The 20-year-old Cartoon Network franchise never lost sight of the childlike joy that comes with being a superhero.
For people who’ve made action-focused western animation a key part of their life, 2005 is an important year. It got off to a great start with Avatar: The Last Airbender, which helped get the non-converted into anime and serialized storytelling that felt mature to anyone in its intended target audience back in the day. At the end of that same year, the demographic got Ben 10, a show equally as important as Avatar but in its own way.
The debut project of animation studio Man of Action and first released December 27, 2005, the Cartoon Network series follows a 10-year-old kid named Ben Tennyson who finds an alien watch called the Omnitrix, which lets him morph into one of 10 aliens for 10 minutes at a time. With Ben, his cousin Gwen, and their Grandpa Max spending their summer vacation traveling the country, each episode had Ben use a handful of aliens to fight villains like monster clowns, secret orders, and other aliens looking to take the Omnitrix for themselves.
On its face, it’s a pretty simple idea for a kids’ show, but execution-wise, it was basically perfection. Man of Action’s founding team was comprised of American comic book writers and artists like Joe Casey and Duncan Rouleau, whose collective credits included Marvel, DC, and Image Comics. Once you know that pedigree, it’s just a matter of clocking what influences run through the show, like the Kirby Krackle or Kevin Levin being a mashup of Super-Skrull and Metamorpho. What made it work was the earnest playfulness that ran throughout, whether it was that still-catchy theme song or Ben’s aliens themselves. The way he slams that dial and transforms, who wouldn’t want to be something called XLR8 or Four Arms?
So it’s not surprising that Ben 10 became a big deal for Cartoon Network with a four-season run, three movies (one of which was live-action), and a tie-in video game.
