The Pirates of Dark Water

I rented this on VHS, then bought the toys, then collected the comics, it was so good. I never knew there was a TV show until after it was gone and unavailable. I'd buy it on DVD in a second.

The concept was fairly unique, dark water taking over the world and the hero going on a quest for magical items to stop its progress. It was like a fantasy take on pirates of the Spanish Main. The ships had really neat concepts, like the hero's ship which could glide for short distances, gigantic waterfalls in the ocean, and some sort of gas gun that worked by stimulating a living creature to produce knockout gas. The main bad guy, Bloth, had a ship which was actually a gargantuan carcass of a long dead sea creature, so it looked cool as well.

It had the same set of characters as a lot of fantasy films, close to Star Wars, but the characters were amazingly three dimensional for a cartoon. Niddler was likable, but you were never sure he would be on your side when the going got rough, and not in a typical cowardly save-his-own-skin type of way, but a maybe-he-really-is-evil type of way.