An interview on Wired.com is a conversation with World of Warcraft production director J. Allen Brack conducted during BlizzCon 2011. They discuss the new pets and the upcoming expansion to determine if the MMORPG has jumped the shark, or in this case, the panda. Here's his take on whether kung fu pandas are a shark-jumping moment:

We don’t really worry about that because we really feel that our fans are going to be really excited about it. We have the community that’s really excited about what we’re doing.

The team is really excited about doing it. So that’s really what’s important. When it comes out, it’s going to be great. I can understand the concept of “Why isn’t there a big bad guy?” in this expansion? But how many times can we say, “This bad guy is going to destroy the world now and this time it’s serious? No, this guy, he’s really, really, really, really bad!”

So taking a break from that was very conscious and just having a very different tone. Instead of Horde and Alliance, we team up to defeat the big evil. It’s about the discovery of this new land and how the conflict of the Horde and Alliance influences that. With [the continent of] Outland [in the Burning Crusade expansion] and then with Northrend [Lich King] we had these self-contained areas where players came for an adventure in the higher level. That was really successful.

With Cataclysm, we didn’t have that. It was very much focused on redoing the entire levels 1-60 experience. You didn’t have, “This is the high level area.” So that’s something we actually want to get back to, that kind of experience and that kind of visual.