Disney's "The Replacements" Retrospective

Last month, I wrote about The Fairly Oddparents, a cartoon about a boy with fairy godparents that grant his every wish. While researching TFO and cartoons in the 2000s for that article, it brought up a lot of memories of shows I watched as a kid. 

At some point I asked myself, "Wasn't there a show on Disney Channel kind of like The Fairly Oddparents, but it was about two orphans with the power to replace any adult they don't like? Or did I just imagine that?"

Needless to say, this show wasn't just a Mandela-affect imagining or fever dream. 

I can't even find a high-res JPEG of this show. That's how obscure and forgotten it is.

The Replacements (no, not those other Replacements) was cartoon that ran on Disney Channel from 2006-2007 for 52 episodes. The plot is about two kids, Riley and Todd, who have a special cell phone that connects them to Fleemco, a company that replaces anyone they want with a "better" version. As a part of their deal with Fleemco, the kids got two parents to adopt them, a British spy named Agent K and a washed-up daredevil named Dick Daring.

The formula for every episode is as follows: Riley or Todd are bothered by some person, they use the Fleemco phone to replace them, the kids suffer unexpected consequences, and they learn a valuable lesson about life at the end.

Don't like your scout leader? Just pull out your cellphone and LITERALLY REPLACE HER

with someone else!

The Replacements reeks of cliches from the mid 2000s. Riley Daring is a girly girl who loves ponies and has a crush on the hot blond kid. Her brother Todd likes skateboarding and hates school. And of course, they've got their own Dumb Dad and Smart Mom to have zany adventures with. They all have snarky friends, including an evil school bully and a nerd who's the punching bag for all the jokes. 

More on this later.

Honestly, I don't remember much about this show at all. I definitely watched a few episodes here and there, but it wasn't something that I was a real fan of, not in the same way I loved Spongebob Squarepants, The Fairly Oddparents, or even Phineas and Ferb. Yet, this cartoon remained somewhere in the deep caverns of my memory, as it popped into my mind every so now and again.

Rewatching a few episodes on Disney+ (they still haven't uploaded Season 2), it's clear that the show doesn't go deep at all. It's very much a "comedy" cartoon, full of pop culture references and obvious jokes based on established cliches. 

But something about The Replacements interested me. For one, the creator, Dan Santat, ran his own blog to post updates about the process of running the show. It's very funny to read through and worth checking out if you want an inside look on what running a Disney cartoon was like in the 2000s. 

In case you wanted to know what a Disney Channel wrap party from 2007 looks like...

here you go.

As it turns out, one of the people who helped Dan Santat on The Replacements is a guy named Jack Thomas, who worked as a story editor for The Fairly Oddparents. None of this is to say that Disney stole from Nickelodeon, of course. While these two shows have similar themes and episode beats, they have clearly distinct styles and characters. 

Reading Dan Santat's blogs, we learn that he struggled a lot with working for television and preferred the creative freedom that comes with writing your own books, which is honestly relatable. Some of the changes he fought against, he actually won. Instead of being animated in Flash, The Replacements retained a hand-drawn quality that is still very charming to watch to this day. 

Santat's original concept design.

Okay, so how does the show itself hold up? I'll be honest, it's not super memorable. The kids Riley and Todd are pretty dull, and Dick Daring is just another doofus dad. The best character is probably Agent K, who delivers a lot of deadpan humor relating to tracking down evil scientists and the corrupt nature of global superpowers. There are a lot of jokes that actually made me crack up while watching, especially when it relates to social commentary as the kids replace one adult with a "superior" version. 

And - hold onto your hats - this is probably the best example of the "smart mom dumb dad" trope I've seen in a while. While Dick Daring can be an annoying character to deal with, his stupidity never actually hurts his family (unlike Cosmo from TFO...who coincidentally happens to be voiced by the same guy as Dick!). It also helps that Agent K isn't the brightest bulb herself. Her immersion in spy shenanigans sometimes makes her blind to what's in front of her. For the few episodes that focus on K and Dick's relationship, they actually make a cute couple.

"That can't be my husband! His hair isn't that fabulous! Obviously this is an impostor."

I don't think it's ever explained whether or not Dick and K were married before they became Todd and Riley's parents, but either way, the Darings make a really endearing family unit.

This is one of The Replacement's greatest strengths: its potential for appealing to different audiences. Obviously, kids will enjoy the power fantasy of being able to replace anything. As a person in their early 20s, I enjoyed this show because of how understandable the characters of Dick and K are. They often make jokes about how they have no idea what they're doing while raising their kids, but they still try their best.

I think that if this show were released in 2022, and with a few changes to the structure, this show could be a hit. Looking at the seminal cartoon Avatar: the Last Airbender (the show that every writer and their mother is trying to emulate), it is often praised for being enjoyable for multiple audiences. But instead of having The Replacements follow The Last Airbender model (not everyone can have genocide as a theme in their cartoon), I think that The Replacements should follow the Amphibia model. 

Check out a review of Amphibia by my friend Briana on her website!

Full disclosure: I haven't finished Amphibia. I'm midway through season 2, and from what I hear from my friends, there's more twists and turns and even a tear-jerking finale. 

But what I gathered from Amphibia (or at least the first season), it's that it straddles the line between serialized TV and episodic TV. 

TV writing 101: There are two types of shows.

1. Serialized shows that have a continuous story with each episode. The advantage is that you can build larger stories and reward viewers for sticking with the show and watching the characters change. These are your Avatar: the Last Airbender's and your She-Ra and the Princesses of Power's.

2. Episodic shows that "restart" the story with each episode. The advantage is that any casual viewer can pick it up without feeling like they missed out on anything. These are your Simpsons or Tom and Jerry's.

As it exists, The Replacements is very episodic. There are lots of running gags (like President George Washington's name being replaced as George Stapler), but there aren't any major story arcs that last more than one episode. 

The first season of Amphibia is very episodic. Each episode presents a new obstacle for the Plantar family of frogs as the human Anne Boonchuy fits into their world. You can probably watch most of season one out of order. But by the end of the first season, a twist happens that changes the way the story is told. Stakes are added that allows the writers to expand the story in the next season, and to change the settings and episodic cycle entirely.

In other words, the style of storytelling in Amphibia is "evolutionary," and I'd love to see something like that done with The Replacements.

Because of its "evolved" sense of storytelling, Amphibia was able to develop realistic characters and expand on them. It balances deep themes and childlike humor that appeals to all ages. On the contrary, The Replacements skirted a lot of topics that it could have gone deeper into, like what Todd and Riley's life was before being adopted. In a post Avatar: the Last Airbender and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic world, people of all audiences crave these pro-social kinds of stories. Let's just say the "found family" trope is so in right now, and The Replacements could totally capitalize on that.

                              

                                                    Fanart by RaygorMortis on Deviantart.com. 

Here's my pitch:

The Replacements begins with a 30-minute episode telling the origins of the characters. Basically, we go over all the exposition that we get in the show's theme song. Riley and Todd are orphans that discover a comic book that gives them access to a Fleemco cellphone, allowing them to "replace" anyone in their lives. First things first, they find themselves some parents. We also get to see Dick Daring and Agent K before they adopt the kids, and we answer key questions like, where they even married before all of this or were they "shipped" together by Fleemco? Both are interesting ideas full of potential. At first, Riley and Todd aren't used to their new parents, and are given the opportunity to return them to Fleemco. As the show establishes, each "replacement" is 100% voluntary (which was actually established in the 2006 show). But after some fun hijinks that involve a lot of family bonding, the Riley and Todd realize that they love their new parents, and decide to stay with them. By starting the series off this way, we can see different character interactions as the Daring couple and the kids meet each other for the first time. 

Season 1 continues with typical episodes of The Replacements that we've seen so far in the 2006 version - the typical formula of the kids replacing annoying adults and learning life lessons about honesty and appreciating what you have.

So what would Season 2 of this "evolved" story look like?

Here's the twist: Agent K, being the spy that she is, gets kidnapped. Not only that, but the kids' Fleemco cellphone is stolen. It's up to Dick, Todd, and Riley to get their mom back. Instead of the kids using the phone to replace people, Fleemco is used against them as people who are helping them on their mission are replaced by bad guys. Todd and Riley have to learn self-reliance on their own, until we get to the point where the two of them and their dad are on K's level of being super spies. 

Basically, we have an Incredibles-style super hero family.

All I want in life is an Incredibles TV show. That, and a few other things I'm not gonna get.

I'm not quite sure where we'd go with season 3, but having a spy main character opens up a lot of possibilities. 

Each episode can be episodic in nature, presenting a new "character of the day" to deal with, but the end of the season builds up to the ending of an arc. Since it's a show that, at its heart, is about a wacky family, I think this hypothetical Replacements reboot can do so much while staying relatively simple.

Today's cartoon audience has expanded. Shows like Amphibia, The Owl House, Trollhunters, Miraculous Ladybug, Voltorn, Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated, and plenty of others tell us that animation goes beyond being stupid stuff for kids. Cartoons and animation can be cleverly written, heartfelt, and innovative. 

When talking about his experience working on The Replacements, Dan Santat has gone on to say that "working creatively with a large corporation and numerous executives was rather frustrating because there was a feeling that there was a process of homogenization to try to appeal to as many kids as possible." This is sad when you consider the storytelling possibilities of a team that isn't restricted by corporate quotas and statistics.

With its premise and heart, The Replacements has a lot more potential than what the 2000s animation industry had in mind.

Oh, and one last final touch for my hypothetical reboot: MAKE DICK DARING A WOMAN. It's 2022, people! Riley and Todd should have two moms.

Happy Pride Month!!!