Road Rover 20th Anniversary Script

Road Rovers… 20 years….
It is hard to imagine that once upon a time, major Networks like, FOX and ABC, actually had an entire line of shows for kids not only Saturdays, but after and before school stuff too. They all had their own diverse line up, of action shows like Power Rangers, educational shows like Science Court and Magic School Bus, and variety of anime and cartoon shows.
Today…  its mostly just talks shows,  kid friendly nature/animal shows… and pretty much NO cartoons whatsoever. Hell, even the Networks made for kids, like CN, Nick, and Disney, BARELY have more than 6 new shows on Saturday morning altogether! Everything else is either a rerun of a show that aired earlier in the week, or an reairing of a show they had an affiliate channel of theirs that you have to payextra.
So yeah… Saturdays are kinda… dead. But the memories of them will live on in those who remember those days well.
One of these memories is an old KidsWb show called Road Rovers. A show about barking, scratching, Frisbee catching presidential pets who transform into cool canine crew who drive cars and jets. The show itself is a parody of the Animal Superhero Genre that the Ninja Turtles started in the 80s, but done in a way like how Freakazoid parodied superhero shows, having fun and not taking itself seriously.
I would go into more detail of the show… but considering you click THIS video to hear about Road Rovers, chances are you already know everything about it, either by finding all 13 episodes  online/DVD, looking it up on some random article online, or from someone else who has done a WAY better video. Like my friend MDThornton83. He has covered the show with a fine comb in a series of video reviews of it (links here). He covers A LOT of ground for a franchise that has only 1 season of episodes that briefly aired for awhile before being canned… and nothing else until the DVD release last year.
Yeah, aside from CN bumpers (back when a full new episode was an half an hour than an quarter-hour on CN) and a background cameo in Sylvester and Tweety mysteries there was nothing else of this show. And it took years for Road Rovers to be on DVD, coming AFTER Pinky Eylmera, and the Brain!
Now that I got that little rant out, I will now cover the one thing I felt that MDT failed to cover in his videoes about Road Rovers and how it was so great.
The fans.
For nearly 20 years, this show had nothing to its name. No VHS tapes, no toys, no comic book spin-offs. Not even a one of those cheap sets of POGS or trading cards you just collect. Absolutely nothing.  
But despite that, the people who did watch the show and enjoyed it wanted more, even when it was pulled off the air, sending in letters and an occasional Tennis-ball, to the network suits to either bring it back for another season, or at least give it a video release.  And the end result was… well, like I said, there was nothing else to the franchise expect for the DVD set last year (YEARS after Pinky, Elmyra and the Brain)… and even then it has no special features and edited out the infamous “Russian Name Song” in the last episode.  So yeah, a small flawed victory from the results of years of fighting and pleading… but still worth it.
And while a good amount of the fans were battling for new content, another good chunk of the Road Rover fanbase set out to immortalize what little content they had already. There were several fansites dedicated to show, WAY back when programing and managing sites was a complex skill for one to have at the time, before it was all cool like today. Some of these fansites were made for creators to post fanart and fanfiction of the show, and they were actually good….” Were” being the “keyword here.  Long before this  video was posted, most of those fansite have been either abbadoned, with no update in over a decade, or just been taken down, because the people who ran them didn’t feel it anymore… which is understandable, considering that, again, it is a franchise from the mid 90s with only 1 season to its name. This something that only infamous nerds of Star Trek, Star Wars, and fans of select few animations can pull off. And Road Rovers had DOZENS.
And remember, This was WAY back when sites like Fanfiction.net and DeviantART were just hitting their stride before join being as big as they are now, made mostly for beginners (I myself started around in middle school) to make it easier for people to mass upload their stuff in on place, and it would be years before Road Rovers stuff stood out from more of the mainstream stuff of the time.
Most of the Road Rover fansites consisted of first generation of user-made content webrings, like angelfire or tripod. I have no idea how these sites were ran or managed. But if it is anything like editing with Wikipedia when it started, it was complex and tedious.
Not only that, but the people who created and ran the sites all the while making great stuff by the barrel, writing multiple stories with different settings and drawing and uploading pictures back when coding for that big of a pain in the butt.
So, just to be clear, people were running and operating super basic sites while making multiple forms of art and stories… all for fun… for a show that just lasted one season. That requires both great dedication and love.
Something that Road Rovers never got from WB. (I will NEVER let this go, they skimmed over 2 Tiny Toon specials for it!) But looking at the show from a standard, unbysis, point of view, the show itself was just par for the course at the time, just a one of many things that everyone was trying to cash in at the time. But for those who watch it, they enjoyed it all. They enjoyed the colorful characters, the puns and jokes that centered around dogs that we all heard before, and they are made aware of some the flaws the shows has,  but still enjoyed it regardless. In fact, I think the early cancellation help the fanbase to grow significantly, allowing fans to build up more from where the show left off more than what could ever happen if it actually had a 2nd season or any continuation.
So… to all the Road Rover fans, both the new thanks to DVD release, to the original fans who watch it during the intial run; all I have to say is this:
Thank you.
Even with the show having so little to it’s name in terms of official over the years, it is still rich in fans. The fans who kept the memory of the show going for all these years.
And who knows, maybe in the future, it will be remade/rebooted like every other show today. Maybe it will be just like it or not, being too serious or too goofy. But regardless, even if something new and different comes along to the franchise, the fans will still fondly remember the original in their own way.
For me, Road Rovers will be that show I will just miss because it was on a channel I didn’t have or was at a timeslot when I was at school, but from the few moments I have seen it, it was just a fun adventure show that made me daydream of stories and help lead me to some great friends and artists online.
And… that’s all I can say for the 20 years of a Saturday morning cartoon. What about you?
I’m SilverZeo, and it’s time for me to hit the road, Rovers.