Whats wrong with the series?

[LBTFan13]

There are flaws with the show, but I wouldn't say they are as bad as people are making them out to be.

I find it really surprising that people are picking the acting apart, because it's more or less the same cast from the later sequels. Cera, Ducky and Petrie are all from LBT V and later, and Littlefoot is from LBT XIII. If I'm being honest, I thought the acting was fine. We were lucky that the producers even bothered to grab voice actors from the sequels to do this show. It's normal tradition for a TV show based off of a movie to have completely different voice actors for a lot of the characters, while there are some exceptions to this. Now if we are talking about the acting of the side characterss (Ali, Hyp, Rhett, etc...) then I can see where the acting is unsettling. But looking at the main seven, I didn't really see any problems with the acting.

While I agree that some of the songs are not the best, the repetitiveness I'm a little forgiving towards. It's not surprising that a lot of the songs are reused because it is a TV series, so it's more cost efficient to just use different versions of the same song. Does it make the songs tolerable? Not all of them. However, I can understand why they would be repetitive.

I found the plots acceptable for TV episodes. Of course, some were better than others, but I didn't find them terrible. Sure they were not as expansive as the plots for the movies, but they are suitable enough to fulfill the requirements for a TV show. As for the plot holes, they are only so jarring because we are already long time fans of LBT. The target audience of the show, younger kids, are not going to be as familiar with the history of the franchise and its characters, so they won't notice any of the plot holes that we do. Yes it's not cool to us, but at the same time lets remember who the show was supposed to be geared towards.

The animation isn't the best, but it's not terrible. Sure Universal and Amberlin have created animated shows before, but there was a nine year gap between this and its previous show (I think Pinky, Elmira and the Brain was 1998), so I think it's only natural that the animation is not the best. Yes, they've been doing all of the sequels, but at the same time the sequels had a bigger budget than the TV series.

Is it a perfect series? Of course not. But does it really deserve the harsh criticisms some of us are giving it? I don't think so. It's not the best, but it could have been a lot worse.

[Malte279]

I agree. Personally I found the TV series not as bad as many people make it out to be and certainly much better than I feared it would be after it was announced. It does have its flaws of course (sometimes Littlefoot for example is drawn unusually "square jawed"), but there are also quite a few elements which I think do not get much credit though they are arguably entitled to get some.
One of the flaws of the series is of course that there is never a thorough explanation on where Ruby came from and how she and Chomper ended up in the Valley and why nobody had a problem with a sharptooth and a potential eggstealer living in the Valley. Perhaps that story would have been one for a future LBT movie that by all likelihood is not going to ever be made, but this gap also allows for us to think of our own stories. Which brings me to an important point that I feel works in favor of the series; the stories. Nearly everyone is bitching about the stories of the TV series, but quite frankly, personally I prefer them by far over the majority of fanfictions which have a deplorable tendency to mix up LBT with all kind of other franchises to the ends of some major bloodbath. I challange everyone complaining about the stories of the TV series to come up with stories of their own within the limits set by the land before time before before talking down the stories of the series too much.
True, there was room for improvement at points and true within the limits of LBT there is the consequence of repetition of the relatively limited number of possible events. But this very limitation of options I think was dealt with quite well by the plot writers of the series who did come up with some ingenuous ideas.
Another point I liked was how in the series they shiftet attention a little more to some of the other characters beside Littlefoot. There had been attempts to do that in the movies, but I do not see any of the movies of which one could say that Littlefoot was not THE maincharacter, while there were TV episodes focussing a lot more on the others to the point that in said episodes they really deserve the claim to that status that had up to then been reserved for Littlefoot.
And as for characters, there too the series deserves some credit. I was highly sceptical about Ruby at first, but I feel she does fill some character gaps that had not been covered by the other characters while she is given a very distinct personality and (very important) not a total Marry Sue either. The TV series also included the return of many characters from earlier movies which is exactly what LBT fans had always been asking for. Now okay, I do admit that with the high hopes long stuck to the announcement at the end of LBT 4 the return of Ali was a real disappointment. I don't like her showing up in the TV series either, but in defense of something that I didn't like I think one could make an argument that with Rhett being the only other longneck kid we ever see in that herd of adult and oldtimer longnecks Ali may be desperate enough to pretend to believe just about anything for the sake of some contact with someone not old enough to be a parent of her.

[Dilopho]

Why is Ruby an eggstealer?

[vonboy]

It's because she's Omnivorous, her species could resort to eating eggs if they can't find anything else to eat.

I'll just say that I HAVE thought of some good ideas that fit in the bounds of LBT. If you'd ever look at my fanfic (Which you've been avoiding just because it has a human in it, for shame), you'd notice there's actually some great ideas in there.

Let's see, one of my ideas is that longnecks use Saurus Rock as a sort of spiritual place where they can go to speak with relatives that passed on.

I came up with a story for how Chomper came to be accepted in the Great Valley. (Yes, I'm gonna knock the series for that.)

I give a reason why we never see the tinysauruses in the TV series. They're all scared of Chomper, so only come out at night to look for food. He discovers them one day when he falls into a cave.

I have an episode where Chomper get's caught up in a group of young fast biters, and is pretty much for to live with them for a bit. This group tries to hunt the Gang, and Chomper stands up and tries to stop it.