Cartoons I Grew Up On: Pirates of Dark Water

Mixing alien worlds with piratical themes, The Pirates of Dark Water is all about one man's quest to recover the thirteen treasures of Rule to save his planet from a mysterious dark substance in the water that eats whatever it touches.  He is joined by a gruff pirate (who turns out to have a heart of gold), a feisty female, and a monkey-bird.  However, the evil pirate Bloth wants the treasures for himself, so he and his crew are constantly chasing Ren (the main character).

This show was awesome because not only was it action packed, but since it took place on an alien world (Mer), they didn't have to follow our reality at all.  So the fact that Ren's ship could essentially transform into a glider or that parts of the planet were constantly in flux were just normal to all these adventurers, but to a little kid it was fuel for the imagination.  Also, like Avatar the Last Airbender and Greek mythology, this show liked to combine animals we know together in strange ways (like Niddler the monkey-bird).  Also also, there are pirates, which have always been cool (except if you lived in a time with real ones most likely).

Ever since college I've been waiting for these to show up on DVD, but apparently I stopped my hunt two years ago because I just discovered today that there is a DVD set of the whole show that you can get from Amazon that was released in 2010.  Unfortunately, the show itself never got to conclude, so you'll have to use your imagination to come up with how the final treasures were recovered and what happened when all of them were brought together.  If someone wanted to do a reboot/reimagining/retelling of this series and finish it, I would be totally okay with that.  Unless his name was M'Knight or Michael Bay.