In 2003, Cartoon Network released Teen Titans, based on the popular DC comics characters. Through five seasons, audiences grew to love the adventures of Robin, Starfire, Cyborg, Raven and Beast Boy, and their legacy has hovered large over the source material in the comics. While other characters have been big parts of the Titans roster in the comics, these five have remained at the core of the team across their various incarnations.
Following the cartoon's somewhat unceremonious end in 2006, over a decade later, it's still unclear if the show ended as planned after being told there would be no more, or ended over combination of a fight over toy deals and declining ratings. Since then, there's been a passionate legion of fans continuing to create art and write fanfic for the series, all while consistently rallying for it to come back -- demands for a new series that only intensified when Teen Titans Go! arrived, even before it cemented itself as the definitive Titans show.
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A recent WonderCon panel saw producer Michael Jelenic, who worked on both Titans cartoons, asked by a fan if there was ever a possibility that the show would return for either a sixth season or a reboot. Jelenic's answer was far from conclusive. It basically boiled down to, "Eh, maybe... someday," the kind of response that neither confirms nor denies anything. But it didn't stop the Internet-at-large from taking that as something more definitive than it actually is. After all, in this day and age, nothing is theoretically stopping the OG Titans cartoon from making a comeback.
But it may just be time for us to let the original animated series rest in peace and move on.
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We live in a day and age where old properties are constantly being resurrected and rebooted, to varying degrees of success. While Star Wars managed to come out the gate swinging, for example, others haven't been quite as lucky. Frankly, there's no sure way to tell when something is going to take off or die, and the constant stream of revivals and reboots is getting exhausting. So many just skate by and "exist," bringing nothing new or of value to the franchise, and there's a good chance that a return to the original Teen Titans cartoon would suffer the same fate.
In addition to Teen Titans Go!, this year will also see the heroes jump to the live action space with Titans, a show that borrows nearly all five heroes from the show. (Cyborg is absent, likely due to his recent promotion to Justice Leaguer.) As it stands, there's no real place for it to thrive, and yes, that includes Cartoon Network's late night [adult swim] block, since nothing about the original show warrants the push to late night.
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A common refrain repeated in support of the return of Teen Titans is that the show deserves a "real ending," much in the same way fellow CN series Samurai Jack got last year, or that Young Justice will get with its upcoming third season. But there's a big hole in that argument in that neither Jack nor Justice originally ended on conclusive terms in the same way that Titans did. Genndy Tartakovsky and the network itself were unsure of Jack's future, so he decided to just wing it in the final season of its original run, and Young Justice's production crew received the news just before they were even done with the script for the second season's final episode. The shows' respective cancellations were extremely abrupt, resulting in a lack of an air to finality to either of them.
Teen Titans, on the other hand, didn't exactly have end with loose threads. The characters had effectively grown up during those five seasons, especially during their globetrotting fight against the Brotherhood of Evil. Slade had cropped up again, sure, but there's no real way for that particular thread to end neatly, and bringing in new team members was literally the point of that entire last season, with a penultimate episode that even ended on showing how far they'd come.
It's been 12 years since the show ended, and that should be long enough to accept that new creative voices need to take over. Not just with Teen Titans Go, but also with Young Justice. The latter may not have all the same characters or a visual style that matches Titans, but Young Justice follows up on the original cartoon's core concept of teenage heroes hanging out and fighting bad guys. Together, both shows encompass the silly -- and let's be honest, the original show could be pretty silly -- and serious aspects the original show blended together so well. If we just stuck with both Titans and the various cartoons of the DCAU, it would render the original endings moot and become unnecessary continuations. Shows like Justice League Action, Titans Go! and Young Justice work because the earlier shows paved the way for them to thrive.
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Considering that Harry Potter and Samurai Jack both had continuations that either failed to stick their landings or have retroactively tainted what fans loved about the original, it just makes sense o let sleeping Teen Titans lie. That the new run of their adventures in the comics will do away with Starfire, Beast Boy and Raven is for the best, because that decision shows a willingness to move on. Like Star Wars, the Titans need to be willing to leave the past in the past, look ahead to new horizons, constantly moving toward the future -- and, sure, eat some pizza while doing it.