What childhood TV shows deserve a reboot?

Nightmare Before Christmas is now a holiday mainstay and Beetlejuice will soon be back, but what about this creepy nineties gem? Created by the same husband/wife duo who brought us Rugrats and centered on three misfit monsters (Oblina, Ickis, and Krumm), Aaahh!! Real Monsters essentially preceded the whole Monsters University “scare school” premise, but brought more Yellow Submarine weirdness and extra gross-out humor to the mix. I mean, Oblina looked like a black-and-white candy cane with wax lips stuck to it, and Krumm looked like a letter H made of skin. Weird stuff, right? And I’d love to see them again. [Meredith Hobbs Coons]

If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember Dungeons & Dragons as one of the highlights of the 1980s Saturday morning cartoon lineup. It follows a group of kids who are magically transported into the fantasy world of D&D. They’re given magic weapons and become the targets of an evil wizard and his five-headed dragon. Although the show isn’t currently streaming anywhere and the out-of-print DVDs are a rare find, it still has a hold on those of us who grew up watching it. That includes the filmmakers behind last year’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, who included a fleeting live-action cameo of the original characters as an Easter egg for fans.Thanks to the movie and the rise of web series like Critical Role, the tabletop game is enjoying a surge in popularity, so now would be the perfect time to revive this show. There’s even an entire genre of anime now called isekai, in which the characters find themselves in similar situations. It doesn’t much matter if the new version is a reboot, a continuation, or a reimagining with all new characters; as long as the writing is good, I’d be thrilled to see it come back in any form. [Cindy White]

A revival project works best, I think, for shows that never quite reached their potential. And no kids’ show from my youth hits that point harder than the single-season series that is, at least from a technical point of view, Paul Verhoeven’s single foray into the world of children’s animation: 1999's Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles. Produced in one of the worst-looking animation eras of all time—the post-Toy Story period where shows tried to replicate Pixar’s CGI beauty on the cheap, to horrifying effect—the show was a fascinating attempt to combine Verhoeven’s gung-ho satire with the military grimness of Robert Heinlein’s original novel (but for kids!). The result was, essentially, a long-form children’s war movie, as Razak’s Roughnecks went on serialized missions that saw characters grow, change—and die. It’s an incredibly strange, surprisingly good series, and it’d be fascinating to see it get a second shot at life. [William Hughes]

This TGIF staple was famous for its little freak Baby Sinclair, a flesh-colored dinosaur in a yellow tee and diaper who whacked his dad on the head with a frying pan and yelled “not the mama” right in his dang face. But this Simpsons/Flintstones-style sitcom starring anthropomorphic, animatronic dinos also got as dark as it did silly (see its ) and deftly tackled social commentary, too. Dinosaurs ended with extinction and was apparently super expensive to make, so this might be a tough one to resurrect. But I say we Jurassic Park this shit anyway. [Meredith Hobbs Coons]

Action League Now! and Prometheus And Bob, you will always be famous. They were two of my favorite shorts of Nickelodeon’s KaBlam! The animated sketch comedy took fun risks with the genre (the PAB stop-motion was amazing). It lampooned cartoons while also providing original humor, and I remember laughing a lot while watching it. The show ran for four seasons, which is pretty great. But that doesn’t mean a new generation of children, along with the grown-ups who enjoyed it back then, wouldn’t want KaBlam! to return with inventive goofiness. [Saloni Gajjar]