The Pirates of Dark Water

This was a great show!!

On first glance, it may seem a bit dorky and juvenile.

However, if one actually watches all the episodes in order, they have a good story to tell.

If you can ignore the blatant morality imposed on all American cartoons [can never kill the bad guy, even if he just tried to kill you for the 10th time], then this is a REALLY good cartoon. Serialized and everything.

The story continues from one episode to the next, yet abruptly stops without any conclusion. That is a real letdown and disappointment. Even Cartoon Network has commented on this in a humour commercial.

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.

This show was such a good fantasy action/adventure with great effort put into both its animation and its world-building and had an all-star cast as well.

But I guess that was what ended up prematurely ending our adventure with prince Ren and his loyal crew of misfits in the search of the thirteen treasures of Rule and the fight against the villainous pirate Bloth and the overall baddie of dark water. Only twenty-one episodes were aired, and what we got was excellent but now unfinished.

The Pirates of Dark Water remains one of the saddest cancellations of a TV-show, because every minute of the show was dedicated to building this imaginative world with its own creatures, clothing, language, culture and we could've got so much more of that and fulfill the quest.

Just to clarify a few things...What became "The Pirates of Dark Water" originally aired as the mini-series "Dark Water". It lasted one week and ran in the after-school slot on Fox starting on a Monday and finishing on the following Friday. This was during what I like to call "the golden era" of Fox. (The Simpsons, In Living Color, etc.) Anyway, here on IMDb it credits Roddy McDowall as the voice of Niddler for all 21 episodes of the series. This isn't correct. He was actually the voice of Niddler for the original mini-series and NOT for the ensuing series. His voice, in my opinion, was way cooler than that contributed by Frank Welker. (Sorry Frank) Welker's whinier version of the Niddler voice was dubbed onto the five original episodes when it was released for Saturday morning television. A lot of people didn't come to know the series until its Saturday morning incarnation and, therefore, never had the pleasure of hearing McDowall's Niddler. I remember being extremely disappointed watching the series and hearing a different, less cultivated voice. It really changed the character completely. Unfortunately, none of the uploads that I've encountered on the internet are of the original mini-series. Also, as of January 2009, it seems that the great fan site piratesofdarkwater.net is now regrettably defunct.

I forgot all about this show untilll I saw it on Boomerang. Then I remembered the greatness. THe show was about this guy named Ren, and his two friends who are trying to find 6 treasures that will let them stop these evil stop called darkwater (kinda like intellegent oil). It had morals, and all that. Shame it was never resolved. A revival would be awesome... But if you want to see an ending, track down one of the copies of POD the video game, for either SNES, or Sega Genesis. I would say the Genesis one is better.