It’s weird how many of these shows end up with spin-offs. I mean, it seems clear to me that the Tales of Arcadia thing was deliberate and planned; Guillermo Del Toro and the rest of the creative staff had a story they were telling, and it needed two more series and a movie to finish. (Badly, but that’s another rant.) Okay, fine. I mean that we end up with Masha telling us spooky stories and True leading singalongs and so forth.

So okay, it’s quick and easy. And goodness knows it’s not as though the spin-off is new—though the Wikipedia list doesn’t distinguish between spin-off and remake, and in at least one case, it includes a show that merely crossed over, in point of fact after the original series went off the air. They list, among other things, a full ten Yu-gi-oh! shows, and do the nine count as spin-offs of the first or just what a lot of anime does? Having one Spider-Man show after another Spider-Man show doesn’t mean one is spun off from another, it just means that more than one era had a Spider-Man show. So determining exactly how often the phenomenon happens is hard to pinpoint.

My own childhood also had at least one “well, I guess this is sort of a spin-off” in Turkey Television, which had a lot of the same cast and otherwise relatively little to do with You Can’t Do That on Television. However, every once in a while, my kids will be watching something that appears to be set in the same universe as something else they watch, and it’s a surprise to me—but they act as though I should know all about it. This is a thing they do; they assume that, if they watch a show, I not only know but care about every detail. So far, I have not been able to persuade them otherwise.

What’s more, Wikipedia doesn’t include Masha’s Spooky Stories, presumably folding it all into the general Masha and the Bear banner, or simply not having been edited into the list yet. Similarly, the dozen or two Pocoyo specials aren’t mentioned, presumably because they’re specials—clip shows, mostly. It’s also true that the fact that Milo Murphy’s World spends most of the series as an under-the-radar spin-off of Phineas and Ferb before being an explicit one. Still, they’re generally separate search results on their respective streaming services.

Then there’s the fact that every single season of True and the Rainbow Kingdom has a name of its own, each coming up in the Netflix search results separately. Mighty Little Bheem is apparently a spin-off of Chhota Bheem, and it has its own specials that are under a separate search. I wonder if this sort of thing draws in more viewers, as people think they’re whole new shows. I’ll admit that not a lot of these shows are much on continuity anyway, but it’s a little exhausting as a parent to go through searching for the exact three episodes of Pocoyo my daughter wants to watch when two of them are specials anyway.

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