant to fill in with their choice to say some version of "None of the above." Of the actual write-ins, there was no clear consensus, with single voters electing for superhero shows like X-Men or Spider-Man and others for originals like Ed, Edd n Eddy or Courage the Cowardly Dog. Congratulations to the group; nobody wrote in The Simpsons.
The big takeaway seems to be that there are any number of '90s shows that audiences would be theoretically interested in seeing return, refreshed, and updated for the modern era. Just so long as nobody changes the theme songs.