Shows You Assumed Were More Popular

[Pooky]

My perception is that if you were in the target audience at the time, or a parent or sibling of someone who was, there's a good chance you're familiar with shows like Prime, Animated and the Unicron trilogy, but only the Original series and the live action movies are really recognisable to the general public. A possible exception is Beast Wars, but that didn't seem to help Rise of the Beasts that much.

 

[Red Arrow]

My perception is that if you were in the target audience at the time, or a parent or sibling of someone who was, there's a good chance you're familiar with shows like Prime, Animated and the Unicron trilogy, but only the Original series and the live action movies are really recognisable to the general public. A possible exception is Beast Wars, but that didn't seem to help Rise of the Beasts that much.

Yes, exactly, this is also my impression. As controversial / hated as Beast Wars was, I think it was still quite popular compared to all of the Transformers series that came after it.

 

[Darklordavaitor]

Maybe it's because that was the primary Transformers series of my childhood (give or take Armada, or Robots in Disguise's brief run), but Beast Wars has always seemed to me to be the only series close to the original 80s Transformers in popularity. Not nearly on that level, but a reasonably popular series from the time.

I wasn't in the target demo, but I was a fan of Transformers Animated and it did appear to be somewhat popular, but hardly as generation-defining as the original.

 

[Vuxovich]

Judging by Christy Hui's words, XIaolin Showdown's spin-off Xiaolin Chronicles was a ratings hit. But the Disney XD broadcast was cut short after 20 episodes. Weird (in my opinion).

 

[JoeMabbon]

I'm gonna cheat and talk about film franchises. Right before Despicable Me 2 came out, I labored under the mistaken view that Despicable Me and Megamind were roughly equal in popularity. I was very wrong.

Speaking of Unkitty, I didn't expect the Lego Movie franchise to burn out so quickly.

 

[Goldstar!]

This one isn't a cartoon, but it's got puppets, so it's cartoon-adjacent:

When Muppets Tonight was airing on ABC, I thought that the show was doing well, until a read an issue of TV Guide that had a list of shows that would or wouldn't be returning the following season and Muppets Tonight was listed under the heading of "Probably Gone".