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The Full Story · Told by the Makers

The Full Story of the Dungeons and Dragons Cartoon

Millions of people remember watching the last episode, the one where the kids finally got home, or died, or found out they had been in Hell the whole time. That episode does not exist and never did. Two of the show's own writers have spent decades trying to tell people so, one of them by publishing his unproduced script as evidence, and the false memory has outlived them both anyway.

Dungeons and Dragons ran on CBS from September 17, 1983 to December 7, 1985: three seasons, 27 episodes, produced by Marvel Productions and TSR with animation by Toei. Mark Evanier developed it and wrote the pilot. No finale was ever made, because the last episode of each season was written before anyone knew if the show was renewed. A script called "Requiem" by Michael Reaves was written after cancellation and never produced.

Why there is no ending, explained by the man who developed it

Mark Evanier developed the series for television and wrote the pilot. On his own site, answering the question he says he is asked constantly, he lays out the reason as pure production scheduling rather than drama.

"The show was in production for three seasons. As you probably know, it takes a long lead time to do animation. When we were producing shows for Saturday morning, the rough schedule was to write the entire season from February through about June…then those episodes would begin airing in September. So the last episode of each season was put into production months before the first episode of that season aired. A few months later, the network would look at the ratings and decide whether or not to order another season."

The consequence follows automatically. "When the last episode of the third (final) season was produced, no one had any idea if there would be a fourth season, so they didn't do a story that wrapped things up. And of course, once the decision was made not to make any more episodes, there was no way to 'end' the ongoing storyline."

This is the mechanic behind nearly every 80s cartoon that simply stopped. The finale was not cut, cancelled, or banned. It was never possible in the first place, because the production calendar ran a full year ahead of the renewal decision.

Evanier is also blunt that the popular explanation for the cancellation is wrong. "Incidentally: The Dungeons and Dragons series was cancelled due to declining ratings. I keep reading stories about it getting yanked off the air because it was too 'violent' or because protest groups thought it was Satanic or something of the sort. As far as I know, the protests were minimal and had no impact. The show simply began losing its audience, as all shows eventually do."

That correction matters because the show is usually filed under the Satanic Panic. An io9 piece in 2024 frames the series itself as designer Gary Gygax's attempt to defuse the panic around his game with a Saturday morning show. Whatever the show was built to do, the man who developed it says the thing that killed it was the ratings.

The episode everyone thinks they remember

There was, however, an episode that looked like an ending.

"Before it came to that, there was one episode produced in which the kids dreamed they were back on Earth…but it was only a dream," Evanier writes. "A lot of people seem to recall that episode as the 'last' episode. But no ending was ever produced."

The last episode actually broadcast was "The Winds of Darkness", which ends the way most of them ended, with Dungeon Master dangling yet another possible way home in front of six children who never get to take it.

What grew in the gap is a documented case of collective false memory. The io9 piece collects the variants that surfaced in chat rooms, on Reddit, and on Facebook over thirty years: that the children were reunited with their families, that it ended on a cliffhanger, that they had died on the amusement park ride and the entire series took place in the afterlife. One commenter called it "My first brush with the Mandela Effect", which is precisely what it is.

Evanier's verdict, given to io9 in 2024, is four words long: "There was NO 'final episode' of Dungeons & Dragons."

Michael Reaves and the script that was written to end an argument

The other half of the story belongs to Michael Reaves, one of the series' most frequent writers, later an Emmy winner for Batman: The Animated Series.

Reaves wrote a script called "Requiem" as a possible finale. It was never produced. Years later, tired of being asked whether he had secretly written an episode revealing that the children were dead and imprisoned in Hell, he answered on his own website. The passage survives because Brian Cronin preserved it in a 2017 CBR legends column.

Reaves' summary of the rumor, in his own words: "Until I received several pieces of email recently, the combined gist of which is that there are rumors abounding on the Net and the Web about a last episode of the show, either scripted and never produced, or produced and never aired, in which we learn that the kids actually died on the rollercoaster that supposedly took them into the Realm, and that they are, in fact, imprisoned in Hell and being tormented with a complex fantasy (as if just being in Hell wouldn't be torment enough) by the Devil masquerading as Dungeon Master, and do I have any words to share with the masses about this issue?"

His answer: "Yes: Bushwah, poppycock and balderdash."

Then he explained why such an episode could never have been made, and in doing so gave the best surviving account of what the show was actually fighting on the network side.

"There is no such episode, as even a moment's rational thought would reveal. D&D was a very dark, edgy show for its time -- sort of the Gargoyles of the Eighties -- and credit must go to Judy Price, then president of Childrens' Programming for CBS, for taking a chance on it and not playing it safe and slapping another Care Bears clone on the air instead. We took the show about as far as you could go on kids' TV at the time; as an example, the script for The Dragons' Graveyard (a second season episode I wrote), in which the kids contemplate killing Venger in order to find a way home, caused a battle royale with Broadcast Standards and Practices. The chances of an episode with a plot like the one described above even making it past an initial three-line pitch were -- and still are -- about as likely as Superman snorting Kryptonite."

Rather than keep arguing, he published the evidence: "So I decided to produce proof, instead of just my say-so. Here, then, is Requiem, the mysterious and much-debated final episode of Dungeons and Dragons -- the first draft, turned in on the 18th of May, 1985."

He closed with a line that doubles as a working philosophy for the entire Saturday morning industry: "It's only television."

Michael Reaves died in March 2023 at 72, of complications from Parkinson's disease.

What "Requiem" actually contained

The script does resolve things, just not the way the rumors claimed. It establishes that Venger is the Dungeon Master's corrupted son, and that the dragon Tiamat is Venger's sister, making the show's villain and its guide a broken family. Venger is redeemed. The portal home opens. The children are given the choice of staying or going, and the script fades out before revealing what they chose.

So the version fans invented was darker than the version the writer actually wrote, which is the reverse of how these legends usually run.

"Requiem" has since had more lives than most produced episodes. BCI Eclipse's complete-series DVD set, released December 5, 2006, included the script performed as a radio play alongside all 27 episodes. Fans later cut an animated version together from existing footage. In December 2024, at CCXP, Hasbro and the Brazilian outlet Jovem Nerd announced a stop-motion short based on it, titled "O Episódio Perdido", The Lost Episode.

Evanier has never endorsed it as the ending, and never dismissed it either. "It's not how I would have ended the series but I wouldn't suggest he's wrong. It's just the approach of a different writer. You can decide for yourself if you want to consider it 'the ending' or not."

How the telling has grown over the decades

The drift here is unusual. The makers do not contradict each other at all: Evanier and Reaves agree there was no finale, agree why, and are gracious about each other's version of how it might have ended. The contradiction is entirely between the makers and the audience. Thousands of people hold a specific memory of watching an episode that two writers, a network schedule, and an episode list all confirm was never made. One of those writers published his own unproduced script to settle it, and the memory survived the evidence.

The honest bottom line

Dungeons and Dragons was a toy-adjacent licensing cartoon built partly to make a controversial game look wholesome, it recycled the same premise for 27 episodes, and it left its characters stranded forever because the production calendar made a planned ending structurally impossible. Its writers had to fight Broadcast Standards just to let children consider killing a villain. And yet it stuck harder than almost anything else on CBS that decade, hard enough that its audience manufactured an ending out of thin air and defended it for thirty years. A show that never resolved anything produced the most stubbornly remembered non-existent finale in Saturday morning history. That is not a failure of the show. That is what it feels like when the ending matters to people more than it ever mattered to the schedule.

Sources

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the full Saturday morning lineup of fall 1983, the season it premiered into, and the full story of ThunderCats.

Frequently asked

What was the final episode of the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon?

There is no finale. The last episode broadcast was "The Winds of Darkness". Developer Mark Evanier has stated flatly: "There was NO 'final episode' of Dungeons & Dragons."

Did the kids die on the roller coaster?

No. That rumor was denied by Michael Reaves, the writer people credited it to, who called it "Bushwah, poppycock and balderdash" and published his actual unproduced script to prove it.

What is "Requiem"?

An unproduced script by Michael Reaves, first draft turned in May 18, 1985, intended as a possible series finale. It reveals Venger as the Dungeon Master's son, redeems him, opens the portal home, and fades out before the children choose whether to leave.

Why did the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon end without an ending?

Because animation lead times ran a year ahead of renewal decisions. Each season's final episode was written and produced months before that season began airing, so no one knew it was the end while there was still time to write one.

Was the show cancelled because of the Satanic Panic?

Evanier says no. He attributes the cancellation to declining ratings and says the protests "were minimal and had no impact."

Where can you hear "Requiem"?

It was performed as a radio play on the BCI Eclipse complete-series DVD set released December 5, 2006. Fans have also assembled an animated version from existing footage, and in December 2024 Hasbro and Jovem Nerd announced a stop-motion short based on the script.