The Newcomers’ Introduction to Lemurian Legends and its Fandom

An Abridged History of Lemurian Legends and its Fandom From The Perspective Of A Fan

Written by Hailumbra with ample help from Nordwarf and Treearcher12. Special thanks to Reptilegirl for her invaluable contributions by giving her accounts of events mentioned in the essay.

Author’s Note from Hailumbra

This article is not meant to be complete and exhaustive retelling of the community history; rather it acts as a quick introduction to newcomers who may be confused by jargons and references to past events that they would be coming across in fan-contributed articles. While much efforts have been placed into confirming facts and trying to track down old faces (and believe me, I tried!), much of those records have been scattered among websites and even Usenet groups that have long went dormant and could only be retrieved using the help of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Many of the famous fan-base controversies have also been generalised or intentionally left out for brevity; if I tried to cover everything the article would be a hundred times as long and still cannot cover them all.

If you feel that any details is wrong, or that you or somebody has been wrongly represented and you wish to set things straight, please PM me and I’ll be happy to listen to your side of the story and set the accounts straight. However I cannot change history, so I will not entertain requests to manipulate confirmed facts. Threats or personal attacks are not tolerated and will be immediately reported.

Introduction

Lemurian Legends is a highly successful toy and television franchise first created by the KidsJoy company and now owned by Wonderland Entertainment Group. Throughout its thirty years’ existence, it has seen numerous reincarnations and spin-off, and gathered a large devout fanbase that has already spanned two generations. It ranked up there with Transformers, GI Joe, Barbie and My Little Pony as one of the most famous pop culture icons based on a children’s franchise.

The history of Lemurian Legends can be broadly divided into four incarnations of the canonical television shows, mirroring the trends of television animation; the edgy original from the eighties; the nineties age of television animation; the anime craze; and the critically-acclaimed revival. As you will see, the history of the fan community could be just as dramatic as the story arc of a Lemurian Legends episode, filled with conflicts, history, idols - and even villains.

Lemurian Legends: Heroes of Eternity (1984-1993)

The first television series bearing the trademark of Lemurian Legends was titled Lemurian Legends: Heroes of Eternity. Don Boken was the head producer of the show, working under KidsJoy’s fledging in-house animation studio. The studio had been churning out short-lived cartoons that were based on the company’s toy licenses like Turtle Knights and Star Tron, and Lemurian Legends was no exception. First aired in the summer of June 1984, it was a low-key cartoon made on shoe-string budget to promote KidsJoy’s new toy-line bearing the same name. Today the toys are considered prized collectors’ items, but back then sales of the toys were only lukewarm, partly due to intense competition from much more successful franchises of the time, and partly because the quality of the toys were generally considered ‘below-average’.

The cartoon, which starred a fellowship of five fantasy heroes led by Rex the human warrior, was not immediately popular due to its low-budget production. The abundant animation mistakes in the first season have even become the basis of an Internet meme that parallels the 60s Spider-Man meme. Despite its shortcomings, it captured the heart of kids and pre-teens with its bold stories, well fleshed-out characters, and an elaborately crafted fantasy world called Lemuria. One can almost sensed while watching that the creative people behind the show were aware that there was little chance of the show lasting beyond its pilot season of ten episodes, but rather than giving a sloppy work they took the boldest direction possible without fear of angering the television executives - since they didn’t expect to hold their jobs for long anyway.

By the time the pilot season had finished airing, Lemurian Legends had gained an impressive fan-base. Sales of the toys sky-rocketed, and the KidsJoy company, which was in financial difficulties back then, went all out to develop the franchise. They expanded the pilot into a full season, eventually ordering five seasons in total. The company also released more higher quality toys to meet rising demands - some of which were actually show-accurate. Over time, the fanbase grew stronger, and by the time the third season was aired it had become a global brand. The team behind the show became a legend in the animation circle, many of whom went on to work in bigger studios and had illustrious careers. Comics, novels, and even an officially-sanctioned fan-magazine titled Lemurian Chronicles were published in quick succession.

The pinnacle of the franchise was the release of the first movie, titled “Lemurian Legends: Rise of Umbra” in 1988. Showcasing the first appearance of the franchise’s now beloved villain Queen Umbra, it was an ambitious attempt at bringing the television to the big screen. Advanced bookings were sold out within minutes of announcement. The movie was hyped up to that point that it was regularly mentioned in news talk show right up to the night of the launch. Any kids whose parents could afford the tickets were excited to watch it.

The final critical reaction to the movie was between mixed to ‘acceptable’. While movie critics praised its art style, many panned its inaccessible story that relied on years of back-story to understand, its uneven pacing, and an ambiguous ending that was intended as a hook to future seasons but confused even fans. Regardless, the movie is still held up as a cult-classic today, and its public re-screening is now a regular fixture at Lemurian Legends themed conventions.

The earliest recorded LLHoE fan-club was called Rex’s Rangers and was founded in 10 January 1986. First mentioned in issue 28 of the Lemurian Chronicles magazine published on June 1986, its membership grew to a whopping 500 members at its peak. The fan-club also formed the first known online community, in the form of a dial-up bulletin board system, or BBS.

More online fan clubs would later sprung up on Usenet newsgroups, the biggest and most famous of which was the succinctly named lemurianlegendsfanclub launched in April 1988. Publicly available records of threads in those newsgroups painted a picture of a lively - and very vocal - community of fans who regularly discussed their interpretations of the story canon and share fan-fiction; a few have even published completely fan-written online magazines, containing unofficial toy catalogues that pointed dedicated collectors towards sources of rare mispainted toys.

Sadly, like many television icons of the era, good things often ended on a sour note. The studio behind Lemurian Legends was embroiled in a heated legal dispute with KidsJoy over payment and ownership of trademarks, and eventually the studio was dissolved after the end of season four, its talents going their separate ways and advancing their careers in other studios. KidsJoy outsourced the production of season five to multiple offshore studios at the same time, and fans considered that to be the show’s unmaking.

Season five was notorious for being the season with the worst animation and story arc, and it was exceptionally poorly received. There were rumours that television executives were firing highly talented animators and story-writers, because they were not churning out new characters fast enough to convert into merchandises. After the lacklustre reception to season five, KidsJoy decided to scrap the show entirely, and with that the first incarnation ended its television run.

To this day, fans still argue over whether season five was as bad as popularly assumed. Although its suffered from bad animation quality and having too many supporting characters, ardent fans maintain that it was still worthy to be considered canon. The argument in their favour was that Don Boken still retained creative control over the entire project to the end and kept the season’s writing standard in check. Detractors spun it the other way and said that this was the season that marked the decline of his career; Don Boken went on to other television projects, but none of them came close to matching Lemurian Legends in success.

Regardless of how the original series ended, Lemurian Legends had become recognized by KidsJoy as a commercial success, paving the way for the franchise’s second generation.

Adventures in Lemuria (1994-1999)

The nineties was a decade marked by high-quality television cartoons that are now regarded as nostalgic classics. The Disney company had set a high watermark for quality with The Disney Afternoon cartoon block on the television side, and their critically acclaimed movies on the theatre side. Nickelodeon’s had also made their mark with their line-up of popular cartoons like Hey Arnold! and Rugrats.

Sensing the need to step up their game, KidsJoy learnt from their past mistakes and engaged a more competent studio, Studio K, to produce a the new cartoon. This time, KidsJoy decided to change tactic and tried to market to a vastly untapped demography; girls. The series was titled Adventures in Lemuria, and it was helmed by a television producer named Janet Lee. This series was Janet Lee’s first debut as a television producer.

In order to make the new series more appealing to girls and tweens in general, the dark fantasy theme that made LLoE popular was significantly toned down. Complex and grim stories involving killer monster and tribal politics were swept aside, and replaced with moralistic tales espousing family love and friendships. Instead of solving conflicts with fighting prowess, the characters tried their best to solve disagreement first by talking and making compromises. Entire episodes were written revolving around characters attending balls or merely socialising. Most significantly, the entire cast of characters was completely revamped, and most of the main characters were female.

The resulting product was instantly despised by fans of the first generation upon first viewing. It earned its derogatory nickname “Barbies in Lemuria” by irate male fans, who were already sore after the disappointment of LLHoE season five. The fans even launched a boycott campaign aimed at trying to convince KidsJoy to revive the first generation. The campaign ultimately failed, but the negative publicity within the fandom stuck. To these days, many fans still refused to consider Adventures in Lemuria to be anything more than an atrocity, a black mark on the franchise’s history.

Despite the negative reactions from fans of the original series, Adventures in Lemuria became a runaway success among its true target audience, namely girls. It featured a more fluid animation than its predecessor, with rich colouring that is representative of the period’s animation style. The shows portrayed a wide variety of well-written characters, male and female alike, playing all sort of roles; as heroines and villains; as brave or cowardly; as princesses, thieves, or as knights. Parent support groups, who had criticised the previous series’ problematic portrayal of females - most of whom were damsels needing to be rescued by the male-dominated leads - applauded the new series as ‘a watershed in feminine media’. Toy sales sky-rocketed as a result - even though most of the merchandises were barely relevant toys such as kitchen sets, dresses and fashion accessories.

The overall themes of friendship and family, as opposed to the violent battles the original series was famous for, resonated well with children and parents of the era. The show was most notable for introducing characters that would become fan-favourite in later incarnations, including Genovefa the orphaned girl, and Finn the trainee dwarf wizard. Genovefa, better known as ‘Gen’ in the show and the fandom, followed the template of popular animated princesses; brave and good-hearted girls who lost their parents at a young age, with a fantasy twist that she was one of the reptilian ‘sea people’. In the competent hands of the show’s writers, Gen was established as a strong yet flawed heroine; one who grieved over the loss of her entire family, had to shoulder the impossible burden of protecting her nearly extinct race, and yet never wavered in the face of adversity.

Gen grew to be one of the most popular characters of the series, and to the ever-lasting cringe of die-hard LLHoE fans, she even replaced Rex (the mascot character of the original series, who was a human man) as the mascot character for AiL. Gen was similar to Sonic the Hedgehog, Scrooge McDuck and Optimus Prime who represented their respective franchises, but she carried the distinction of actually replacing the her predecessor. Ironically, it was pure business logic that made Gen’s ‘promotion’ possible; with the overwhelming popularity of princess-themed toys eating into their traditionally male-oriented toy line, and their market share already sandwiched by vastly more popular boy-oriented toys like Hot Wheels, KidsJoy’s marketing executives made the logical decision to replace Rex with a vastly more popular character as their marketing anchor.

Adventures in Lemuria lasted a respectable four seasons with a total of sixty episodes. A direct-to-video movie titled Adventures in Lemuria: Sword of Light was released in November 1998, its story taking place in between season two and three. It had some of the same problems as the first movie, mainly its uneven pacing and over-reliance on audience’s familiarity with the franchise, but it became known as a video rental staple for families with young girls for years to come.

Adventures in Lemuria was the show that expanded the female part of the fanbase till the gender ratio was almost fifty-fifty, and it remained so to this day. Adult fans, male and female alike, still talk fondly of this show as the show that empowered them with its message of self-confidence, and taught them the value of family ties and friendship. When Animation Club magazine ran a poll asking what were the readers’ fondest cartoon of their childhood, Adventure in Lemuria was voted number five among female readers, and number eleven overall.

Early on, AiL fans already desired to build their own online community where they could communicate globally. Riding the Web boom of the 1990s, they had created many fan websites, or ‘fan club web rings’ as they were called then, with what was then considered the latest in computer multimedia technology. Unlike the text-oriented mailing lists favoured by LLHoE’s fans in the past, the websites were colourful and loud, filled with galleries of fanart (mostly drawn in MS Paint as scanners back then were expensive and rare), fan-fictions written in wildly different fonts (yes, even entirely in Comic Sans), media study essays analysing the show and its impact on its audience, animated GIFs, and even the earliest Internet radio podcasts.

The podcasts, titled the Old Yewtree Lodge Bulletin, belonged to the then-highly popular fan-site Old Yewtree Lodge, named after a pub in the dwarf town Capilli, and founded in 1996 by a small group of fans in colleges. The podcasts discussed character analysis, story-telling, and contemporary social issues highlighted by the show. The podcasts would define the websites, drawing spirited discussions between viewers and the podcast crew on its - primitive but still serviceable - chat boards. The Old Yewtree Lodge website was eventually merged into Lemuria Fan Network in 2006. The podcast channel was still active at the time of this article.

The old podcast episodes, which were originally released only in low bit-rate RealPlayer audio files due to storage and bandwidth restrictions, were becoming increasingly difficult to play. Luckily, a former web administrator of Old Yewtree Lodge, known only by the alias ‘reptilegirl’, had successfully restored the old epsiodes. In 2009, ‘reptilegirl’ managed to relocate all of the original recording samples, painstakingly remastered them, and re-released them for free as lossless audio files. Today, the podcasts are available publicly on YouTube, transcribed and translated into multiple languages by volunteers.

Almost none of those websites have survived the passage of time, but they can still be seen on the Internet Archive, in their original static, Netscape Navigator-compatible, HTML-framed glory. Even though most of those websites had disappeared, they represented an exciting period of the LL fandom’s history, when fans had just discovered a much wider community of like-minded people from vastly different cultures and backgrounds, sharing their views and understanding one another better, bonded by love of the same cartoon. They also sown the seeds for the Lemurian Legends community we see today; one that follow the spirit of LL by valuing friendship, community and acceptance.

Lemurian Fantasy (2000-2009)

After the respectable success of Adventures in Lemuria - and despite the bitter backlash from older fans - KidsJoy decided that the next reboot would be outsourced to yet another studio. This time it would be produced by a Japanese studio called Element 8, helmed by Hiroshi Masumoro, a famed Japanese animation producer.

The first decade after the new millennium was when Japanese animation had fully entered mainstream pop culture. Imported shows like Pokemon, Digimon and Naruto had taken the world by storm, and their related merchandise became top-sellers in toy stores. To keep up with the popular trend and at the same time tap into the still untapped Japanese market, KidsJoy entered a licensing agreement with Tojo Inc. to market both the show and the toys, aiming to tap into anime craze.

The new show, titled Lemurian Fantasy, took viewers by surprise when the pilot episodes were first aired on January 2000. While it had more in common with LLHoE in terms of plot and cast - including the reappearance of Rex as a lead character - the new cartoon had a more comedic tone than both of its predecessors; beloved characters had their personalities tweaked to fit the new tone; and the world design incorporated elements of Japanese culture. Most importantly, the show was aired in Japan first, and re-dubbed at the same time before releasing in America, hence the show had two concurrent sets of voice cast.

This was the series that effectively bifurcated the fandom into two halves. Fans of earlier series were quick to deride the series for betraying its western fantasy root. Some heavily criticized its anime animation style for being lazy - which was a common complaint from western animation aficionado at the time - and ill-fitting for the general tone of the franchise. Fans of this series staunchly defended it, arguing that this was meant to be an alternative portrayal, and pointing out the hypocrisy of complaining about LFW without acknowledging that past versions also had problems of their own - the 80s version easily comes to mind.

Others were upset with the liberty that the writers had taken with their beloved characters. For example, Queen Umbra, who was usually portrayed as a ruthless and politically shrewd queen, was re-imagined as a vain, hot-tempered megalomaniac who regularly chastised her comic-relief henchmen for their incompetence. Robert, once an intelligent and calculative merchant, became a greedy penny pincher and womaniser who openly fawned at pretty female mice. Most controversially, Genovefa gained a more adolescent personality in a bid to make her more appealing to teens.

Despite the early backlash - or because of it - the show gradually gained a following among kids and teens of the period. Most of them were also fans of anime and were initially drawn by the novelty of a western animation reinterpreted by Japanese animators. It featured energetic theme songs by popular Japanese singers, lush animation showed off in elaborate fight scenes, and beautiful scenery art that evoked comparisons to Studio Ghibli movies. The story, despite some missteps, was mostly excellent, mixing the warfare and politics of the first series, and the moral themes of love, friendship and forgiveness.

Surprisingly, Gen benefited the most from the tweaks made to her personality. She started off as a whiny and self-centred teenager, but as the series progressed she learnt lessons on responsibility and gradually grew as a character, eventually growing into a mature woman and a formidable warrior. Her close, non-romantic friendship with Rex was also commended for portraying a realistic, non-romantic friendship between teens of opposite gender - not that it stopped their fans from still reinterpreting it as romance.

The first movie based on this series was released in 2003 after the second season. Titled Moon Dragon, it was given a decent theatre release that drew new fans to the franchise, most of whom had never heard of it until then. It confirmed the series as a commercial success, and any detractors who were still harping over its unfaithfulness to the original already had their voices drowned out by newcomers.

On the Internet, even more fan websites sprung up, this time in the form of forum websites that were vast improvements over the static websites of the past. One such website, LemuFellowship, grew from a simple forum into a sprawling community supported by a custom web platform - developed and administered by volunteer developers - and a large army of volunteer administrators. The website was known for hosting abundant fan-made content, including but not limited to fanarts; fanfictions; music; fan-made animations; and even fan-created video games. LemuFellowship was one of the biggest websites in the Lemurian Legends fandom, if not one of the biggest fan website ever dedicated to a animated television show.

Unfortunately, the website was also infamous for its darker aspect; the seedy, unsafe side that administrators refused to - or dared not to - eradicate as they claimed it went against the website’s mandate of supporting freedom of expression. Trolls frequently hung out there, taking advantage of the websites’ lax rules on membership to anonymously post hate content and questionable content of all sort without any fear of repercussion. To be fair, this is a problem that still afflicts every fan website to this day; however LemuFellowship received the most bad press because it was so visible within the fandom, and because most fans of LF back then were still children - not the kind of audience who could be expected to know how to avoid disturbing content on the website.

LemuFellowship was run mainly by the site’s large chain of administrators, each responsible for a section in the sprawling websites and ranked by seniority. Administrators can wield considerable power over the website section they control, and becoming one would grant special privileges and a higher status in the community. Unlike web-masters of the past who had complete control over the content of their websites, the founders of LemuFellowship gave the users almost complete freedom over how they organize themselves and administer their sections - they only intervened to remove illegal content and oversee elections into their inner circle of ‘core’ administrators. Unfortunately, this lack of tight oversight meant that administrators of the website had numerous public spats that were allowed to grow. Conflicts ranged from the frivolous - such as a disagreement over which character is the best - to serious matters of plagiarisms and smear campaign among rival administrators.

The most infamous incident to have happened to the LemuFellowship website was the ‘Summer Blackout’ incident, which occurred in May 2005. A long-running spat between two rival teams of administrators in LemuFellowship, both running fan-art image boards, led to one administrator exploiting an unreported bug in the website’s administrator web-page to sabotage his rival’s board. The ‘hack’, which was later revealed to be an amateurish SQL injection attack*, back-fired spectacularly by wiping out the website’s entire database, bringing down the entire website for almost four weeks.

(An SQL injection attack is an attack that took advantage of weaknesses in a website’s back-end code that handle database transactions, potentially allowing attackers to read privileged information or - in this case, accidentally - erase the data. )

It took the website’s core developers eight pain-staking days to restore just the static content from backups (complicated by poor backup practices by the administrators), and for another three weeks the website could not support user login. In the aftermath, the culprit - who shall remained unnamed - was permanently banned, and after a week of chaotic finger-pointing, the two teams involved in the dispute voluntarily resigned from their posts. The owners of LemuFellowship tightened the admission criteria and rules of conduct on users and site administrators, and the incident was never repeated again.

Outside the drama, the show chugged along smoothly, creating more story arcs and producing spin-offs covered in other mediums like video games and manga comics. An RPG game titled Lemurian Fantasy: Trial of Oengus, based on the back-story of Oengus, was released during the season break between season two and three on the Nintendo DS. The game was a moderate hit in the public, but it became a sensation within the fandom. So much so that pirated copies of the game flooded fan-sites within days of the game’s release.

KidsJoy, who had up till then used a hands-off approach on the LL fandom, cracked down on websites hosting the pirated game by dishing out cease-and-desist orders. Most websites were only happy to comply and banned all mention of the pirated game on their forums, but a few refused to comply, resulting in them being forcefully taken down. This move, while legally justified, soured relationship between KidsJoy and the LF fandom, leading the more hardcore group to even proclaim that Tojo, which had not taken any similar legal action against the fan websites, should be the only true owner of LL.

After yet another three seasons, the canon storyline culminated in another movie titled Curse of the Red Eclipse. Released in 2006, the movie was notable for redeeming Umbra by having her joining the heroes in a battle against an even greater evil. The movie was more well-received by the general public than previous movies, and it is now widely considered to be the franchise’s best movie to date with its strong writing, epic climatic battles, and an ending that nicely wrapped up the major story arc. It ended with Queen Umbra’s isolated kingdom finally welcomed back to the larger Lemuria community, and the heroes achieved their personal goals of self-discovery and redemption.

Unfortunately for fans, the second movie was destined to be the series’ final chapter in animation. The industry-wide shift away from original animation to live action shows, coupled with declining sales of toys, led KidsJoy to shift their business focus away from their own trademark and onto licensed products based on teen celebrities and music stars. Plans for three more seasons of LF were quietly cancelled without explanation. It was an immensely disappointing moment for all fans alike; their only solace was that their beloved cartoon had ended on a strong note.

Tojo, still tapping the strong fan base in Japan and elsewhere, soldiered on by continuing the story in a popular manga series titled Lemurian Fantasy: The Next Generation that picked up where the movie left off. The manga covered a new major story arc that was already planned for three cancelled seasons. It focused on the offspring of Gen and her comrades, who took over their parents’ role in defending their world and repairing the damage caused by their ancestor’s wars. For a significant period of time, Tojo became synonymous with Lemurian Legends, resulting in younger fans even mistaking LL for a purely Japanese creation.

After a whopping ten years since the first episode of Lemurian Fantasy first aired, the major story arc of Lemurian Fantasy finally ended in the comic with a grand conclusion that tied up all of the minor story arcs, leaving a happy and unambiguous ending that satisfied its grown-up fans. To this day Lemurian Fantasy was still considered one of the best reincarnation by fans, second only to the original - and even now this ranking is still a major source of contention among fans.

For some fans, the anime style was still just too different for them to accept, and within them were the minority who unquestionably looked down on all fans of this series. Fans of LF became defensive and hit back with criticisms of the hallowed original - of which there were many - resulting in the fandom breaking into factions who were constantly in conflict. The conflict simmered over the three year long “drought”, a period when KidsJoy had seemingly abandoned the franchise in favour of marketing licensed products tied to teenage television celebrities. Fans carved out their own enclaves online, segregating themselves into virtual tribes where they could be feel safe sharing their love for their preferred incarnations of LL without fear of being attacked by vocal ‘haters’.

Lines are blurred in places, but in general the fandom had split into two broad group; the royal LLHoE fans, and the post-LLHoE fans. The royal LLHoE fans, consisting mainly of fans in late teen and young adulthood, branded themselves ‘Lemurian Loyalists’. Their core belief was that the original series was the only true incarnation and KidsJoy should be blamed for ruining the franchise with the later series. They were also still bitter that Rex had been unceremoniously booted off his position as the series mascot. Every year without fail, on the anniversary of LLHoE’s first broadcast, fans would sign petitions to KidsJoy to reinstate Rex as the franchise’s main mascot. KidsJoy had yet to respond to any of the petitions.

The post-LLHoE fans, who are more loosely organized and younger, insisted that the newer series should be judged on their own merits since it was ridiculous to expect all LL fans to watch the original series - which consisted of nearly one hundred episodes, many of which even die-hard supporters admitted were repetitive. The post-LLHoE fans had also pointed out that the newer series were more in line with today’s societal values, in particular their positive portrayal of female characters. Post-LLHoE fans were further divided into the AiL and the LFW groups, and while both groups had their share of disagreements, they in general agreed that LL was better off with Gen and her companion characters. The battle over who should be the franchise’s mascot raged on for years, earning the ire of many non-fans who got caught in the online crossfire on unrelated forums and social networks.

The fandom existed in an uneasy peace with itself, with each splinter group keeping to themselves and being careful not to do anything that would ignite another flare up. This relative peace would last until Lemurian Legends arrived.

Lemurian Legends (2011-present)

In 2010, Wonderland Entertainment completed its acquisition of KidsJoy and all its trademarks. KidsJoy was in hard times by 2010; their narrow focus on selling cheap merchandise based on teen celebrities was initially very profitable, but that strategy backfired in the years after they let LL lay fallow. A spate of high-profile scandals involving teenage celebrities, coupled with the 2008 financial crisis, had rapidly cooled demand for those goods. Demand for such merchandises also ebbed and flowed with the fluctuating fortunes of those celebrities, and when too many of them got bad press in a short span of time, the drop in sales hit the company’s sales figure hard. By end-2009, KidsJoy was facing bankruptcy, and there were rumours that their trademarks would be sold piece by piece in an auction.

Wonderland Entertainment, formerly one of KidsJoy’s competitors, bought over the company and its entire portfolio for an undisclosed sum - rumoured to be close to half a billion. The new owner dug through KidsJoy’s vast and underused archive of past properties, and in almost total secrecy revived LL with yet another reboot, this time by a new in-house studio helmed once again by Janet Lee, the former producer of Adventures in Lemuria.

Since the end of Adventures in Lemuria, Janet Lee had established herself as a highly-regarded television producer who oversaw the production of critically acclaimed cartoons, including Samurai Jane and Power Kids. In a recent press interview, Janet Lee had said that she had always wanted to go back to Lemuria, and tell a different story that wasn’t possible with the budget or technology available back in the 90s.

The resulting show, simply titled Lemurian Legends, was aired in the spring of 2011. Even before the airing, some older fans were already condemning the show simply on the basis that it shared many similarities with LFW and AiL, including the inclusion of Genovefa as one of the main cast. The phrase, “My childhood is ruined” was repeated so often by them that it practically became their hate-mantra. Non-LLHoE fans on the Internet in general, already used to the antics of rabid LLHoE fans, at first dismissed and mocked their rants on-line. The uproar sparked interest in the show though, and word of mouth of a brand-new LL show spread quickly.

Gradually, fans who had long given up on LL franchise, or had never even heard of them, gave the new series a try. Their reactions were overwhelmingly positive. With almost no marketing on Wonderland Entertainment’s part outside their own television channel, Lemurian Legends became a sleeper hit. When words of the new show spread into the mainstream, its popularity sky-rocketed.

Lemurian Legends brought back many old characters and fused them with elements from the newer series, creating a show that paid homage to the old series and yet still have original elements of its own. It had a much higher production budget than LLHoE and AiL, allowing artists and animators to bring to life a lush interpretation of Lemuria painted almost entirely in water-colours. The computer-assisted animation was fluid; the voice-acting was excellent; the writing was mature without being inappropriate or too complex for young audience; and the characters carried all the personality traits that fans cherished. Gen took centre stage once more among the main cast, which now consisted of her, Robert, Oengus, Finn, and the series’ popular new additions; the jester siblings Rubelle and Tristis. It was a winning formula for a revival, and it gained many fans who in the past had never even heard of the past Lemurian Legends series.

The fanbase rapidly expanded to accommodate the new batch of fans who watched Lemurian Legends, nicknamed LL-Prime to differentiate it from the original. These new fans are the social network generation; within weeks of the first episode’s airing, full-fledged fan websites were created from scratch. Episodic reviews, podcasts and video logs dedicated solely to discussing the show sprung up like mushroom on video sharing websites.

Fan arts and fan fictions flooded fan-generated content websites like DeviantArt. LL-Fiction, now the fandom’s biggest website dedicated to fanfictions, opened for business within only three months of the show’s first broadcast. LLWiki, which was founded during the LF era, had to be upgraded when it could no longer deal with the rapid creation of new articles dedicated to the new series. This was the fruits of the Web 2.0 revolution; viral user-generated content can now easily outstrip even the most elaborate online marketing campaign.

The LL fanbase expanded at a pace it never had experienced in its thirty-years history. Most of the older fans gratefully welcomed the brand-new series, appreciative of the writers’ efforts to incorporate elements that fans wanted while still bringing something new to the table. They heralded the show as the best thing to have happened to the franchise since its creation, and they did their utmost to welcome the newcomers to the burgeoning community. For a while, it appeared that this series could finally reunite the heavily fractured fandom. Unfortunately, over time that proved to be more wishful thinking than realistic.

The rabid side of the fandom reared its ugly head after the initial euphoria had simmered down; once again the unappeasable minority decried the series for betraying its root, this time solely on the basis that it was produced under Wonderland Entertainment, not KidsJoy which had been assimilated and became one of many divisions of its new parent company.

Those fans tried to lash back at LL-Prime’s popularity by nit-picking on every perceived faults in the show. They criticised the new streamlined character designs as ‘lazy’ and ‘bland’; they grumbled that the show merely recycled the most popular lead characters because the show staff only wanted to make a quick cash-in; and they made broad sweeping statements that the ‘spineless’ show staff had bent over backward in order to appease everyone and didn’t display any willingness to bring something new. The criticisms mostly ignored the fact that the show staff had already recreated a whole new cast of supporting characters from scratch, re-wrote all the main characters’ back-stories, and re-imagined Lemuria to be an almost entirely different world from the series that came before it.

The most contentious issue revolved around the Rex human character; due to complicated licensing issues with companies that KidsJoy had partnered with in the past, Wonderland Entertainment could not take back control of Rex’s character trademark, hence Rex was completely missing from LL. (It was rumoured that the new human character Fabio, which bore many superficial similarities to Rex, was essentially a stand-in for Rex, but Rex’s fans considered this theory to be irrelevant.) The licensing conflict after Wonderland’s acquisition was not unique to Rex: many side characters had to be renamed and recoloured because KidsJoy’s trademark on them had lapsed over time. However the exclusion of Rex appeared to be permanent and this made the LLHoE fans extremely bitter, further ostracising them from the rest of the newly revived fandom.

Regardless of the fan dramas, Lemurian Legends is going strong. Two critically acclaimed seasons had already been aired; season three was already confirmed with rumours of more to follow; and a movie had been announced, titled Girl of Light. Trailers released so far revealed that the story would revolve around the as-yet-unnamed human girl who was the secret daughter of the late Queen of Lemuria, and who apparently had direct family connection with Umbra - though Umbra had yet to be introduced as a character in Lemurian Legends. Reaction to the revealed synopsis had been mixed, but LL-Prime fans in general are still excited that their own generation Lemurian Legends is going to have its first movie.

With the same staff working on the television series working concurrently on the film, they had good reasons to be optimistic that it would to be a worthy addition to the long, winding lores of the Lemurian Legends franchise.

Conclusion

Despite ups and downs the of the franchise, the huge fan community of Lemurian Legends have weathered the odds and still remained a mostly friendly and united community. The future looks bright once more for fans of Lemurian Legends; regardless of their age, gender, and which series they hold the most dear. If there is one lesson that this marvellous fan community has taught us, it’s one that can be summed in the now famous quote made by Gen, in episode 20 of Adventure in Lemuria: “Our boat may not make it through the rapids, but at least we’ll still have an easier time swimming to shore!”

Extra Chapter: Notable mentions

Lemurian Legends also had several ‘non-canon’ adaptations that were considered to be outside the official canon of the time when they were broadcast or published. Here are the notable mentions.

Rex - Heroes of Eternity Movie (1988)

Rex - Heroes of Eternity was technically the first ever movie adaptation of Lemurian Legends, despite KidsJoy’s absolute refusal to acknowledge its existence. This movie was actually produced concurrently with the first animated movie of LLHoE. It featured Rex played by Mark Russo, a body builder whose previous acting jobs were in body-building supplement advertisements.

The movie was an almost word-for-word retelling of its animated brethren, except with live actors in costumes and an additional sub-plot involving a trip through a magical portal to the contemporary world. It was produced without any input from the cartoon production staff except for the script - which was rumoured to have been swiped by a middle executive desperate for a usable script for the live-action movie adaptation. The movie was a total commercial flop when it was released two months shy of the animated movie.

The final product was notorious within the fandom for its general awfulness. Costumes of supporting characters were appallingly bad and - to use a contemporary metaphor - had been described, “as disturbing as the animatronics from Five Nights’ at Freddy.” The heavily tweaked story and its sub-plot in the contemporary world was heavily criticised for being unnecessarily long and boring. The acting had been described as ‘laughably terrible’. The special effects was comically cheap. Most bafflingly of all, the alternate ending had Queen Umbra transformed into a skimpily-dressed princess who instantly agreed to marry Rex on the spot. The movie was to Lemurian Legends like, to paraphrase Don Boken, “what Star Wars Holiday Special was to Star Wars.”

The film was so infamous that in recent years it actually received a resurgence of morbid interest from fans who enjoyed it ‘ironically’, who said that it had accidentally became the greatest satire of the fantasy genre ever made. Today, secret screening of the movie had become a fixture in conventions, often issued as a form of ‘challenge’ to any con-goers who wanted to prove their unwavering loyalty to the franchise. According to the lucky group of viewers who watched the entire movie first hand, it was the only adaptation which all LL fans could universally agree was bad.

Note: The authors had watched the movies themselves and strongly discourage readers from watching the movie. It is a legitimately horrible movie and had been known to reduce grown men to tears - of laughter. You’ve been warned.

Lemurian Legends: Heroes of Eternity - The 90s comics spin-off

To placate angry fans who were disappointed with Adventures in Lemuria, KidsJoy commissioned a relatively unknown comics company called Imaginative Panels to create a comics series that was meant to pick up the original series’ continuity. KidsJoy heavily marketed the comics, even going as far as boldly proclaiming on the cover of its first issue, “Lemurian Legends for REAL boys, REAL fans, REAL heroes!” One could not shake the feeling that however progressive AiL was at the time, whoever decided on the tag-line was still adamant that Lemurian Legends should retain its macho ‘boys-only’ image.

The end result however was far from impressive to even fans of LLHoE. The illustrators decided to make the comcis’ art style closer to the era’s standard superhero comics art style, and as a result it was completely unlike the original in tone. Characters were either drawn as impossibly muscular for males, or stick-like for females - not unlike the prevailing comic book art style of the period, but it managed to become one of the decade’s worst examples. The story, despite promising to be a continuation of LLHoE, actually ret-conned past events, or even outright erased by the writers for the sake of the stories - writers who were later revealed to have almost zero knowledge of LLHoE lore.

In their attempt to make the comics appeal to the grown-up fans, the writers wrote stories filled with excessive violence, deaths of major characters - who were repeatedly revived with zero consequences - and most controversially, outright sexualization of all female supporting characters. The comics attracted fierce complaints from parents, who had bought them for their children assuming that they were comic adaptation of Adventures in Lemuria. The complaints grew so bad that KidsJoy was forced to label the comics as “unsuitable for kids”, effectively killing off any chance of the comics having success with the mainstream audience.

The comics was eventually cancelled after twenty issues, after Imaginative Panels closed down. The storyline in the comics, which was left incomplete, was never referenced in the lore of LLHoE again.

Lemurian High! Manga Series

Another peculiar adaptation, this parody manga spin-off was a satirical reinterpretation of the Lemurian Fantasy generation. Started in 2006, the manga was officially released only in Japanese alongside the official canon comics, though English-translated versions did eventually materialized. This time, instead of warriors in the fantasy world of Lemuria, the main and supporting characters were re-imagined as high-school students and placed in a contemporary Japanese high school - in school uniforms and all, but still in their fantasy creature forms. Queen Umbra became a comically power-crazed school principal; Rex was a rebel who often got into trouble; Gen was a clumsy, love-sick junior schoolgirl; Finn was a air-headed science geek; and Oengus was a gentle-hearted giant often mistaken as a school bully.

Despite its bizarre concept, the comics were popular enough to eventually span four volumes, chronicling the fantastical school misfits’ time in school from junior year right up to graduation. It was - for obvious reasons - not considered canon, but it had its share of dedicated fans within the fandom who genuinely enjoyed how the light-hearted high-school stories reinterpreted the characters in a unique - albeit unusual - settings. A follow-up was rumoured to be in the works, and it was rumoured to star the Lemurian Fantasy: The Next Generation cast instead.

Lemurian Babies

When the 2011 Lemurian Legends series became popular, Wonderland Entertainment, perhaps hoping to recapture the female market segment that made Adventures in Lemuria popular, created a separate spin-off based on a new merchandise; Lemurian Legends characters, as babies.

Making the toys was not enough for them; the toy-line, which initially had no storyline backing it to begin with, was given an ‘what-if’ alternate universe where every character in Lemurian Legends were babies who threw tantrums, went to ‘war’ over ownership of toys, and could only be placated with their favourite food: oatmeal porridge.

The toy series had been highly successful; in fact the doll of baby Gen was so popular that it was sold out from pre-orders a day before its first launch, and it was already undergoing the third release. A recent Wonderland Entertainment shareholder meeting had revealed that another one of the company’s production team - different from the one now working on LL - was even producing an entirely new cartoon based solely on this toy-line. Judging from the reception to the toys, it would seem that the cartoon will have a ready fan-base by the time it comes out.