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.

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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.

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...

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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.

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

The Triumphant Return of Fird and the Firffels!

Look at what came in the mail last week!

Okay, this might take some explanation, especially if you're new to the blog.

Way back in the first year, one of the most popular posts I wrote mentioned the Firffels and my assumed history of the toy line. Many comments suggested I was very wrong about the Fiffels and that they had a much more interesting history. I made a follow-up post which itself became very popular. Sadly, it didn't look like there was any more to learn about the Firffels, since the book that introduced the characters, Whoever Heard of a Fird, was long out of print and what copies popped up as available were very expensive.

Well, a few weeks ago, I received the following email:

Hi there.

I was looking at your blog. My name is Shann Hurst, I'm an illustrator. I thought you might be interested to know that I've been working with Othello Bach and we're re-releasing "Whoever Heard Of A Fird?" Actually it's out and on sale now. Anyway, It's something we've really put a lot of work into and we're really excited about how it's turning out. If you have time, you're invited to look at the official website: www.whoeverheardofafird.com

Let me know how you like it.

Shann Hurst

www.wishenginestudio.com

I thanked Shann Hurst and ordered the book right away.  It took a while to arrive, which implies that it must be pretty popular and there's a lot of nostalgia for these characters.

And now that I've just finally read the book, I can see why.  The message is simple: be yourself.  But everything else in the book is so unusual and fun that the moral doesn't feel like a pill.

First off, obviously, the characters are all delightfully bizarre.  Boogie monsters, Panducks, Kangaroctopi, it's clear that Othello Bach had a lot of fun coming up with these creatures and Shann Hurst must have had a lot of fun drawing them.  Hurst's style itself is very unusual and almost surreal, and it fits the menagerie of friendly freaks.

Othello's writing is highly unique as well.  The book is much more text-heavy than I thought it would be, but it never feels bloated.  A lot of text is given over to poems and songs, some of which get downright philosophical.  And some of them are just fun.



My prediction is that kids -especially weird kids- are going to embrace this new edition of Whoever Heard of a Fird.  Hopefully, it'll renew interest in Othello Bach's characters.

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Sketch of the Day

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.

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Sketchadaday! Speaking of imaginary animal franchises...



This hasn't been Jossed yet, has it?

RE: Wuzzle Wings

Another old LaGremlin land post. Originally posted on 1/20/06. I wrote this several years after "Deep Questions About 80's Cartoons" inspired by one issue on the list I couldn't shake...

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Hey, remember the "Wuzzles"?
 
T’was a fun little cartoon and toy line that followed the great tradition of 80’s cartoons and toys, in that it was colorful, had kind of a sci-fi/fantasy theme, and made little sense you wonder what kinds of medication the people who came up with it were taking at the time.
This is not a “Wuzzle” information article. (There are plenty of excellent fan websites out there, the best of which is The Unofficial Wuzzle Fansite, which is still around. Head over there in case you need to familiarize yourself with these characters again before we go on.)
Instead, consider this an expansion on the article I have about weird questions raised by 80’s cartoons. This article intends to address an issue of great societal fallout, a question I have had about the Wuzzles since the characters debuted. Amazingly, my number one question about the Wuzzles is one that -as far as my research found- no fansite has yet chosen to even acknowledge.
 
For the moment, we are going to ignore the fact that kangaroo and elephant DNA just won't splice. For whatever reason, this (seemingly the obvious question raised by the Wuzzles) did not bother me too much as a kid. What I could never figure out - what I STILL can’t figure out - was this:

WHY does each and every Wuzzle, regardless of species, posses those stupid-looking pastel-colored vestigial wings on their backs?

And they are vestigial. (That’s the technical term for a body part on an animal that is basically pointless; examples include anything inside you right now that you might need to have removed at some point.) Unless you are a Wuzzle who is part insect, these wings are fairly useless. You can only flutter your wings when you are excited or scared, suggesting that they are merely there for decoration. There are, of course, real-world equivalents to this. For example, there are several flightless species of aquatic birds such as Gruiformes and Pelecaniformes, most of whom are able to fly (quite gracefully in the case of pelicans).
However, unlike the Takahe and the Galapagos Cormorant, the Wuzzles appear to be well aware of the crappy hand dealt to them by natural selection here. In one cartoon episode Elaroo even laments the fact that he is flightless. “If only my wings were strong enough to get me off the ground.”
 
So the question is, why give the Wuzzles wings at all? As you can plainly see in the pictures above, the stuffed Wuzzles all had a different style of wing, instead of the little fruit-fly deelies each cartoon Wuzzle had. This is very, very important. It tells us that, as far as the character designers knew, the wings were NOT arbitrary. So we know that something’s up here...

Thank goodness for thrift stores. I have found some particularly damning evidence in this here book. Here we’ve got a story about dear little Moosel having trouble finding a present for another Wuzzle’s birthday (this was the plot of his freebie storybook too). The story itself is a bit boring and gets to a particularly predictable ending, but things get rather intriguing at the top of page six:

Well, hello there? Our little Alcid/Pinniped is clearly attempting to fly here. And according to the text, he has every reason to think this will work. But why…?

No.

Way.

Wuzzles. Flying. Blatantly. In the air. Even the least aerodynamically likely ones.
 
First, here’s the most likely reason why we’re seeing all the Wuzzles flying, and it’s the kind of thing that drives me crazy. There was probably little to no communication at all between the different groups of people working on all the different Wuzzle products. Perhaps there wasn’t much quality control either, and certainly no attention paid to blatant contradictions like this one.
 
This is very likely because, as we’ve already seen, there are many differences between the characters’ designs, depending on whether you are looking at the cartoons, or the toys, or the books. Here’s the worst thing: They probably assumed that the kids wouldn't notice. That kind of assumption REALLY drive me crazy.
 
But that line of thinking isn’t much FUN now, is it? So let’s approach this from a different angle. How come the Wuzzles are able to fly here? I have two theories:
 
THEORY A: This books takes place in the long, long-ago “Golden Age” of the Land of Wuz. Everyone was able to fly back then. Over time, for some unknown reason, many Wuzzles gradually lost the ability. Perhaps they forgot how to fly as they came to rely more and more on artificial means of transportation, such as cars and boats. Kind of poignant, really.
 
THEORY B: This book is actually an “Else-worlds” or “What If…?” Wuzzle story. Also, it takes place in the Matrix. (Shrugs.)

Maybe later I'll post my theory that the Fraggles are descendants of Troodontid theropods.

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Well, I obviously did present my Fraggle theory later. Much later.