Prickles the Cactus

Pilots are often a treasure to behold, either they're good that could've been great shows, or something that are better off as just a one-off sort of thing. Then you have the middle ground where you don't mind it being a one-off, but also like it to continue on. This cartoon is somewhat the middle ground.

Title card of Prickles

During the 1990's, Cartoon Network was trying out different shorts that can be spun off into a full fledged series. They did this a few times, such as "What a Cartoon Show", but they might have viewers pick out which cartoon is the best, which is done in the form of "The Big Pick", a marathon of short cartoons that viewers can vote that can become a series, which they did for both summer of 2000 and 2001. One of the cartoons I wanna talk about is Prickles, a anthropomorphic cactus who lives in Cyclone Ranch with her dad and brother Bert and Egbert, and her main gimmicks is that shes is clumsy and fear of touching water as that makes her puff up. She was created by Denis Morella, and this was the first thing he worked for Cartoon Network after looking at his IMDb page, the other thing prior was Liquid Television for MTV. I was actually unaware about this cartoon until I was replaying some games Cartoon Network used to have called "Summer Resort", a episodic overhead view game where you play as a random character from the pilots and need to help out with the Cartoon Network characters with their problems. Turns out she was one of those characters you play in that game.

One thing that bothers me was that I'm not sure which came out first, as there was not only the pilot, but also a short cartoon released on Cartoon Network's official site prior to the revamp. Internet Archives states that it was in 2003, but the toon itself says it was released in 1999. I assume this was released on a different part of the official site during that time. But I'll discuss about both toons.

The first will be on the flash cartoon, which I found out was actually made alongside the pilot to help promote it. In the toon, Prickles is competing at the Miss Green Teen Pageant 2000, and she has to deal with her rival Becky and partner Cccynthia. Becky does try to juggle to show off and to give Prickles a run for her money by giving her the stuff to juggle as well. This doesn't go well as Marci was trying to eat the rats Prickles was juggling, which causes Becky to drop the goldfish bowls and the water swells up Prickles. Prickles does win, but she dislike the picture.

Like other flash cartoons, there some interactive parts you can poke around, like there's one part where you can make Prickles dance to the music of the jukebox, and the magazine part towards the end.

The other is the pilot which probably might've seen if you were watching Cartoon Network of summer 2000. Here, the ranch is in a severe drought and there's hardly any water to keep it going, as well as keeping everyone thirsty. Her dad Bert tells Prickles to find water using a stick, so both she and Marci decided to travel to find some, which they find a small cloud who was very troublesome until the magic stick pokes him. The cloud agrees to go with the two back to the ranch. Things go well until Sunny decides to be a dick and try to fry the cloud. Prickles calls out on him and whines that he gets carried away, then it gets worse when the cloud calls out for his mom, and torments Sunny for picking at her son and causes it to rain. Good news; no one is thirsty. Bad news; it's flooding. And that's pretty much it.

Both of the toons are pretty good for what they are. I like the colors more from the webtoon, while the animation on the pilot is better animated. The plots themselves aren't remarkable, but they're still very good to watch. The voice acting is very good, my personal favorites are Prickles and Marci. Prickles just sounds innocently adorable, while Marci has the deadpan snark tone which fits them very well.

Unfortunately, Prickles didn't became a full series after that summer, with the winner being  Billy and Mandy. Which I can't blame as that had the more interesting series out of the bunch. However, I still think Prickles could've had some potential to be s series as well, though I think the desert setting would've been boring for some, despite being only two cartoons on the cactus.

So what happened afterwards? Well, according to some users, the cartoon reaired one last time on May 2003 and as I stated above, Prickles became a playable character in the Summer Resort game afterwards. As for the creator, Denis actually got a bigger career when he worked for Disney, first working on the Disney Junior (formerly Playhouse Disney) show Higglytown Heroes, then finally his recent and biggest project Sheriff Callie's Wild West, which like Prickles takes place in the desert and features a talking cactus.

You can watch both cartoons on YouTube and through Internet Archives (which you can watch the webtoon here).