Crime?
Hope your New Year is splendid!
This is a clip from Danny Phantom's Christmas special.
In the episode, Danny meets a ghost
who is set on destroying Christmas and punishing Danny.
To do this, he begins to write a Christmas poem,
one that Danny is at the mercy of.
As he writes, Danny's story unfolds
and we hear that ghost narrate the story in rhyme.
The same year this episode is released,
the first trailer for Stranger than Fiction
released-- a movie starring Will Ferrell in which the character
is at the mercy of a narrator who is writing a story starring
Will, the exact same reality as Danny Phantom's Christmas
episode.
See, it's easy to attach a negative connotation
to words like trope or cliche.
But Danny Phantom is from the ground up built
on cliche, built on tropes.
And in a way, the show is great because of it.
Danny Phantom knew how to be the best version of things
we've seen before and it was awesome.
Look at you.
You're too excited to speak.
So I'll just go on speaking.
It starts with Danny Fenton himself.
Danny is your typical hero protagonist,
but played heavily into the archetypal animated vigilante.
His identity is a secret.
It has to be, because, of course,
his parents are ghost hunters and Danny is a ghost.
His sister is never on his side because, well, that's
how these things go, but one day she'll come around.
And because of Danny's ghostly affliction,
he only fits in with his two best friends who help him
in the real world with his ghostly duties and, of course,
Danny and his female best friend play
will-they-won't-they for most of the series.
Danny even as his own version of going
Super Saiyan or the Sailor Moon transformation.
I'm going ghost!
Yeah, well, that's just a cliche.
There's really no way around that.
But yet, the series still elevates almost all
of those other cliches.
Danny's ghost hunter parents?
Yeah, they're zany and absurd, but they're also not
just there for laughs.
They drive the plot consistently.
They frame Danny's struggles in relationships.
They are good characters.
And throughout the series, the question
of how they react to Danny's identity
is an interesting one, given that there's more to them
than just ghost catching.
They're not like in Fairly OddParents, funny, talking
heads exclusively.
Danny's sister, actually, sees some growth, eventually
becoming a real ally for Danny and his ghostly pursuits,
developing real nuance.
And that will-they-won't-they between Danny and Sam?
Well, that relationship is well written enough
that you actually care that the idea of them
finally will being matters.
These are cliches done better, specifically
from a protagonist point of view.
And the same goes for the show's action side.
Return to me my sword, so my reign of terror can begin anew.
I can bring the sword back by midnight,
but the reign of terror is kind of a deal breaker.
The show's conflict accomplishes something similar.
Danny, the kid, struggles with typical coming of age fair.
He has difficulty socially with girls,
he doesn't always fit in, as already mentioned.
He doesn't always agree with his parents and school still sucks.
And this is where most shows would stop.
Danny would grow slowly throughout the show,
overcome these very small normal struggles
and be all the better for it.
Instead, the show very smartly parlays those problems
into ghostly ones, into new power
that Danny has to learn to use to overcome his foes
and his problems that are a bit more normal.
He doesn't just grow as a kid-- he grows as a ghost
simultaneously, and we see that growth manifest physically
in the form of those powers.
Is this a new ghost power?
Powers we can see.
Growth we can see.
And powers that, by the way, are serialized
throughout the series.
They exist episode to episode.
The growth remains.
And while those ghost problems are handled similarly,
remember Chip Skylake from The Fairly OddParents?
Yep, well, he's here as well, except now
is a girl and a villain.
One of Danny's greatest foes, a villainous version
of himself, as to be expected.
Here is Fright Knight, a medieval knight
that wants to oppress and control everything
and makes declarations in rhyme.
And of course, the show premieres with an episode
about an evil lunch lady.
You've almost certainly seen all of these villains, these very
ubiquitous tropes in other places.
But again, it's about how they're handled,
how well they're done.
She is also arguably as memorable
as any villain in an animated show outside of Avatar.
Danny's battle with his future self
is a relatively complex character study hidden away
in bright ghostly colors.
Fright Knight is genuinely funny and that evil lunch lady
his relatable horrifying.
None of these characters exist for the sake
of being unoriginal.
Instead, Danny's foes are all almost always
some of the best versions of these cliches put to screen.
They're not cliche for cliche's sake.
And in their variety, whether they're terrifying, funny,
surprisingly thought provoking, they are interesting.
But all of this only works if the show gets
one very specific thing right.
Get behind me.
Wow.
I feel safe.
Danny Phantom embodies two words perfectly-- self aware.
Danny Phantom is as self-aware as a show of its kind can be
and because of that, and because the writers play on that,
all of its tropiness, its cliche,
plays humorlessly, sometimes even bordering on satire.
It knows it's tropey.
It knows that evil lunch lady is the same evil lunch
lady that Codename--
Kids Next Door played with on Cartoon Network.
It knows its fight with future Danny
is something that science fiction is presented
to his audience a dozen times over the previous four decades.
And it does Scooby Doo has seen its fair of oppressive knights.
And because of that self-awareness,
it can be better, and importantly, funnier
than some of those other things.
Danny's ghostly parental problem is amped up
to absurdity, written as a ridiculous obsession that
knows no bounds.
And so, Danny reacts to that accordingly.
It's eye-rolling.
It isn't oh, my god, what will I do?
It's relatably why are my parents like this?
When Danny starts body hopping in a season one episode,
it isn't to discover what it's like to walk in someone else's
shoes to get perspective on the outside.
Well, not really.
Instead, the entire premise is a vehicle for one
of the show's funniest episodes, joke, after joke, after joke.
by identifying how the show's tropes normally play out
within the context of the writing process,
the writers are able to find ways
to play with them instead of just representing
them or recreating them.
Danny Phantom writers clearly believe
that you can be original without building
a wholly new structure.
You can make something great by building on top of a structure
that's already been built. In nowhere
does all of this coalesce more clearly
than that aforementioned Christmas special.
Santa Claus is a ho, ho, hoax.
Christmas episodes, or specials, are ripe for tropes,
and I think Danny Phantom's self-aware take on those tropes
makes for something special here.
Everything, and I mean everything,
in the Christmas episode is a cliche.
Danny is the curmudgeonly Scrooge,
the Christmas detractor that must learn and understand
the meaning of Christmas before his problems can be solved.
But here, Danny knows this.
Throughout the entire episode, he hates Christmas, the malls,
the shopping, the sounds.
And he knows that he's supposed to love it.
He knows his villain Watson to understand it.
He just doesn't care.
The ghost that narrates and controls
the story, the one trying to teach Danny a lesson?
Yeah, Danny also knows that this trope is flat-out
ridiculous and absurd.
He himself points it out as a trope and his resistance
in mocking of the idea is consistently funny.
And his parents insistence on catching Santa
creates situational comedy that sure is cliche,
while Santa is fake, haha, but is also super
well written and again, incredibly humorous.
The episode is a ghostly Christmas Carol.
It knows that it plays with that,
and it's great regardless.
It may not be the best episode in the series one,
but it is a microcosm of what's so special about the show
to begin with.
Danny Phantom isn't this wholly original animated paranormal
sci-fi tale.
It isn't that by design.
The show only ran for three seasons, which is criminal,
considering just how much potential this universe had
to be explored, how much more there was to see.
Danny Phantom is, in my opinion, one of Nick's best shows.
A show that understood its audience, and most importantly,
understood its identity better than so many
other animated products.
And because of that, I think the show
is a great lesson for anyone with an idea, a story to tell.
It's great to focus on being the most original thing you
can conjure up.
Originality is never a bad thing.
But it's also worth remembering that ideas
are meant to be played with.
They're not meant to exist in isolation.
They're meant to be explored.
Sometimes being original doesn't mean getting there first.
It means doing things differently.
Doing things better.
And nowhere is that clearer than here.
I'm going ghost!
[MUSIC PLAYING]