Steven Universe Reflection

Proposing Steven Universe as a live action series is an interesting idea, where I'm sure some people would enjoy Steven Universe as a live action show I personally cannot see it being able to all that well. The show has this absolutely amazing art style that would be hard to capture the feel of it in real life, without excessive CGI (then you get into Mars Needs Moms territory, which we don't need).
Another thing that I find with a cartoon to live action is that it appears almost impossible to get characters right. Whether it be age, hair colour or strangely everything about a character is changed. I'm quite nitpicky about these things, I believe that if you are running a high budget show you should be able to afford those things like coloured contacts and good looking wigs. And even if cosplayers achieve a characters looks perfectly it appears that a lot of the time Hollywood would rather go with what they think looks best (I could spend hours tearing apart the differences between the book and the movie for Percy Jackson and the Lightning Theif).
My "favourite" example of a cartoon to live action has got to go to the 2016 film Assassination Classroom: Graduation. Like Steven Universe, Assassination Classroom also has it's very own alien, Koro-Sensei. While he isn't as human-like as the Crystal Gems, his CGI form still does look rather weird in comparison to his appearance in the anime/ manga. Because the gems on the show have very unique body types it would be hard to capture that with both CGI and live action. This kind of stuff is why I probably wouldn't particularly enjoy the visuals, let alone all the giant characters or the ones with more than the normal amount of human body parts in Steven Universe would look weird in CGI (or whatever Mars Needs Moms did). The Cartoon can pull all this eight-limbed, third-eyed goodness easily. While Garnet looks great in the show with her three eyes I can't Imagine it looking all that in Live Action.

 Being a show on Cartoon Network Steven Universe is most likely aimed at older children and tweens. I'm sure younger would be fine watching it from what I've heard the storyline appears to be pretty deep which may be hard for a younger audience to comprehend. One of the key things in my opinion to figuring out the target audience for a show is, does it sell toys? For Steven Universe, this is a yes. Although shows that are obviously made for a much more mature audience like Rick and Morty and Breaking Bad both have toy lines neither of them exactly have Megablock lines like SU.
But then we get into the company's acknowledgement of the older fans. The official social media accounts have used well known Steven Universe cosplayers as well as artists to do promotional material from the show. While this isn't a direct pointer that the show is aimed at an older audience it does show that the staff care about them.
The show is also filled with things referencing to the LGBT+ community and if I have learned anything from Fandom about putting LGBT+ themes into your media, it's that the hordes will come running. This means the show suddenly gets a lot of older fans. Whether the writers did this knowing this would or they just did it because they wanted younger children to know about these things remain unknown to me.

Now if I fit into to this target audience is the next question. In the initial release of the show, I most likely didn't fit into the demographic. The way the plot appears to be going as it gets deeper and deeper, it might become more suited to an older audience. I have watched the show from time to time and listened to a few songs so I do enjoy the occasional Steven Universe. I would watch it if I had the chance but it isn't on Netflix :(. At my age I'm probably not part of the target audience, but I'm almost sure majority of the fanbase is my age and older.