Where did SD Gundam Force goe wrong?

[Grav!ty]

I begin wondering about this as I read through the favorites threads here, and found the almost everyone hated the show. So I decided to give the series another chance and see if it's as bad as everyone makes it out to be. After watching the complete series, I gotta say it wasn't all that bad. In a way, SD Gundam Force seems to be a decent enough of a reboot to the SD Gundam franchise. It's got pretty much all the elements that made the original SD Gundam series' great (Okay, maybe without the Char jokes. But it does have what made up the G-ARMS, Gundam Knights and Sengoku/Musha Gundam series), so why didn't it sell well?

Also, people really need to watch the original SD Gundam.  

[THE Jan Valentine]

Classic SD is good because they're cartoons for adults. They have adult concepts and foul language and parody the real series pretty heavily.

SD Gundam Force tried to be a serious standalone show incorporating SD Gundams. THAT is where it went wrong.  

[NewtypeS3]

Hate to break it to you, Jan, but the original SD Gundam shorts were hardly for adults. The glut of jokes were either simple puns or toilet humor - which places the level of humor much closer to "grade school" level. SD Gundam was, and always has been, aimed towards the audiences younger than the traditional demographic of Gundam: young teens to young adults.
This means that SD was actually aimed to kids. This is why those SD shorts are so easy to comprehend and contain such crude humor: children eat that stuff up.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love SD Gundam... in all forms. Yes, this even means SD Gundam Force.
Even Japan loved SD Gundam Force, frankly. In a "100 best episodes of anime" ranking, Gundam shows took up many of the top 50 - but SD Gundam Force was able to sneak their own final episode in at rank 51... an episode that was completely awesome but never aired in America (the latter half wasn't picked up by Toonami once they saw the ratings, but it was dubbed and finished off in the Philippines - and we got the dub a year ago or so).

You see, SD Gundam Force didn't actually have a problem in the show itself. It was aimed towards young children, contained some pretty awesome mech designs and even brought in all of the previous SD Gundam concepts into one story (which, frankly, was no actually unique. SD Gundam Mk.IV gave us the first crossover, while later chapters would give us far greater crossovers than that). The problem was in Cartoon Network putting the program in the 5pm time slot, rather than the early morning timeslot of about 7am or so.
The early am timeslot, or even a 3 or 4pm timeslot would have worked perfectly for a show aimed at gradeschool children - the morning timeslot even more so, as kids love to get every ounce of TV out of their life before school. I know I did.

Also, SD Gundam did have a problem of budget, but budgets for shows aimed at children are actually pretty abysmal in Japan. Even Super Sentai (Japanese Power Rangers) and Kamen Rider (you know, Masked Rider) have pretty low budgets for what they are, and they're franchises that have been around for well over 30 years.

So, really, SD Gundam was (like Hamtaro was) shoved into a horribly wrong timeslot for the demographic and marketed horribly on top of that (we all remember the glut of SD Gundam stuff alongside the G-Gundam stuff in stores, yes?). The creators of the show, quite frankly, weren't at fault - especially as the series remained true to the original shorts of SD Gundam while simultaneously surpassing the fart and piss jokes that held it back originally.