Which Teen Titans Character Are You?

Learn More About Teen Titans

Teen Titans premiered on Cartoon Network in 2003 and did something that should not have worked: it took a DC superhero team, animated it in a style borrowed from Japanese television, scored it with a J-pop theme by Puffy AmiYumi, and swung wildly between slapstick comedy and some of the darkest material any American childrens cartoon had attempted. It ran for five seasons and a film, and two decades later it remains the version of these characters that a whole generation considers definitive.

The show drew heavily on Marv Wolfman and George Perezs New Teen Titans comics from the 1980s, which had reinvented a group of sidekicks as a genuine ensemble with its own mythology. The animated series kept the core five Robin, Starfire, Raven, Cyborg, Beast Boy and stripped away most of the continuity baggage, deliberately never naming Robin as Dick Grayson or showing Batman on screen. That choice freed the show to be about the Titans rather than about whose sidekick anyone was.

Robin is the tightly wound centre. He is the only one without powers and the one most convinced he has to carry everything, and the show is unusually clear-eyed about how that curdles the Apprentice arc, in which Slade manipulates him into servitude, is genuinely uncomfortable television. Raven, half-demon and permanently managing an inheritance she did not choose, got the shows most ambitious storyline: a four-season slow burn about a prophecy she believed made her a monster. Starfire, an alien princess with unfiltered sincerity and enormous strength, gave the show its heart and its funniest culture-clash comedy.

Cyborg and Beast Boy are where the shows warmth lives. Victor Stone is the practical one, the mechanic and the cook, and his arc about accepting a body he did not consent to is handled with more restraint than the format required. Garfield Logan hides an enormous amount of grief under relentless jokes, and the episodes that let him stop particularly those dealing with Terra are among the most quietly devastating in the run.

Slade, voiced by Ron Perlman, deserves separate mention. He is one of the great animated villains: patient, unhurried, entirely uninterested in world domination and entirely interested in getting inside Robins head. The show almost never lets him lose cleanly, which is why he stayed frightening across five seasons.

Teen Titans also arrived at exactly the right moment for anime-influenced Western animation, and its visual language chibi reaction shots dropped into serious scenes, the split-screen transitions, the deliberate tonal whiplash became enormously influential. The 2013 spinoff Teen Titans Go! took the comedy register and ran with it, to the eternal frustration of fans of the original, and the debate between the two has been running online for more than a decade.

For more from the same corner of the universe, try Which Peacemaker Character Are You? or explore our other DC character quizzes.