Butch Hartman struck Nickelodeon gold (Orange? Slime?) when he created The Fairly OddParents, a duo of fairies who attempted to improve the lives of their two wards but often just made things more complicated via magic. The animation style was crisp with bold black and white outlines making the series sleek but still very cartoonish. About three years into the successful run of OddParents, Nickelodeon gave Hartman a second series, Danny Phantom, which, while retaining the same visual style foundation of his first series, received a slightly more mature twist to its aesthetic. Unfortunately, the visuals were the only real twist made and the Danny Phantom never managed to acquire the same wit or sense of creative wonder that made OddParents enjoyable across a spectrum of age groups. What Hartman delivered instead was a product with the same amount of flair but an episodic formula that could have been just about any other show with a sense of humor that felt like a blander OddParents or a severely dialed back Invader Zim.
In its first season, Danny Phantom takes a novel approach to the introduction of its central character: it leaves the backstory to a well-performed intro song and just jumps into Danny’s life as a boy struggling to live as both a normal kid and the gatekeeper between our world and that of the ghosts. It doesn’t really do much to develop Danny Fenton or his friends Sam and Tucker, and instead it just conjures up wacky adventures where a ghost with a weird fetish breaks free and Danny has to shepherd it back from whence it came as his friends assist in comically misguided ways. The problem is, this formula is nearly identical to the OddParents formula (the two kids get into trouble, OddParents help or make it worse, and they fix the problem in some strange way). Hartman could just as easily have ported the episodes of the first season of Danny Phantom into seasons of the OddParents and no one would have been the wiser, giving the better, longer running show 4 extra seasons.
As it is, Danny Phantom is its own entity, but it’s a tepid effort at best and doesn’t come close to some of the weirder and more imaginative cartoons that have called Nickelodeon home in the past.
DVD Bonus Features
The set includes the twenty episodes of the first season of Danny Phantom. That’s it.
"Danny Phantom: Season 1" is on sale September 13, 2011 and is not rated. Action, Adventure, Animation, Sci-Fi. Directed by Wincat Alcala, Butch Hartman. Written by Steve Marmel, Butch Hartman. Starring Colleen Oshaughnessey, David Kaufman, Grey Delisle, Kath Soucie, Ron Perlman, S Scott Bullock, Rickey Dshon Collins.
