Fantasy Television & Animation

What it is

Fantasy television is any series, miniseries or TV film built on magic, myth or invented worlds, from live-action epics to cartoons. It overlaps with its cinematic sibling, fantasy film, in subject but differs in shape. A film must close its story in two or three hours; a series can run for dozens of hours across years, which is exactly the scale of the doorstop fantasy novel and the long-running tabletop campaign.

For most of its history the genre lived at the margins of the schedule: children's animation, comedies about witches and genies, syndicated adventure shows. Its modern identity was forged in two places. Animation kept fantasy on screen when live-action effects were too expensive, and prestige cable and then streaming, beginning with Game of Thrones, turned it into the most lavishly funded drama on television.

Origins

Early television flirted with the fantastic through anthology series such as The Twilight Zone (1959) and sitcoms like Bewitched (1964), in which magic intruded on suburbia. Secondary-world fantasy arrived through animation. On November 27, 1977, NBC aired Rankin/Bass's The Hobbit, animated in Tokyo by Topcraft, as a Sunday-night special; its teleplay won a Peabody Award.

The 1980s turned Saturday morning into fantasy territory. Filmation's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) sold barbarians and sorcerers alongside a toy line, and the same year CBS launched the Dungeons & Dragons animated series, co-produced by TSR and Marvel with Gary Gygax as a co-producer, in which six children are pulled into the Realm and each given a D&D class. It ran until 1985, amid complaints from activists during the Satanic Panic. In Japan, the 1990 anime Record of Lodoss War adapted a saga that had begun as "replays," published transcripts of Dungeons & Dragons sessions in the magazine Comptiq, making it an ancestor of both anime fantasy and actual play.

Evolution

In the 1990s syndication brought campy sword-and-sorcery to prime time with Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995) and its spin-off Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), while Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) made urban fantasy a television staple. The 2000s added miniseries adaptations, among them a 2004 Earthsea for the Sci-Fi Channel that departed so far from Le Guin's books that she publicly criticized it, and Hogfather (2006), from Terry Pratchett's Discworld. The BBC's Merlin (2008–12) retold Arthurian legend for families, and Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005–08) proved animated fantasy could carry serious serialized storytelling.

Then came Game of Thrones (2011–19), HBO's adaptation of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Its Grimdark politics, shocking deaths and dragons made it a global event, and it won a record 59 Primetime Emmys. The streaming services raced to find the next one: Netflix's The Witcher (2019), from Andrzej Sapkowski's novels; Amazon's The Wheel of Time (2021) and the enormously expensive The Rings of Power (2022); HBO's prequel House of the Dragon (2022).

Animation found new ambitions too. Netflix's Arcane (2021), set in the world of the game League of Legends, showed games could be adapted with prestige; the anime of Sword Art Online (2012) spread the game-world story that feeds LitRPG. Most striking, Critical Role's crowdfunded The Legend of Vox Machina (2022) turned a streamed D&D campaign run by Matthew Mercer into an adult animated series on Prime Video. Stranger Things (2016–25), meanwhile, put a D&D game at the heart of a horror-fantasy hit and helped introduce the hobby to new audiences.

How to tell it apart

Fantasy television vs fantasy film. Length and rhythm. Film favors spectacle and compression; television favors character, politics and the slow build. Game of Thrones could follow dozens of point-of-view characters because it had 73 episodes.

Fantasy vs other "telefantasy." British critics use "telefantasy" to cover everything fantastic, from time travel to ghosts. Science-fiction series explain their wonders; supernatural horror uses them to frighten. Fantasy in the narrower sense builds on magic, myth and invented worlds, though shows like Buffy happily straddle the lines.

Fantasy animation vs children's television. Not every talking animal makes a fantasy show. The genre label fits when a series is built around fantasy's furniture, wizards, quests, magic swords, dragons, as He-Man and the D&D cartoon were, and increasingly when it is aimed at adults, as Arcane and Vox Machina are.

Fantasy television vs actual play. An actual-play show is a real game recorded as it happens; a scripted series like Vox Machina is written, voiced and animated afterward, even when it adapts one.

Where to start

• The Hobbit (1977): Rankin/Bass's television Middle-earth, the starting point for many viewers.
• Dungeons & Dragons (1983–85): the Saturday-morning show that carried the game to children who had never rolled a die.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005–08): serialized animated fantasy at its finest.
• Game of Thrones (2011–19): the show that made epic fantasy prestige television.
• The Legend of Vox Machina (2022– ): a tabletop campaign reborn as animation.
• The Rings of Power (2022– ): Tolkien's Second Age at blockbuster scale.