The scourge of reality television has come to cartoons in the form of Total Drama Island, a new series on Cartoon Network. Produced by Fresh TV Inc. and animated by Canadian studio Elliott Animation, it’s the first Cartoon Network show to receive a TV-PG rating outside of Adult Swim and Toonami. The show is primarily targeted to 8-12 year-olds, but the quirky animation and accessible character archetypes make this more watchable than most live-action reality drivel. The creators interviewed preteens and studied what they liked and disliked about reality television and brought those elements to the show, which basically plays the genre pretty straight. Characters compete in teams in a series of adventure/stunt/survival challenges and the losing team each week must vote off a member, who the must walk down the Dock of Shame to the Boat of Losers, never to return, ever.

I caught a Total Drama Island marathon over the weekend and got totally sucked in. There’s nothing dramatic or inherently repulsive about watching cartoon characters dive off a towering cliff or drink cockroach smoothies, but the humor and character interactions are solid. Will Duncan, the punk, hook up with goody-two-shoes, Courtney? Will bossy and conniving Heather get her just desserts? Why is Harold such an unabashed Napoleon Dynamite rip-off? Who will be the last contestant left? I’ve got my FiOS set to record the new episodes, Thursdays at 9:00.

The show also boasts a fantastic interactive Web site with character bios, a sweet avatar creator and flash games themed to each episode (Harold’s beat box battle anyone?). Just don’t go if you hope to catch some repeats because the home page tells you who of the twenty-two initial contestants have already been voted off.

The reason I stopped at this show in the first place was that I recognized the animation style from one of the most under-rated cartoons ever: Clone High, where teen-aged and contrary versions of Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Joan of Arc, JFK and Cleopatra interact in high school and were voiced by much of the talent from Scrubs. Its stint on MTV in 2002 was cut short when protestors in New Delhi threatened to fast over the depiction of Ghandi as a finger-snappin’, high-fivin’, non-stop party machine. It is now available on DVD or your BitTorrent of choice. 

WEB | http://tdi.cartoonnetwork.com