Tales from the Cryptkeeper Review

I've garnered a strange fondness for shows created in Canada and Australia. Whilst American shows have to abide to the animation fandom, political correctness and gay couples (with most shows utilizing the hideous FLCL template), Down Under and Canuckland don't follow those asinine standards. Instead, people are free to create whatever they want, and people appreciate it. They don't have idiots who cry about Teen Titans Go every few months or use Steven Universe as a backup viagra, and heck, they don't consider a gay couple to be a focal point of The Loud House.

(though just to get this out of the way, I will say that the one-sided chemistry between Luna and Sam is better executed than the gay dads, definitely feels somewhat more believable, though I hope they just become friends and leave it at that.)

Back to Canuckland, without any standards to follow, anything there can and will happen, which could often lead to very interesting shows, like this one.
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I'm sure many of you have at least heard of Tales from the Crypt, one of the top horror anthologies alongside The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Tales from the Darkside, The Hunger and Tales from the Quadead Zone. Heck, I was such a huge fan of the show... I only saw two episodes in my lifetime. Namely Fitting Punishment and, the most important one, The Third Pig.

Why is the latter important? It was produced by Nelvana. What else did Nelvana produce? They produced today's show.

With all that's mentioned, you might already get the idea what this series is about. But if you're still conditioned to believe that Steven Universe has a semblance of quality (poor you), I'll fill you in. Tales from the Cryptkeeper was an animated spin-off geared at a much younger audience. It debuted in 1993 and ended in late 1999. It aired on ABC and YTV in the US and Canada respectively, but by the third season, switch to CBS and Teletoon. I've... never heard of something like that happening. But onto the show.

Season 1-2

Aside from an obvious toning down of the more violent aspects of the original show, Tales from the Cryptkeeper keeps with the standard formula, least for the first season. The Cryptkeeper entertains the viewers, tells the story and then we return to the crypt keeper soon after. Aside from a color change, the Cryptkeeper looks close to the original version. His behavior is also somewhat intact, which is a good way to help guide viewers into the legacy series.

The stories themselves, in spite of being more kid-friendly, still manage to be creepy and interesting to watch. Though the first season seemed to be a little flat for my tastes, with the more notable bits going toward the often over-the-top performances of most of the characters. Then again I haven't seen every episode of that season, so I could be missing something. Each story tends to go for that moralist route, but unlike most shows the animation community latch on to, they don't dominate the episodes themselves, sorta.

The animation is decent, for the time. It captures the gritty look of the original EC Comics from the aesthetic right down to the atmosphere. It doesn't look that good now, but hey, at least it's not trying to be like FLCL, nor is it as butt ugly as Steven Universe.

This applies to the first two seasons since little differs between either one. The only major difference between the first and second season is the addition of two new characters to the Cryptkeeper bits, namely the Vaultkeeper and the Old Witch. For the record they aren't exclusive to the series, they have turned up one way or another in other Cryptkeeper media, and I think at least the Vaultkeeper appeared in one episode of Tales from the Crypt.

I guess they knew they couldn't keep it up with the original format, so to help keep kids relaxed, they made the narrative bits more crazy. This might seem like a recipe for disaster, but it didn't tamper with the spirit of the first season. The stories were as scary as ever (heck, they interestingly brought back characters from older stories too), and the fighting dynamic between the Cryptkeeper and co. was a nice touch. They didn't just chill in the background or only exist for comic affect. Sometimes they competed with one another to determine who'd tell the story. Aside from the Old Witch's stories usually centering on romance, I haven't found a key difference between the Cryptkeeper and Vaultkeeper's stories.

However you view it... it's better than the third season, which is so radically different from the previous seasons it wouldn't matter if it's treated like it's own series.

Season 3

The show's second season drew to a close by the end of 1994. But Cryptkeeper fever must've kept going strong because five years later, a new season came out, and new doesn't begin to scratch the surface of this season. Everything about this season is different, right down the focal points, but I'll get to that in a bit.

As I said before, at this point the show no longer aired on its original networks, it now aired on CBS (the only network to not have a Russian meltdown as of yet) and Teletoon (which you could say is good timing, as YTV has since aired Freaky Stories, a brilliant anthology series, check it out.) At this point, the show succumbed to the plague that befell other shows of its kind, the E/I regulations. Now the morals have entered full swing, and I could see a bulge in the animation community's pants as we speak. Nobody liked the season when it aired, nobody bothered to make high-quality recordings and the show died off soon after.

Before I get into the meat of the season, I'd just like to point out the show's true positive. The episodes are still genuinely creepy, the few I've seen anyway, and the episodes have decent execution. To put it bluntly, the season is at least stomach-able.

And now... the rest.

It was at this point that Nelvana stopped animating the show themselves. They outsourced the show to a French studio, Fantome Animation, and no I haven't heard of them either, but apparently the rest of their work is rooted in computer animation. How much did this affect the show? Well it had its own style, granted. But I dunno, it just didn't go well with the show. Everyone has bug-eyes and everything looks flat. It'd look fine for a general entertainment series, but a cartoony style conflicts with the nature of the series.

The Cryptkeeper has also gone through a change in his role. Now he's part of the story, in that he gets the plotline going so the moral of the day could be shat out.

Now I know what you're thinking, that doesn't make for a bad series, just a mediocre one. Well duh, it sucks more to be just a mediocre series than a memorably bad one. The fact that the only preservations made toward this season were old recordings shows how little people gave about this season. So let's honor this series and just call it a happening for a friend of a friend of yours.

The third season of this series is like putting sweetener instead of sugar in your coffee. It tastes fine and you could hold it down, but it just isn't the same.