DreamWorks Dragons set out to do something the films could not: live with the truce. The first How to Train Your Dragon ended with Vikings and dragons sharing one island. The second film picks up five years later. This series fills the space between, and it does it across 40 episodes that aired on Cartoon Network from August 7, 2012 to March 5, 2014.
It is a bridge, and bridges are usually the least interesting part of a story. This one mostly holds.
Trailer, via DreamWorks Dragons.
Hiccup Keeps the Peace on Berk
The premise is simple and smart. Hiccup has his dragon. Berk has a Dragon Training Academy. The cohabitation is new, and new things break. DreamWorks Dragons follows Hiccup as he tries to keep balance within that arrangement, alongside Toothless and the Viking teens. They meet worlds harsher than Berk, dragons that cannot all be trained, and enemies looking for any reason to destroy the harmony between Vikings and dragons.
That last part matters. A show about a peace treaty has to find conflict somewhere, and it finds it in people who do not want the treaty. The result is a series that treats the films’ ending as a beginning rather than a finish. It is not a victory lap. It is the work after the victory.
Riders of Berk and Defenders of Berk
Cartoon Network aired 40 episodes across two seasons, subtitled Riders of Berk and Defenders of Berk. The show premiered with a special preview on August 7, 2012, then began airing regularly on September 5.
It was DreamWorks Animation Television’s only series produced for Cartoon Network instead of Nickelodeon. That is a small piece of trivia and also the show’s whole situation. It was a franchise extension built for a network the studio did not usually work with, and it had to justify itself to an audience that already knew the films.
It mostly did. The two-season run is consistent, and the subtitle change between seasons is cosmetic. What changes is the scale of the threat.
Jay Baruchel Stays, Ruffnut Changes
Jay Baruchel returns as Hiccup. America Ferrera returns as Astrid. Christopher Mintz-Plasse returns as Fishlegs. T.J. Miller returns as Tuffnut. David Tennant returns as Spitelout.
The new voices are a mixed bag by necessity. Julie Marcus voiced Ruffnut first, later replaced by Andrée Vermeulen. Zack Pearlman took Snotlout. Chris Edgerly took Gobber the Belch. Nolan North took Stoick the Vast.
None of this is a scandal. Recasting for television is normal, and the show keeps the voices that matter most. Baruchel’s Hiccup is the load-bearing performance, and he is here. Ferrera’s Astrid is here. The film-to-television transition costs the show some texture and does not cost it its center.
The Dragon Training Academy
The series takes place between How to Train Your Dragon and How to Train Your Dragon 2. That placement is the whole design. It is not a spin-off about side characters. It is the missing chapter, and it treats the gap as a real period with real problems.
The Dragon Training Academy is the show’s best invention. It gives the teens a reason to be together and a structure for episodes that would otherwise drift. It also lets the series ask what training actually means when the dragons are not all the same. Some can be trained. Some cannot. The show says so plainly, and that honesty is what separates it from a toy commercial.
Where the Run Sags
The animation is television-grade, which is to say it is not the films. That is fine. The show spends its budget on dragons and flight, and the flight sequences are the reason to watch. Toothless remains the best character in the franchise, and the series uses him well.
The comedy lands more often than it should. Tuffnut and Ruffnut are the designated chaos, and T.J. Miller and the Ruffnut actors make them work. Fishlegs is the anxious one, and Mintz-Plasse plays that note cleanly. The show knows its ensemble and does not overwork any single member.
The action is where the series earns its keep. Genres listed for the show include Animation, Action & Adventure, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, and Comedy. That is a lot of lanes, and the show drives in all of them without crashing. The enemies who want to destroy the Viking-dragon peace give the series its stakes, and the series does not pretend those stakes are smaller than they are.
Forty episodes is a long bridge. The show has filler, and the filler is filler. Episodes that exist to fill a slot rather than move the story are the weakest part of the run, and there are enough of them to notice.
The recasting is the other soft spot. Ruffnut changes actors between the seasons, and the character’s voice changes with her. It is not fatal. It is a reminder that this is television, made on a television schedule, with television constraints.
The show also cannot escape its own function. It exists to connect two films, and everything it does is in service of that. When the series tries to be its own thing, it is at its best. When it remembers it is a bridge, it tends to look like one.
What the Numbers Say
DreamWorks Dragons holds a 7.8/10 audience score on TMDB across 766 votes. That number is fair. The series is not the films, and it does not try to be. It is a solid, well-voiced, occasionally excellent extension of a franchise that had room to grow between installments.
The verdict here is the same: 7.8 of 10.
What matters most is that the show understands its own premise. A peace between Vikings and dragons is not a finish line. It is a daily argument, and the series makes that argument interesting. The Dragon Training Academy, the untrainable dragons, the enemies who want the harmony destroyed — these are the right pieces for the story the films left open.
What matters least is the trivia. That it was DreamWorks Animation Television’s only Cartoon Network series instead of Nickelodeon is a fact for a wiki, not a reason to watch. The recasting is noise. The subtitle changes are noise.
The 40 episodes are the thing. They aired across two seasons, and they did the job a bridge is supposed to do: they made the gap between the first film and the second feel like a place where something happened. That is more than most franchise extensions manage.
The Hard Numbers
- Title: DreamWorks Dragons (also known as Dragons)
- Created by: Chris Sanders
- Network: Cartoon Network
- Seasons: 2
- Episodes: 40
- First aired: August 7, 2012 (special preview)
- Regular run began: September 5, 2012
- Last aired: March 5, 2014
- Season subtitles: Riders of Berk, Defenders of Berk
- Genres: Animation, Action & Adventure, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Comedy
- Score: 7.8/10 (TMDB audience score, 766 votes)
| Season | Subtitle | Episodes | Run |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Riders of Berk | — | 2012–2013 |
| 2 | Defenders of Berk | — | 2013–2014 |
The two Cartoon Network seasons total 40 episodes. In 2015 the series moved to Netflix and was rebranded Dragons: Race to the Edge, with its first season premiering June 26. Four more seasons followed on Netflix between January 2016 and August 2017, making their linear debut on Universal Kids starting September 2017. A sixth and final season was released February 16, 2018.
That later run is a different show with a different name, and it is not what this review is scoring. But it is worth noting that the Cartoon Network years are the foundation. Everything after them stands on the two seasons reviewed here.
The show’s synopsis promises Hiccup and Toothless taken to the edge of adventure. The series delivers that often enough to justify the trip. It also delivers the quieter thing the films could not: the daily maintenance of a peace that nobody is sure will last. That is the part worth remembering, and it is why 7.8 is the right number rather than a generous one.
DreamWorks Dragons is not essential viewing for someone who has never seen the films. It is essential viewing for someone who has, and who wants to know what happened in the five years the movies skipped. The answer is 40 episodes of dragons, academy drills, and arguments about whether Vikings and dragons can actually share an island. The show’s answer is yes, mostly, with effort. That is a better answer than a clean one.
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