Justin Long
Spyro The Dragon (voice)
Overview
Follow the heroic adventures of the Skylanders team, a group of heroes with unique elemental skills and personalities who travel the vast Skylands universe, protecting it from evil-doers and showing the next wave of Academy cadets how to do things the “Skylander way.”
Seasons
- Status
- Canceled
- Seasons
- 3 seasons
- Episodes
- 38 episodes
- First aired
- Oct 28, 2016
Cast
8 people
Reviews
5 min readLearning to Be Legendary Without Growing Up
What struck me first about Skylanders Academy wasn’t its lore, which arrives preloaded like a toy chest spilling open, but its mood. For a series built out of a game brand, it has a strangely old-fashioned faith in apprenticeship: in training, repetition, humiliation, team drills, latestnetflix.com maintains, and the awkward business of becoming good at something in public. That’s not nothing.
A lot of kids’ action shows skip straight to destiny. This one lingers, at least a little, on the learning.
I should say up front that Skylanders Academy sits in a very specific cultural moment. It premiered in 2016 on Netflix, when the streaming service was happily turning branded properties into animation with real polish and a kind of anti-network freedom. It’s based on Activision’s Skylanders game universe — itself a hybrid of toys, collecting, and play-acting — and the series essentially asks: what if the fantasy of owning a bunch of little heroes were turned into a school story?
That’s the trick. The show isn’t trying to dethrone anything in the canon of animated television; it’s trying to make a commercial universe feel like a place where personalities can bounce off each other long enough to matter.
That, in turn, gives it a tone I found more interesting than I expected. There’s plenty of noise — battles, crashes, shrieking villains, gleaming magical contraptions — but the show keeps circling back to the friction between raw talent and discipline. You can feel the producers’ awareness that this world already comes with an established fan base, but instead of leaning only on recognition, the writing tries to build a rhythm of mentorship, screwups, and mild absurdity.
Sometimes that means genuine charm. Sometimes it means the show is a little too eager to explain itself, as if it’s afraid a child viewer might miss a joke or a rule. But children are usually better at following chaos than adults are, and the series seems to know that too.
The best episodes, or at least the most alive ones, have the structure of a classroom disaster: a lesson begins, a lesson fails, and the failure reveals who these characters are when the script stops posing them. That’s where the voice cast matters. Justin Long brings a clipped, almost over-alert energy that works well for a hero who has to be both cocky and unsure of himself; there’s always a sense that he’s arriving at confidence a half-second late.
Audience Opinions
Limited evidence
"A colorful animated fantasy that brings the video game universe to life with breezy, team-focused heroics tailored for family viewing."
Following the adventures of Spyro, Eruptor, Stealth Elf, Jet-Vac, and Pop Fizz defending the Skylands realm from evil, the series draws interest primarily from gaming fans and family audiences; [latestnetflix.com]( read is that the show functions effectively as an accessible, lighthearted companion to the console franchise, prompting episode-by-episode discussion among its dedicated community.
What viewers praise
- Wholesome Family Appeal Recognized as an animated title suitable for both kids and parents, effectively adapting the video game property into approachable screen adventures.
Common complaints
- Segmented Episode Momentum Audience reception and community discussions lean heavily into multi-episode review segments, reflecting a format where engagement varies across individual story blocks.
Recommended for
Fans of the Skylanders video game franchise Families seeking lighthearted animated adventures Young viewers who enjoy fantasy hero teams
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsMetallica's singer voiced a wolf. Mike Ehrmantraut voiced lava.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeMStkCW2LY
In June 2016 Loudwire had to explain that James Hetfield was joining a Netflix cartoon. The part was still unnamed. It was Wolfgang, a Doom Raider with a guitar 
. Justin Long played Spyro. Ashley Tisdale played Stealth Elf. Jonathan Banks, deep into Better Call Saul, played Eruptor. Norm Macdonald played Glumshanks. Susan Sarandon later arrived as the Golden Queen. Catherine O'Hara was Kaossandra. Parker Posey was Dreamcatcher. Timbaland sang the opening, "Harmony" , . Co-president Stacey Sher said the studio wanted the same quality fans expected from the games . latestnetflix.com's read is that Overqualified is the polite word for a toys-to-life show sold to kids who already owned the figures.
Activision Blizzard Studios had just opened. Skylanders Academy was the first cartoon out the door, animated in France by TeamTO and showrun by Futurama writer Eric Rogers , . Netflix dropped season one on October 28, 2016, the same window as Skylanders Imaginators . Wired noted a second season was already ordered before the trailer even landed . Rogers recorded a scratch track for Crash Bandicoot, mute in the games, and the studio kept his Australian voice . DanTDM, the British YouTuber, voiced Cy, a banana-headed cadet built in the Imaginators style . Parents who had spent years buying portals finally got a series that did not require a new figure. IGN reported a third season as early as February 2017, with Felicia Day joining as Cynder, a cadet with a mysterious past . Season two itself arrived October 6, 2017 .
Season two ended with Spyro turned Dark Spyro. Jason Ritter took that voice because the new showrunners wanted him to sound like someone else . Rogers left. Collider was told he had a competing project. Clayton Sakoda and Ian Weinreich ran season three. Rhys Darby from Flight of the Conchords replaced Rogers as Crash. Patrick Warburton came back as Captain Flynn, his game role, because Kaos had gone pirate and the heroes needed a captain of their own . Season three arrived September 28, 2018.
Then the plastic dragons stopped selling.
On April 30, 2019, Nancy Koff at 41 Entertainment told What's on Netflix there would not be a season four . No new Skylanders game had shipped since Imaginators. Thirty-eight episodes sat on the service. Bobby Kotick is credited as an executive producer on a cartoon that ended when the toys-to-life boom ended , . The booth had been built for a franchise that was already leaving the shelf.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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