Is there a lack of serious american cartoons?

But those aren't meant to be serious shows and never were meant to be that. Who says they should be serious shows? They wouldn't work that way.

Super Hero Squad is just Avengers but made for little kids, and we'll be getting an Avengers cartoon in a couple of years anyway so it doesn't matter.

Batman Brave and the Bold is 50s/60s Batman after we've had some of the darker stories told recently (The Dark Knight, Batman TAS) so it's good to have a change and tell different stories the others couldn't tell.

Teen Titans, well if you take out all the comedy elements it's just got some dodgy characterisation, samey plots, uninteresting villains beyond Slade (who isn't that well characterised), and heroes who are too attached to their costumes. If this was a serious show it'd be a really bad one. Since it's a comedy those elements don't matter so long as it's funny.
 
You kind of missed the point.

The characters in those shows and the series they are based on heavy action orientated series.

Taking them and making a kiddie version out of them, IMHO, really diminishes the franchise.
 
I could see your point if all we were getting were lighthearted spoofs or parodies of the franchises, however this is not the case. As WC Reaf already mentioned, there's going to be a new Avengers animated series that will be played more serious, and there have already been 2 serious takes on Batman, so why can't we there be a more campy comedic take on the DC universe? And there are serious versions of both Iron Man and the X-Men that are currently running. We're still getting the serious canon versions of the characters, so the parodies aren't hurting anything. The world of animation is big enough to support more than 1 approach to comic book superheroes. Why not just ignore the silly stuff if it's not to your liking?

Bear in mind that there is no 1 definitive take on any of the comic book super heroes. The characters and their respective franchises can be interpreted any way that their creators choose to interpret them, because they are fictional characters.
 
How so? The rich and lengthy histories of these characters allows them to be interpreted in a variety of ways. Shows like Brave & the Bold, Teen Titans and Super Hero Squad aren't supposed to be canon to the action comics, so I fail to see how they "diminish the franchise" in any way. If anything, these knockoffs help enhance their respective franchises since they tend to bring in non-comic book fans who would otherwise have no exposure to these characters. Half of the people who regularly watched-and loved-the Teen Titans cartoon have never read a comic in their entire lives. Heck, a lot of them didn't even know that TT was a comic book before it was a TV show. Widening a franchise's audience isn't a bad thing.

Besides, you always have the option of not watching the lighter shows if they're not for you, so I don't see how they're doing the action genre any harm.
 
I'm not going to deny that, but action is certainly at a disadvantage in that, as a genre, it has to include fight scenes. That limits the kinds of stories that can be told in an action cartoon, while - in theory - any subject matter can be turned into a successful comedy.

I mean, ever see When the Wind Blows? It's an animated film about Britain getting hit by a nuclear bomb (it was made in 1986, when this was still a possibility); its main characters are an elderly couple who eventually die of radiation poisoning. But despite this bleak storyline, it's a comedy. And that doesn't weaken its emotional punch at all: if anything, the fact that the main characters are funny just makes their fate all the more rending. I felt for those silly old pensioners far more than I ever felt for Mr. Freeze, Demona or Zuko.
 
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