Cartoon Network Shows Wheel

Eighty-nine shows fill this wheel, stretching from Dexter's Laboratory and Johnny Bravo out to preschool titles and late-night animation. One click picks one at random, which settles what to put on when a group cannot agree, or gives a nostalgia night somewhere to start.

Three entries are misspelled badly enough to break a search

Two of them sit close together near the middle of the list. Apla Teen Hunger Froce has errors in two separate words, with the first word unrecognizable and the last one transposed. Shunk Fu is missing a K from the first word. Neither will match anything typed into a search bar as written.

A third entry carries a doubled L in its first word and a second word that does not match the title it otherwise resembles, which leaves it impossible to confirm from the list alone. That one was left alone rather than guessed at, but it is worth checking against the actual show before the wheel gets shared, because a wrong title copied into a shared link tends to survive for months.

There are smaller issues too. POCOYO is the only entry in full capitals apart from MAD, which is an acronym and belongs that way. Teen Titans Go drops the exclamation mark that Unikitty!, What A Cartoon!, and Thomas & Friends All Engines Go! all keep. And OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes uses a curved apostrophe where the six other apostrophes in the list are all straight, which means the entry came from a different source than the rest. All of it is fixable in the Entries panel, and the wheel redraws as the text changes.

Ben 10 takes five slices on its own

Count the Ben 10 entries and the number is five, covering the original plus Alien Force, Ultimate Alien, Omniverse, and a later reboot. That is the largest single block on the wheel.

It is not the only one. Looney Tunes appears three times in different forms. Powerpuff Girls, ThunderCats, Clarence, Steven Universe, Teen Titans, Total Drama, and the We Bare Bears pair all take two slices each. Added up, roughly a quarter of this wheel points at franchises that appear more than once.

That changes the odds in a way nothing on screen signals. A group spinning for something to watch will land on a Ben 10 series far more often than on Camp Lazlo or Squirrel Boy, and the fifth Ben 10 spin of the evening is usually when somebody notices. Keeping one entry per franchise fixes it and drops the list to around seventy without losing a single show anyone would miss.

The year tags are formatted oddly and only appear four times

Four entries carry a year in parentheses to distinguish a reboot from its original. All four use the same unusual spacing, with a space inside each bracket. That is consistent, at least, though it is not how years are normally written.

The larger issue is that the tagging is incomplete. The Powerpuff Girls and Ben 10 both get year-tagged reboots, and their originals sit untagged elsewhere in the list. Clarence appears twice, once plain and once with a 1988 tag that points at something very different from the Cartoon Network series most people mean. ThunderCats and ThunderCats Roar are distinguished by title instead. A viewer scanning the panel has to already know which is which, so anyone sharing this wheel with people who did not build it should either tag every pair or drop the duplicates entirely.

One entry is not animated at all

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Tournament of Houses sits among eighty-eight cartoons. It is a live-action competition show. It is also the longest entry on the wheel by a comfortable margin, running to five words and a colon, where the shortest entries are three and four characters.

That length difference matters on a wheel this size. With eighty-nine slices each wedge is roughly four degrees wide, which is too narrow to read while the wheel is turning and barely readable when it stops. Short entries like MAD and Bing survive that. Long ones get clipped. Trimming the handful of longest titles to their common names is worth doing before anyone tries to read results off the screen rather than off the result display.

The age range on this list is enormous

Caillou, Bing, POCOYO, Thomas & Friends All Engines Go!, Mush-Mush And The Mushables, and Sesame Street Mecha Builders are aimed at very young children. Robot Chicken, 12 oz mouse, MAD, and the misspelled Aqua Teen entry come from late-night adult animation. Those two groups have nothing in common except that they are both on this wheel.

For a household with one child that is a problem, because a third of the results will be either too young or entirely inappropriate for the viewer. For a group of adults doing a nostalgia night, the preschool entries are the dead spins instead. Either way the wheel works better after being split in two, which takes one pass through the panel.

Spinning itself is one click of the center SPIN button, and each click gives one result. The whole list travels as a single link, so a cleaned-up version can be built once, with the typos fixed and the duplicates cut, and handed to whoever is holding the remote. Nobody retypes eighty-nine titles.