Let's Binge "Gargoyles"!

I can't offer you much in these Interesting Times, but I can offer you some recommendations what to binge watch while we're all stuck indoors.

I've done a few series marathons in the past in the good/bad old pre-streaming days and thankfully it's easier than ever to binge some of my favorites like "Gummi Bears" and "Fraggle Rock".  The former is available with Disney+ over which quite a lot of digital ink has been spilled and my extremely controversial opinion is that it is Good.  For one thing, it enabled me to finally, finally binge "Gargoyles", something I've been meaning to do since at least the late 90's and has been really difficult, up until Disney+ gave ready access to nearly every Disney Afternoon series.

Here's the trip report.  It gets a little spoilery the further in I get so either read it after or watch along with me.  My other really controversial opinion is that "Gargoyles" is excellent; easily one of the best animated series of the 1990's.  I'd go as far as to say that this is a series that tells as elaborate an ongoing saga with as well-developed characters as "Game of Thrones" except it's much more consistently good at it.

All that and you're internal dialogue will be voiced by Keith David for a while.

-----

Art!

"Ah, man, I heard about this thing..." - Let's watch "The Dream is Alive"!

I reiterate: I like to watch vintage Disney Park specials before heading down to The World.  I like to see what's changed, what's stayed the same, and what I missed out on that I honestly wouldn't believe actually happened unless they were documented on film for posterity.

"Walt Disney World's 20'th Anniversary: The Dream is Alive" does not preserve much of the latter (save for a brief glimpse of a Pleasure Island marquee).  In fact, this Disney Park Anniversary Special contains almost NO footage of Walt Disney World at all.  What it gives us instead is Michael Eisner -a LOT of Michael Eisner- struggling to be as charismatic as possible.

Whew, they really don't make them like this anymore.  Look for Eddie Murphy's expression at about the seven minute mark, because I had a similar one watching this.



Side note: Me having to pause and rub my temples at the sight of Michael Eisner's credit in "Bojack Horseman" is the new me having to pause and rub my temples at the sight of Seth MacFarlane's credit in "Cosmos". 

---

Art of the Day!

Speaking of Especially Weird Disney Things, we recently got a look at "Kingdom Hearts 3" and...

Oh no...

Oh nooooo...

"Do something instead of being afraid." - Let's watch 1990's Earth Day Special!

Remember back in 1990, when Gaia appeared in front of a kind-of-evil Robin Williams in the glorious form of Bette Midler and would've died if not for the valiant efforts of Neil Patrick Harris in-character as Doogie Howser M.D.?



All joking aside, yes, it's the cusp of the 80's and the 90's.  Yes, looked at from a certain angle, it's the weirdest "Always Sunny in Philadelphia" Prequel / "Ghostbusters" and "Back to the Future" Sequel ever.  And yes, this is a nearly two-hour movie where Gaia appears in front of a kind-of-evil Robin Williams in the glorious form of Bette Midler and would've died if not for the valiant efforts of Neil Patrick Harris in-character as Doogie Howser M.D. (and as far as I know, Michael Eisner wasn't involved).  And yes, there is a scene where Midler-Gaia, in a last-ditch effort to save herself, litters, and the litter lands near E.T. (who's just kind of there for reasons unknown), who turns it into a book that teaches some children and IDK, WTF.  But dang me if I wasn't genuinely moved by this special.  I mean, that bit with Kermit and Robin...


-----


Sketch of the Day!

In honor of all the adorable amphibians out there, meet my #Salamandersona!

Let's Ask Walt Disney World Tourists in 1993 About Their Favorite Attractions!

Hailing from the same year (or thenabouts) as "Journey Into Magic", this video was a trip-planning instructional film put out by Disney and Delta.



There's a lot of great footage of then-new and currently-gone attractions (that shot of Horizons got me right in the feels). There are also some pretty candid interviews with guests and cast members.  And there's a great deal of regrettable 90's fashion.

Sidenote: Again, the more I see/hear about Adventurer's Club, the more deeply sad I am that I never got to experience it myself. Tell me it wasn't as fun as it looks. Look into my little face and lie.

-----

Sketch of the Day

Introducing the Total Media Bridge Podcast!

Great Scott, it's alarming how easy it is to get out of the blogging habit isn't it?  Let's not dwell on that (as much as my guilty conscience would like to) and instead focus on one of the most awesome things I got to do over this busy summer:

The Total Media Bridge Podcast's Awkward First Episode!

In which Kevin Johnson of the excellent Total Media Bridge and I battle audio problems while discussing the roots of the Disney Afternoon, the Nostalgia Filter is strong with this one "The Wuzzles" and the better than it has any right to be "The Gummi Bears".  We talk about what went right, what went wrong, the adorable reality subtext of "Little Bears Lost", the issue of Hoppopotamus fat-shaming, and I do my (awful) Michael Eisner impression!  Click the link above to enjoy, and head over to TMB for the show notes.

-----

Sketch of the Unspecific Length of Time!

"The Wuzzles... But They Are Dinosaurs!"

It all started innocently enough with a Twitter conversation that eventually wound up here:

.@talcotts @Himmapaan @anatotitan Okay seriously (A) thanks a ton and (B) I am going to have to put some thought into this one...
— Trish (@Babbletrish) January 20, 2014

(And if I did that right, you should be able to click on that and read the whole discussion.  I hope.  Otherwise, ugh...

By the way, we can get robots on Mars and the moon, but there's no way to edit Tweets?)

Here's the resulting fun exercise in character design that forced me to draw like myself (and also like an 80's Disney person), but think like an Eisner.

The first step was to get some decent screenshots of "The Wuzzles" cartoon, then try to think of a way to approach this idea.  I didn't want to go "realistic"; for one thing that seemed beyond the point and for another, I'm... kind of sick of drawing "realistic (enter franchise centered on some kind of weird imaginary animals)".  I also couldn't think of a crazier thing to do then "Insect + Vertebrate" so my Bumblion and Butterbear equivalents were going to stay part-bee and part-butterfly.

So now I just had to think of dinosaurs who were semi-equivocal to the animals who made up the original residents of the land of Wuz.  On that note, meet B. rex!



Right, here's something I didn't know about the designs of the original Wuzzles before I did this, since I wanted to use their color schemes (or close enough; watercolors, man): there is a LOT of pink in their color schemes.  A lot.  Except, fascinatingly, in the female Wuzzles, who are almost completely devoid of overtly pink-derived colors.

Now, I'm not saying that this -exactly this- is where "pink is a manly color for manly men, blue is for girls" thing ended but it's certainly odd.  I wonder if it was a conscious decision?  If the opportunity ever came up, I would ask one of the people who worked on the Wuzzles franchise about... well, by golly, I'd ask her what's up with those fairy wings first, but then about the pink thing.  Anyway, here's non-pink Brontomastax.



Now... she's part Brontomerus.  She could only be part Brontomerus (or, honestly, mostly Brontomerus; I wanted to stick with the same animal combination ratio [for want of a better word] as the original Wuzzles did, which worked out fine until I got to "basically just a hippo with rabbit ears").  As you may recall, one of the most soul-crushing aspects of my revisiting "The Wuzzles" this past summer was realizing as an adult how much of the humor was at the expense of Hoppo's weight.  Hell, I feel kind of gross having drawn this, so let's move on.  Oh, and she's also part Pegomastax because dang it, you think of a rabbit-like dinosaur.



I drew Stegomimus last of all, and... eh, I still feel like I could've done something funnier here.  Elaroo is honestly one of the strangest character concepts in a multimedia franchise full of weird character concepts because, let us just drop this right on the table, he is a male and he has a pouch.  If we knew more about sexual dimorphism in dinosaurs, I'd do something with that, but we don't, so moving right along...

Another thing about revisiting "The Wuzzles", but for different reasons, was seeing how Moosel, my favorite character as a kid and again I have no idea why, was just the diametric opposite to the very concept of appealing character designs.  For the dinosaur version, there were, as far as anyone knows, no seagoing dinosaurs -- except for sea birds.  So I suppose a penguin would be the dinosaur equivalent of a seal?  And hadrosaurs are large herbivores; Lambeosaurus in particular has that awesome crest that looks kind of like an antler so aaah!  AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!???!!!



Got nothing to add to Styracoraptor.  I personally can't look at him without laughing.  Oh, wow... I am a crazy person.



As for Ceratofly, I think she might actually be my favorite out of the whole gang.  Her design is ridiculous, but it isn't SO ridiculous that I can't see her working as a character.  She looks like she could guest-star in the most bonkers episode of "Dinosaur Train" ever made.

In Which We Kick Off The New Year by Playing Kill/Refurb/Marry!

A new Year has dawned and with it is the desire to blog more.  And to that end, I've decided to -why not- join the Kill/Refurb/Marry Blog Hop created by Mouse on the Mind and This Happy Place.  This party has been going on for a few months but this month's topic was so oddly specific that I could not resist joining in.

The idea is that the K/F/M founders pick a topic and participants decide which relevant things at Walt Disney World they would get rid of, give an overhaul, or live inside if they could.  And the topic of discussion this time out is that most wondrous and unique of Walt Disney World Experiences, the Aerial Spinner Ride.  Or, "You know, Dumbo and the various less popular Dumbo substitutes".  Nothing says "I am having fun in a theme park" then riding around in a circle inside a thing that is shaped like another thing.  Let's get right into this shall we?  The first choice, at least, is wikkid easy.

Kill: TriceraTop Spin

Right.  So, I will admit that my vote to demolish Dumbo-But-They-Are-Triceratops-For-Reasons-That-Are-Unclear-Until-You-Notice-The-Pun-And-Thereafter-Wish-To-Punch-The-Person-Who-Came-Up-With-That-Because-Honestly is due to my larger issues with Dinoland USA as a whole in general and with Chester and Hester's Dinorama specifically.  (But also because of the pun thing, because, I reiterate, honestly?!?)

New readers, I have to level with you.  'Round here at the Obligatory Art Blog, we love dinosaurs.  A lot.  (About as much as Disney, theme parks, and animation.)  And I think they deserve a much, much better themed land in the Disney parks than... whatever the hell this is.

And, yeah, I "get" it.  I "get" the theme of Dinoland/Dinorama.  I "get" it, and I really, really hate it.  I maintain that there is something very wrong with your theme/concept when it is decades later and most visitors still need to have it explained to them.  Doubly so if the explanation boils down to, "But it's SUPPOSED to look just like your town's cheesy local county fair except it's in Disney World and taking up space that could be better occupied by something totally amazing and unique!  Listen..."  You know what the only non-terrible thing in Dinoland is to me?  That walk-through exhibit of modern species of Mesozoic plants.  The best part of this Dinosaur themed land in a Disney theme park built by Disney Imagineers is a *garden*.  I'm not even angry (I like gardens), I'm just very disappointed.

So yeah, plow over Dinoland USA and start the whole dang thing over.  (Hint: There's already an awesome attraction elsewhere in Animal Kingdom that just so happens to involve dinosaurs of the modern flight-capable persuasion, so let's start by bringing Flights of Wonder over from Asia and take it from there.)  This will, naturally, take TriceraTop Spin down with it.  Oh well.

Refurbish: The Magic Carpets of Aladdin... I guess?

I have to be honest, I have little to no emotional investment in the non-Dumbo Dumbo-type spinning rides in Disney World.  I'm giving this one a refurb because it's kind of awkwardly placed, probably the least interesting idea for an "Aladdin" themed ride (Where the heck is our Cave of Wonders thrill ride?), and Astro-Orbiter is much prettier and has a better view.

Marry: Dumbo the Flying Elephant

Because it's freakin' Dumbo, duh.

Okay, seriously.  One crazy trip around Thanksgiving, my whole grown adult family rode Dumbo, the Mad Tea Party, and Cinderella's Golden Carousel Super-Manly Testosterone-Fueled Spinning Horse Ride For Boys Prince Charming's Regal Carousel and we were about a million times giddier than we were before, for reasons that had nothing to do with Dole Whips.  From Dumbo, we got a few decent seconds-at-a-time tantalizing looks at the New Fantasyland, which was under construction at the time.  That and the new "Dueling Dumbos" version is gorgeous.

-----

And for extra credit, why not catch up on the other Kill/Refurb/Marry topics?

Resort Hotels

Kill... well, no.  Kill is a little strong.  But Seriously Reconsider: The All-Star Resorts.  The theming over there was decided by a crazy person.  For example, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I learned that the Mighty Ducks building, covered in hockey stuff and with a hockey rink shaped pool, was part of All Star Movies rather then Sports.  (And yes, I know the answer, as it so often is for weird Disney things of that era, is "Because Michael Eisner..."  Look, he doesn't work there anymore.  Move the Ducks/Hockey to Sports and retheme their Movie building to something more timeless, like "Mary Poppins" or "Victory Through Air Power".)

Refurb: The Pop Century Resorts.  Again, the theming is crazy and they look really sad next to their sisters over at Art of Animation.

Marry: Can I be a Polyandrist here?  Because between childhood favorite Beach Club, gorgeous Wilderness Lodge, Animal Kingdom Lodge, and Polynesian, and our DVC home resort Contemporary/Bay Lake Towers, I just can't choose. 

Crescent Lake Restaurants

Kill: ESPN Club.  I get the need for a sports bar in Disney World, it's the fact that this dad oasis wants so desperately to be a restaurant as well that... just, no.

Refurb: Toss-up between Big River Brewery, which either needs to commit fully to being a brewpub where you go in for beer tastings and to drink beer and eat pretzels, or have more room inside to be a full-on restaurant, and Kouzzina which I desperately want to retcon back into Spoodles.

Marry: Il Mulino.  New York.  Trattoria.  Oh goodness, yes.  Most underrated restaurant in the whole World and my family's little secret.  I can't wait for that Risotto Con Funghi and homemade Limoncello.

Thrill Rides

Kill: Dinosaur.  We're plowing over Dinoland anyway, but really the most entertainment I get out of this obnoxiously loud, dark, and buggy mess is hearing Bill Nye trying to tell us with a strait face that Carnotaurus -adorable little gonk-faced Carnotaurus- was "the fiercest and most terrifying predatory dinosaur of all time".  Um...

Refurb:  Splash Mountain.  This is one of my favorite rides ever and by Walt's mustache it needs an awful lot of love.  And I don't mean the seemingly yearly upkeep, I mean updating the animatronics, soundtrack, and the landscaping.  I'm sure they can take a full year or two off from adding new stuff to Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean to give poor Splash Mountain an overhaul.

Marry:  Star Tours.  All versions.  I'll be riding this awesomeness until my thirty-something year old back can't take it anymore.

For more opinions on this blog hop, head on over to the list at Mouse on the Mind.  The next topic is Live In-Park Musicals!  It's the dream we all dream of: Nemo vs. Ariel in the World Series of Blacklight Sensitive Puppetry!

-----

Sketch of the Day!

Seriously, Carnotaurus was adorable and a sweetie. WTF, Disney?



Bonus much more recent art of a weird-looking prehistoric hoofed mammal! This handsome, hopeful holiday Unitatherium was the result of some Twitter shenanigans and the very last drawing I made in 2013.  I... am okay with this.

Some Thoughts After Watching 29 Episodes of "Gummi Bears"

There is a wonderful, crazy rumor about "Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears" that's worth recounting before we get rolling bouncing here.  The origin of "Gummi Bears" supposedly involves Michael Eisner in one of his most deeply Michael Eisnery moments.  He is said to have pitched one of the two first television animated series ever produced by Disney thus: "Hey, my son really loves those Gummy Bear candies.  Make a show about that!"

It is a testament to how awesome Disney can be in a pinch when the animators heard that command, looked at each other, said "okay" to Eisner, and came up with this.*

As I said in the previous post (which you should pause and read right now if you missed it), Disney had entered the wilderness of animated television cartoons with two series produced for the autumn of 1985, "The Wuzzles" and "Adventures of the Gummi Bears".  And in America, and I mention this again because I cannot emphasize how astonishing this fact is and how unthinkable this would be now, these two series aired on two different channels in the exact same time slot. "Gummi Bears" was much more successful and went on to become one of Disney's longest-running animated television series ever, surviving even into the early '90s.

Full confession: I wasn't really into this series as a child.  Remember, I was watching "The Wuzzles" on a competing network; I had no idea what I was missing.  And it turns out that I was missing something really special.

The thing that struck me the most about "Gummi Bears" is how much more care obviously went into it compared to "The Wuzzles".  Yes, it's a series with cute colorful funny animal characters living in a magical tree in an enchanted forest.  But the writers made an effort to give them fairly complex personalities and a well-established world to live in.  And, on top of all that and most impressive of all, a fairly elaborate mythology.

The idea is that we're seeing the final remnants of an ancient advanced civilization, one that is just starting to rediscover its heritage, magical powers, and lost technology.  (As far as the aforementioned lost technology goes, the Bears rediscover such items as what is basically a mech suit and a long-distance communication device/laser canon, neither of which I expected to see in a show like this and my goodness is it ever all the more awesome for it.)  Up until the end of the first season, the residents of Gummi Glen have no idea that they are not the last of their kind.  There's an underlying poignancy here that you aren't going to get in "The Wuzzles".

The setting of "Gummi Bears" is developed enough that I could do yet another parody of the "Game of Thrones" opening with its various locations if I had a penchant for stop-motion animation (and any desire to send yet another damn "Game of Thrones" opening sequence parody out into the world).  The visual design appears to take some influence from "The Sword in the Stone", especially in Dunwyn Castle and its residents.  But I detected an even stronger visual similarity to "The Black Cauldron", especially in the forests, Castle Drekmore, and the Quick Tunnels (a very cool device in their own right and I suddenly long for a dark ride based upon them).  I want to buy a round of pints for whatever layout artists designed Gummi Glen itself because it is just wonderful; you want to walk around inside it and explore every corner.

But the characters really drew me into the series.  There is not a single dud character in the main cast.  I could gush about them all day but I'll keep this quick: the characters are awesome.  Even the human characters are awesome.  Hell, even the younger characters are reasonably awesome!  (For the most part.  There aren't a lot of episodes centered on Sunni and Cubbi, and thankfully those are mostly okay.  Even so, by the end of the DVD set, I still wasn't completely sold on their voices or designs.  Dig Sunni's 80's hair.)

There is a noticeable bit of a dip in quality in the third season.  The writers focused less often on the high concepts introduced in the first two seasons.  They also break out in chronic new characters, including a very obnoxious "LOL, aren't artists random?!?" type. That said, the show is still, if you'll pardon the phrase, leaps and bounds over much of what it was competing with at the time.  I am very happy that I gave it a try.

So what does Calla have to do to be part of the Princess line already?

* - There is another crazy-awesome rumor about "Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears" that links it with another Disney animated television series with a slightly larger fanbase.  Very early on in "Gummi Bears", there is an episode where an evil gargoyle who wants to hurt people comes to life at night and makes mischief in the castle.  The rumor insists that this episode may have inspired a later series about good gargoyles who want to help people and who come to life at night to protect the castle.  Yes, "Gargoyles" supposedly started life as a "Gummi Bears" spin-off.  If that's true, especially when you consider how many spin-offs they had in mind for "Gargoyles", then that is amazing.

Addendum: The wonderful Total Media Bridge agrees with me here, and goes into a little more detail regarding the history of the show and it's subsequent seasons.

-----

Sketch of the Day! This was a pretty big hit on Twitter, if I do say so myself:

Some Thoughts After Watching All Thirteen Episodes of "The Wuzzles"

It's been a while since I shared something from my "Watch Later" YouTube queue, hasn't it?  Well, strap yourselves in, kids, cause this one is a doozie.  It's a playlist that preserves the complete series of Disney Television Animation's very first effort, "The Wuzzles".

Watching "The Wuzzles" for the very first time since 1985 was an experience, let me tell you.



Okay, it honestly stuns me that I haven't written anything at length about "The Wuzzles" since way, way back in 2006.  (That essay is reposted here.  Forgive the early blog format.)  This wasn't my favorite show from when I was a child, but it's the first show I ever remember really liking and watching -- or, rather, the first show I remember making a conscious choice to watch.

You see, back in the early 80's, the landscape of children's cartoons was really f-ing bleak.  If you want a good idea of just how really f-ing bleak it was, take a look at these two recent AV Club Inventories.  Have a strong drink at the ready.

Into this (I can't emphasize this enough) really f-ing bleak environment came two Saturday morning cartoons from what was then considered an unlikely source: Disney.  In those days, and this is totally understandable (read those Inventories again), television cartoons were considered the lowest rung on the animated ladder.  That Disney would wish to enter that arena was shocking.  However, as stated in this article from the time, Disney Television Animation wished to bring some sophistication to Saturday morning.  So, we have to thank Michael Eisner for making television a safe place for quality animation, at least indirectly.

Now here's where things get strange.  Disney produced two series for the autumn of 1985, "The Wuzzles" and "Adventures of the Gummi Bears".  And this would be absolutely unthinkable today, but these two first experiments in television animation from Disney aired on different networks in America.  At the same time.  Like literally they aired on different channels in the same time slot.  "Gummi Bears" was much more successful and went on to become one of Disney's longest-running animated television series ever, surviving even into the early '90s.  Meanwhile "Wuzzles" lasted for just one season of -and this blew my mind to smithereens when I found out- only thirteen episodes.

Thirteen episodes!  Sweet unlikely hybrids with inexplicable fairy wings, thirteen episodes!  How is that even possible?  As I said, this was the first Saturday morning cartoon I ever really liked, and it's shadow looms absurdly large over my childhood; the way I drew, the stories I wrote, the characters I invented.  Hell, who am I kidding?  You can still see some influence from the show on me to this day!  "The Wuzzles" meant an awful lot to me for a very long time, and it did it with only thirteen episodes.  It's like the "Firefly" of Disney animation, though I hasten to clarify after refreshing my memory that I mean that in a ratio of "amount of nostalgia" to "actual shockingly low number of episodes" sense, nothing more.

Before we get into that, let's talk about what I liked about "The Wuzzles" while watching it for the first time since childhood.  This show is, especially for it's time, lush.  The animation is stellar for a television cartoon from the 80's; roughly on-par with the much later "Animaniacs" (both series as well as "Gummi Bears" featured the work of the studio TMS Entertainment).  The characters are always on-model, the backgrounds are gorgeous, and the voice acting is generally very good.  I wasn't really sold on Stan Frieberg's narration at first, but then I realized that it was starting to feel like he was struggling to describe a vivid fever dream, which made the proceedings much more entertaining as an adult.

I'm especially fond of two things that, happily, turned out to be just as good as I remembered from childhood: the score and the set design.  The synth-heavy score is very definitely of its time, but is pretty sophisticated for electronic background music in an 80's cartoon.  By the set design, I mean take a look at the houses in the neighborhood where the main characters live.  Each one is distinct, tells you everything you need to know about its resident, and sports a crazy amount of detail even objectively better cartoons don't bother with.

So there's the good thing about revisiting "The Wuzzles" as an adult; it is at least pleasant to look at and to listen to.  Now here comes the upsetting part: other than that, "The Wuzzles" is not as good as I remembered.  This is almost maddening because, see, I remembered almost every key moment from every episode.  But watching these episodes as an adult... they weren't *horrible*, mind you, they just didn't seem to deserve the huge place they occupy in my earliest animation-related memories.  That's pretty heavy stuff, if you think about it.

And speaking of heavy, I have to warn people who are going to be watching this 1985 cartoon for children by Disney for the first time ever in the year 2013 about the one thing that surprised and honestly really upset me the most about "The Wuzzles": this show just straight-up HATES overweight women.  It really does.  Take a drink whenever poor Hoppopotamus is the victim of a fat joke.  Ugh.

Speaking of the characters, it was also a pretty big blow to see my favorite character, Moosel, for the first time in forever.  Yes, this was my favorite character as a child.  For the life of me I could not tell you why.  With all due respect to the late Bill Scott, Moosel's voice is very obnoxious.  He's also the most boring character of the lot, personality-wise.  But what made me cringe most of all is his character design and animation.  He's just unpleasant to look at now, especially with those weird floppy walk-cycles they gave him.  What kills me is that I loved this character enough to base some of my early character designs on him!  I don't know anything about anything anymore!?!

Overall, what disappointed me the most about "The Wuzzles" is the writing.  The stories told in these thirteen episodes aren't all that interesting to be honest.  The best episodes take a boring plot and put a weirder spin on it, and they're the ones most worth watching.  (My favorites are "The Terrified Forest" and "Class Dismissed."  I'd be remiss if I didn't mention "Ghostrustlers" because it manages to be insane even by the standards of both "The Wuzzles" and Required-By-Law 80's Cartoon Episodes Set in the Old West.)  What surprised me this time out was that this is a series that in the course of only thirteen episodes manages to have THREE episodes ("In The Money", "Elaroo's Wishday", and "What's Up, Stox?") where the lesson is, "be careful what you wish for".  And it hit me like a brick as an adult that each and every one of those episodes might as well have sat their young audience down and said, "Those grapes are SO sour, kids, you wouldn't believe it."

So here I am, wiser, disillusioned, with fresher, less rose-tinted memories of a very important part of my early childhood dancing in my head and haunting my dreams.  I do plan on watching and reviewing "Gummi Bears" next week, having already tackled other early efforts from Walt Disney Television Animation like this one.  But I also hope to quickly wash this one off with something else that I thankfully already know holds up...

-----

Sketch of the Day!  Ooh, they got originality...

"Smash your TV and have ADVENTURES!!!" - Disney's "Fluppy Dogs"

I'm still plowing through my YouTube queue, and callooh calleigh! I've hit our first Weird Disney Thing!

Now, if you remember this 1986 episode of the Disney Sunday Movie, and you try to tell me that you expected exactly this from a title like "Fluppy Dogs", you are a damn liar:



If you aren't a liar, then you are psychic.  If you aren't psychic, then you are halfway between insane and awesome.  Because literally the only other option here is that you are Michael Eisner, because when you see a strange Disney thing from a time period roughly stretching from the mid-80's to the late-90's, your explanation will almost certainly involve Michael Eisner somehow.

Now I'm being a little unfair here because there's no hard evidence that this is the case with "Fluppy Dogs".  There is basically no information at all about this franchise to be found online (aside from good old Ghost of the Doll and even their section is scant on information).  Based off what I remember, this hour-long animated special was based off a very generic stuffed dog toy put out by Disney through Kenner around the same time as the Wuzzles, and they followed the formula of far better-loved 80's toys: they were colorful, cute, and collectable.

So, naturally, their nominal movie had to involve dimension-hopping.  Really, the only nostalgia at all appears not to be for the toys but for this special itself, which was itself a pilot for a series that never got off the ground.  I'll be honest that if they hadn't gone for the crazy fantasy route here, I'd have zero nostalgia for the Fluppies myself, since I remember exactly nothing about the toys.

So about the special.  The animation is very iffy for a Disney production.  In particular, it seems the studio was used to more stylized cartoon animals and humans gave them problems.  The Fluppies themselves look fine, but the human characters often just look... well, there's off-model and then there's this, which is like never-even-ON-model-to-start-with.  Aside from that, here are the things that hit me after having not seen it in many years:

* - Mr. Wagstaff is such a "Captain Planet" villain.  Hell, he goes to depths I don't think even Captain Planet villains would sink to, keeping demonstrably sapient cryptid animals in a tiny cage in his library.

* - Speaking of, endangered animals kept in tiny cages in a library.  That's... that's new.  I wonder if Wagstaff's home was initially supposed to resemble the Colby Trophy Room, but they were afraid that would be too traumatic for the children, so they made sure all of Wagstaff's rare animals were still alive.  And in tiny cages.  In a library.  Yup, totally less horrible.

* - One aspect of this special I really like is that they address something that always kind of bothered me about fantasy stories where an ordinary kid goes off on crazy adventures with magical creatures.  The writers of such stories seem to be wholly unaware that kids aren't fully independent.  Don't the kids in these stories go to school?  Wouldn't adults wonder what they've been up to?  Wouldn't their parents ever confront them about all the strange things happening around the house?

* - On that note, man these Fluppies are like the worst peer pressurers:
"You gotta help us, Jamie!"
"But I can't skip school!?!" 
"~*~ADVENTURE!!!~*~" 
"Uuuuugh, fine!  This better not end with Main Street getting flooded!"

* - I'd like to think the first episode of the series that never happened would have been just short scenes of Cryptozoologists, Xenobiologists, and everyone at SETI watching footage of the Fluppy invasion and either fainting, crapping themselves, or breaking out the champagne.

More Disney Television from the 80's: "The Wuzzles" and "The Adventures of the Gummi Bears".

And do read the review of "Fluppy Dogs" on Total Media Bridge as well for a different take on the movie.

-----

Sketch of the Day!  Decided to color the Fantasyland Dragon making friends with Duffy just for the heck of it. 

The Insanity of the 1996 Walt Disney World Christmas Parade!

There's a part of me that thinks I ought to be doing a trip report or something more substantial like that, but I've been busy with decorating and other Christmassy things. So here's a weird Christmas and Disney related video instead:



I discovered this barrel of insanity some time before we left for our spur-of-the-moment Christmastime in Disney World Round Two trip. It has been argued that the current age of the Disney theme parks is the strangest ever but looking back at 1996, I don't know. Among the stuff I noticed:

* - Is it me or is this actually a document of Jerry Van Dyke gradually losing his mind?

* - I forgot how obnoxious the hype for the live-action remake of "101 Dalmatians" was back then.

* - How would you like to be on the same stage as that terrifying Broadway Lumiere costume?  How would you like to have to WEAR that terrifying Broadway Lumiere costume?

* - J.D. Roth's entire career seems to be floating from random hosting gig to random hosting gig.

* - "Remember the Magic!!!"

There are two major Weird Disney Things that are worth singling out here:

* - Okay, there was one interesting and different thing we did during this latest WDW trip, and that was staying in Saratoga Springs. It is a very very large and sprawling resort with many buildings spread out over a large area. I don't think we would have liked it nearly as much if we were in one of the more remote buildings (we were in Congress Park in a building overlooking the remains of Pleasure Island across the river and within about a twenty-minute walk to the main building.) But our room was huge as far as DVC studios go, the facilities in the resort were all very nice, and it was fun spotting the buildings like the old theater that betrayed the fact that this used to be the Disney Institute.

Generally speaking, if you are walking around in Walt Disney World and you see something very strange that has been there since the mid-80's through mid-90's, you can explain it with two words: Michael Eisner. The story with the Disney Institute is that supposedly Eisner went to a resort in upstate New York once that catered to older adults and during your whole stay there you took classes in various subjects. "I LOVED it," he said upon his return, "I LOVED spending the whole week in classrooms learning how to cook or arrange flowers or whatever! You know what, I WANT that! I WANT that in my park!"

And so the Disney Institute, a resort where you'd stay in and take classes all through your entire stay in Walt Disney World, was built. As you can see in the segment about it in the video, the concept didn't go over as well as Michael Eisner thought it would.

* - Castle. Cake.


-----

If you enjoyed this weird Christmas special from days gone by, I'm planning something big -and probably ill-advised- for next week. Until then, here's the Sketch of the Day with Santas galore!

The Mystery of the Firffels Deepens! But Not By a Whole Lot.

When I rescued this old essay from my sunken Geocities website, I didn't expect it to get the reaction it got. In particular, I've been getting a lot of "OMG, THAT'S what those not-Wuzzle things were called! Thank you for helping me not go insane!"

In the older post, I described the Firffels rather unfairly as "The Wuzzles Who Didn't Make It", and assumed that "Remco probably saw the mint that Disney made with their cute little spliced furballs and said, 'WAH! Me TOO!!!'"

It seems I was wrong in assuming this. Maybe.

I got a couple of Anonymous posters stating that the Firffels actually predate the Wuzzles. I can believe this; it's fairly well-known that the Go-Bots were released long before the Transformers and it's not hard to see who won that duel. Further, one poster claimed that Michael Eisner saw the Firffels at some point, and liked the concept enough to do his own version. These wound up being much more successful because he had The Power of Disney on his side.

I can kinda see that happening. Thing is, I seem to recall seeing the Firffels commercials at around the same time Wuzzles cartoon was just getting popular. I hate to be like this, but it'd be nice to see some hard evidence that Eisner was aware of Firffels at all before we accuse him of stealing the idea...

I just kinda ran to Michael Eisner's defense and now I feel dirty. O.O

I did, however, have to admit that there is some reason to agree that Firffels predate Wuzzles by at least a few years. There's an old picture book featuring the Firffel characters; and I only knew about that thanks to a comment in TV Tropes. Then a nice poster called Venusboi79 provided some links. They don't quite answer all my questions about these weird characters, but they do deepen my curiosity.

The first link took me to the official website of the woman who created the Firffels characters, Othello Bach. (I still need to experiment with calling myself Trysch just to see what happens.) Her site is very Flash-heavy and a bit confusing, but if you hit "Books" and then "Collectibles", you'll find yourself at a page with a book entitled Whoever Heard of a Fird? Clicking the cover enlarges the picture and... that's it. (Well, there's also an arrow taking you to the book's Amazon page and the asking price made my eyes bleed, so I can't follow that thread.)

Far, far more interesting is the film clip under the book cover. Unfortunately, embedding is disabled. It's well worth watching though because it is fascinating (it's very clearly designed for buyers). I also found this commercial:



Venus also directed me to good old Ghost of the Doll, a website that has saved my rear end many times in the ebaying department. There's no entry on the Firffels, but there is a very extensive message board thread with loads and loads of pictures.  

Looks like I remembered everyone from the toys (Fird, Dicken, Butterfrog, and Burtle) except Shamel (sheep + camel. We don't need to do this on the planet I live on because Llamas exist.) According to TV Tropes, the books also include a Woose (worm/goose and according to the illustration showing him at Ghost of the Doll, well up there with the Slobber and the Wyrm as the Saddest Imaginary Animal Ever), Blizard (bird/lizard), Girouse (giraffe/mouse), Snog (snail/hog), Dryder (dragon/spider - WTF?), and the not-as-horrifying-as-it-sounds Hyenant (hyena/ant). But there's also the truly horrifying Elephunky (elephant/gorilla).  It's those giant arms. And the man-boobs.

----

Sketchadaday! Speaking of imaginary animal franchises...



This hasn't been Jossed yet, has it?