As a result of a comment in the last top ten, I now present to you the Cartoon Vault entry Kung-Fu Dino Posse, sadly made by we British.
Now let me tell you how British Cartoon Channels work; we borrow Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon & Disney along with the remnants that used to be Fox Kids and we take the content from them into three of our main channels.
Most of our homegrown stuff is put into our pre-school shows like Peppa Pig which I believe is now airing in America, but when it comes to main stream cartoon making, selling to our main channels is non existent and our best works like Amazing World of Gumball get sold to Cartoon Network.
What we have left are attempts like this.
This is the biggest most shameless ripoff of the Ninja Turtles I've ever seen. We have four dinosaurs in Kung-Fu gear; Kane the T-Rex, Lucy the Triceratops, Jet the Pteranodon & Chow the Stegosaurus. The idiot human in the picture is Edgar, a reluctant human helper character 15 years out of his comfort zone who conveniently designed all the weapons at the best possible time.
The villains this time are two raptors named Skor & Skrap, one is obviously confident the other is plain stupid.
Unlike the Turtles who can disguise themselves with trench coats the Dino Posse make no effort to hide their appearance as the best they can come up with are old school rap clothing from the 90s.
The whole plot revolves around mystic gems that when shot by a device the villain somehow has can turn the nearest object or person into a giant rampaging Dinosaur, and this is where it gets silly. Here is a list of some of the dinosaurs we see.
A Granny Dinosaur
A Rapstar Dinosaur
A Pickle Dinosaur
A Beauty Queen Dinosaur
A Skater Dinosaur
A Clown Dinosaur
You get the idea, it's utterly stupid. When things get out of hand the four main characters fuse into a giant dinosaur made of qualities of each species, so they ripoff Power Rangers as well, why not. After the Dino of the week is beaten they turn the big dino into a fossil and end the episode.
Production values seem to be a bit mixed, you can tell which episodes had someone off sick in the production team. There are parts where the episode slows down for no reason, some sounds seem to be missing and Kane's voice actor goes in and out of colds a little too frequently, plus some of the stock footage seems to randomly appear, other than that when they make the effort you can see the effort and for a series made on such shameless values that's not a bad achievement.
What do I think? It's not terrible, and with 60 episodes under it's belt has lasted longer than expected, it's a little out of date to try ripping off Ninja Turtles now but the benefits of doing it means that no one else is stupid enough to try it so you have no competition and being British made means it still gets an audience in it's country of origin, that's how Winx Club can keep making shows in it's native Italy despite not nearly getting the same treatment Stateside.
Episodes of Kung-Fu Dino Posse are easy to find on Youtube, see for yourself the power of crappy British cartoons.
Cartoon Vault: Kung-Fu Dino Posse
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