My gosh. The moment the first footage of Dragon Striker dropped online, I was so pumped up, so amazed and so excited. This looks good, not Disney Channel good, but like really good. I'm still finding it hard to actually believe it was from the Disney television animation team. We've got high level animation, emotional story telling, action packed football scenes and cinematic action. The kind of show that will make you say "isn't this show a little bit too expensive?".

Now Disney television animation has been having major issues with their shows lately. They release a show, the show starts to resonate with the audience, and they just cancel it. Worse it doesn't even make it up to two seasons. Understandable though because I believe some animated shows were worth the cancellation but you see shows like Hailey's On It, didn't deserve to be cancelled after just one season. Well, Disney is just being strategic about this. Why waste resources on a show that won't even make the expected cut-off mark in viewership. Now I'm nervous about Dragon Striker. This show looks like Disney is really trying to go all out. And that's why I'm just concerned.

From everything shown so far, Dragon Striker looks like a fantasy-action animated series centered around dragons, ancient powers, football and emotional character arcs. Imagine fantasy anime, western animation, Disney storytelling and Avatar-style action all collided together. And no joke the visuals look insane.

The current release for Dragon Striker is June 9 with an 11 episode release. Though it was earlier stated that it was supposed to be 22 episodes but let's see how it plays out. This series was announced a while back and it actually took so long before we even saw the trailer. And honestly it's worth it you can tell immediately that the lighting is detailed, movement feels fluid, action scenes have weight, facial expressions are expressive.

When the trailer was released, some people were like "did the Avatar: the last airbender team work on this?" Yes it's understandable. It has avatar DNA written all over it from the fluid motion, impact-heavy attacks, wide cinematic angles and emotional action instead of random punching. Now, from what we know, some artists and animation staff connected to projects inspired by Avatar-style choreography reportedly worked around the production pipeline. Dragon Striker doesn't feel like a copy. Instead it tried to create an originality out of it.

Okay. We need to talk about the giant emotional dragon in the room. The Owl House. This is my favourite animated series of all TIME. Because I genuinely think Disney underestimated how much damage that cancellation did to fans emotionally. People loved that show. Not casually. Not “it was cool.” They loved it. I loved it. The characters. The world. The weirdness. The emotional storytelling. And then Disney basically shortened its ending and moved on. So now fans are looking at Dragon Striker like “Please don’t hurt us again.” At least Disney gave The Owl House an ending. But if you look at it, The Owl House really gathered a lot of views and even won different awards but yet still cancelled by Disney. So what exactly is the problem?

Everything about Dragon Striker screams “Huge budget.” And that’s making people nervous too. Because high-budget animation is risky. And outside of the animation fandom, people really don't know what Dragon Striker is. And Disney needs to convince the audience that this isn't just some kids cartoon. Because most western animation has just been looked on with the eyes of just being kid friendly.

If this show gets the required number of viewers on streaming and television, then it might just have a second season. Dragon Striker feels like Disney finally remembering “Oh yeah… animation can be epic.” Not just funny. Not just safe. And I'm surprised they actually used a male lead for this one. Not to criticise or anything, it's just that Disney has been using a lot of female leads and I truly respect that. But at least, the male audience can finally relate too. But to me I think people are hyped because they want Disney television animation to feel important again.

Dragon Striker will release on Disney channel and Disney XD on June 9, and stream next day on Disney plus.