I realize I don’t normally review cartoons I’ve recently checked out, but I felt compelled for reasons that will probably become obvious quickly.

This weekend, my favorite Saturday morning line-up is premiering a cartoon that’s actually a year old. Di-Gata Defenders is a Canadian cartoon about a kingdom that was once protected from a bad guy when four people sealed him up in four stones. (I’m going to others’ descriptions for that part. I haven’t seen the first episode, where I assume the backstory is laid out clearly, yet.) The magic of the stones is starting to fade, though, and four children (two boys, two girls), descended from the original defenders, are being trained to handle this menace.

These four youngsters control magic abilites that manifest through dice with sigils on them. Both the die and the sigil matter in what magic the youthful defender can perform and at what strength. (And doesn’t that sound like a game you can, or could, find at your local game shop…) They all have mastered at least two of the sigils. Unsurprisingly, the four seem to be coded to the four elements- the boys representing fire and air, the girls water and earth.

The characters are engaging. The air and earth defenders are brother and sister, but that’s so downplayed in the early episodes I got to see that I didn’t realize it until I read the website. The fire character is a charming, yet flawed, natural leader who’s still all kid. The water character is adorable. She keeps trying to sing…something she should probably never, ever do again. The group is quickly joined by a fifth, a skilled thief who immediately takes to the water character and annoys the fire character.

To make matters worse, this game-based, well-charactered cartoon has some of the best writing I’ve seen in a cartoon in a while. And it’s about to be dropped in between Chaotic, another fairly young game-based cartoon that seems to be trying to find its way, and Yu-Gi-Oh, which may or may not be around in the fall. The rumor is that 4Kids is reorganizing their line-up to focus on nothing but game-based, boy-targeted cartoons. (Their girl line-up, with the notable exception of Winx Club, has sucked for years, so I’m actually glad for the change.)

My concern (other than I won’t get to see this line-up unless it’s moved immediately to the Video on Demand area of the 4Kids site) is that Di-Gata is going to cause more problems for 4Kids than it’s going to solve. While 4Kids does have some passably written properties that are rumored to be staying around for the fall, Di-Gata is better. Add to that the fact that people who attack 4Kids tend to blame the writing on the voice actors (Don’t ask. I don’t get that one, either.), and that Di-Gata doesn’t involve a single 4Kids actor, and I have a bad feeling they’re going to come under even greater fire.

Di-Gata Defenders is a pretty cool little cartoon. It’ll be interesting to see how it holds up.