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Two wildly different cartoons make their TV debuts

The cute little dinosaurs that inhabit the world of Littlefoot have been around for ages. The cute little kids who inhabit the world of Manny Rivera are new to the cartoon universe.

"El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera," for older kids, has adult appeal, too.
"El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera," for older kids, has adult appeal, too.Read more

The cute little dinosaurs that inhabit the world of Littlefoot have been around for ages.

The cute little kids who inhabit the world of Manny Rivera are new to the cartoon universe.

One group is prehistoric, the other is postmodern. Both appear in new TV series.

The Land Before Time, the TV version of the movie and its numerous straight-to-video sequels, premiered on Monday and can be seen weekdays at 9:30 a.m. on the Cartoon Network.

El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, which made its debut on Saturday, appears at 10:30 a.m. Saturdays on Nickelodeon.

The young sauropod Littlefoot and his dino buddies have been around since 1988, when The Land Before Time premiered. Since then, there have been so many video sequels - from The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure to The Land Before Time XII: The Great Day of the Flyers - that even the most patient adult might secretly yearn for The Land Before Time VIIL: The Extinction.

But kids obviously like their paleo-pals. How else to explain why new adventures pop up so regularly?

The TV series, scheduled for a time of day when only preschoolers and afternoon-session kindergarteners are likely to be home (at least, during the school year), is for the very young viewer.

The animation, set against richly colored backgrounds, is above average for television, though below the sophistication of the movie original, which was produced by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

The story line for the debut episode, "The Cave of Many Voices," is simple: Littlefoot and his gang outwit the tyrannosaur Red Claw and his two velociraptor henchmen by using the cave's echo effects to scare off the baddies.

There is, of course, a moral, so simple that any 4-year-old can grasp it: You're as big as you act.

That lesson comes courtesy of little Ducky, the hero of the piece, who is tired of people ignoring her. (That tends to happen when you speak in a small voice and say "yep, yep, yep" a lot.)

Ruby, a good-natured oviraptor who makes her debut in the TV series, teaches Ducky that "to talk big, you need to feel big inside."

Ducky also comes to realize that it is sometimes better to be small than big (especially when avoiding tyrannosaurs), but she knows she will always be big inside.

The show's theme song, "All I See Is the Day in Front of Us," is the highlight of its score, judging by the debut episode.

Performed by the a cappella South African choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the song has a bouncy, almost calypso beat.

The two songs in the body of the show, "I Want to Go Adventuring" and "Talking Big," are bland, inoffensive stuff - which, come to think of it, is a pretty good way to summarize The Land Before Time TV series.

El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, animated in hot colors, is anything but bland.

Created for older kids and certainly palatable to adults, El Tigre zips along with a rat-a-tat wit that bends stereotypes into irony.

Cops in the Latino metropolis of Miracle City wear sombreros topped with emergency lights. A zombie guacamole terrorizes our hero.

It could have been cheesy, but the Mexican-born husband-wife creators of the show, Jorge R. Gutierrez and Sandra Equihua, make it work.

El Tigre is more than caricature. It is also a morality play.

Manny's superhero father, White Pantera, and supervillain grandfather, Puma Loco, are fighting for the soul of the 13-year-old.

Manny has some super powers of his own, which he gets by spinning his belt buckle and turning into El Tigre, whose fighting moves have names like "the screaming armadillo."

He tries to be good, but it's so hard - especially with a best friend like the blue-haired Frida Suarez, always ready with the wrong advice.

"You can't fight lies with truth," she tells him. "You have to use bigger lies. It's simple mathematics."

The simple math of El Tigre is that wit equals hit.