Everything is Hell so Let's Watch "Saturday's the Place" From 1984!

Well, it sure has been a while hasn't it?

You might have guessed, given the wait between Blog posts, that your germphobe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder suffering buddy Trish hasn't been having a very fun time during the pandemic.  And, you're right.   The past few months have been surreal.  Back in the beginning, when people were taking Covid-19 more seriously, almost everyone suddenly agreed, "Always have disinfectant spray or wipes. Use them to sanitize everything in your home and clean everything that comes into your home because your home is your Safe Place. Avoid public transportation and above all Wash. Your. Hands!!!"  

And there I was, already deep in the middle of a sustained anxiety attack for everyone I care about and incidentally also myself, thinking, “Normal people DON’T do these things?"

Because if I have to fill the bird feeders or ride the subway, my entire day centers around that because for me it is a Whole Thing.  My home is my Sanctum Santorum of Sanitary, so after such activities, I must go through a thorough dermatopic purification (hot shower) before entering.  Everything is a potential danger you must prevent somehow or Bad Things Will Happen and it Will Be Your Fault.  

What I'm saying is, in the early days of the pandemic, what people were freaking out about was my "normal."  (I and a few others were very quietly hoping that maybe, just maybe, OCD people would get a bit more sympathy from all this.  Or at least that most folks would start going over your phones with a wet wipe when you charge it at night because I honestly still can’t get over the fact that most of you apparently wouldn’t normally do that?!?)

But I don't want to dwell on that right now.  For the first blog post in ages, I want to post something silly and upbeat instead.  

And so, let me share the ridiculous 1984 CBS Saturday Morning Preview show!  I talked a little bit about these programs way WAY back in the Archaen Eon of my Blog, and I'm surprised I've never revisited them since.  After all, if there are things I love to write about here, two big ones are 1) Animation and 2) Unintentionally Hilarious Vintage TV Specials. 

 

So here's the preview special for the... honestly pretty bleak lineup for CBS in 1984.  The highlights were "Dungeons and Dragons" (better than I remembered), the then-brand-new "Muppet Babies" (not as good as I remembered), and Looney Tune and Charlie Brown anthologies series.  Lowlights include about a half-dozen cartoons based on arcade games.  Mediocre-lights are the "Shirt Tales" and "Get-Along Gang".  The IDKWTF-light is a live-action show I completely forgot about, kind of a precursor to "Pee-Wee's Playhouse", made by Sid and Marty Krofft, and starring Richard Pryor.  (When I need to tell a kid what the 90's were like, I usually tell them, "Monks had a double-Platinum hit record."  From now on, when I need to tell kids what the 80's were like, I shall tell them, "Richard Pryor hosted a children's show.")  

What's really interesting about this special, the reason I want to share it, is the "plot".  Janet from "Three's Company" is a reporter who hates hates hates cartoons but must write about how they are made.  And so Henry from "Too Close For Comfort" is going to show her.  What follows is more delightfully strange than you'd expect, but hey we get to see the cast of "Muppet Babies"!

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Art of the Day!  And now, totally botanically accurate humor.

 

The 25 Weird Days of Christmas Day 1: "The Adventures Of Candy Claus"

Happy Holidays, everyone!  This year, encouraged by my Inktober success at actually posting something, however brief, every day, I'm going to try and do an Advent Calendar of weird and/or forgotten Christmas specials.  Will I find 25 specials weird enough to make the cut?  Will I give myself the "you don't have to post on weekends" clause?  Will this Christmas marathon break for "Star Wars"?  (In order: I hope so, probably, and possibly.)

Most of the specials I have lined up are entirely new to me, but I could swear I've already seen our first entry at least once as a child.  It's "The Adventures of Candy Claus", it's directed by noted weird animator Yoram Gross, and it looks like this:



Candy Claus appeared in an ad for a 900 number, in which she's identified as "the Christmas Seal Child".  None of that matters as far as the special goes.  Instead, Candy is one of two dolls made by a family who just realized it isn't really fair that Santa never gets a present on Christmas.  (The special at least operates in a world where nobody questions whether Santa exists, which is honestly refreshing.)  Candy comes to life thanks to the power of love and she becomes Santa and Mrs. Claus' daughter because sure, why not.  Later, this young new character for the young persons to relate to gets her own sleigh pulled by baby reindeer, a robot buddy, and access to a time machine.  Really.

The other doll, meanwhile, is stolen and raised by Oh No, a wicked... nasty old man that's also a wind ghost...  This doll comes to life but only *partially*.  He is barely able to move and talk because Oh No doesn't love him.  Oh No gives the poor thing the name Hey You, treats him like crap, and makes him compare his wretched life to Candy's and reflect on the existential horror of his existence and hate himself.  If you're at all paying attention, you may have noticed that this is one hell of a subplot to a children's Christmas special.

With that in mind, as terrible as the songs are (and of course these hideous earworms are why I remember this special), they're nothing compared to that ending.  Merry Christmas, kids!😥

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Art of the Day!

Hey, if it's winter, Boston Yeti should be reappearing soon!

"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. 

EVERYTHING Had a Cartoon in the '80's - "Deck the Halls With Wacky Walls"

So help me God and Dr. Fad, I never thought I'd ever see this thing again:



I don't even know what I could add to this. If I ever had to explain to my youngest relatives what it was like being a child in the early 80's, I suppose I could show them that Wacky Wall-Walkers had a Christmas special -- and it's actually pretty good! The story is cute and heartwarming, the animators had fun with the amorphous characters, and the voice actors are top-tier!  Hey, it's not "Charlie Brown" but it's better than it had any reason to be.

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Festive Older Art of the Day! Fanart of Fireball's reaction to Rudolph's nose, but I think it applies to this special too. Not to mention tomorrow's...

Being Santa Malkovich: "Santabear's High-Flying Adventure"

Welcome to my incredibly ill-advised Solstice Eve-Christmas Eve Christmas Special Marathon! For the next five nights, I'll be digging up strange Christmas specials from the past and hopefully finding funny things to say about them.

We start with something that's been sitting in my "watch later" YouTube queue for a while now, the innocuously titled "Santabear's High-Flying Adventure". It's cute, and has an entertainingly strange plot, but the highlight is this: John Malkovich Santa Claus. Holy mother of God. Best Santa.

(And it's funny how the sheer awesomeness of Santa Malkovich overshadows the fact that this upload contains all the awesome 1987 commercials AND that Bobby McFerrin voices the title character and his doppelganger villain.)



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Festive Older Art of the Day!

To make this a little easier/less insane for myself, I'll be posting older Christmas-themed drawings. Here's a Holly Jolly Jackalope:

Random 90's Animation Month: "Osmosis Jones" (2001)

If I am not mistaken, "Osmosis Jones" is the only DVD for a Farrelly Brothers movie that allows fans to skip right to the gross-out jokes (that's what the second option is in the above screenshot).  I should have taken this as a kind of a warning, but we'll address that in due time.

Pity the studio executive.  (Stay with me here.)  This poor creature never knows what movies will be huge hits, and which ones will be colossal flops.  To wit, "There's Something About Mary".  In 1998, nobody expected this weird little B-movie from the Farrellys to be the massive sleeper hit it quickly became.  But indeed, "Mary" became the kind of surprise hit that both changes the game and briefly ruins any future films from the same genre/format (although some of them ruin that genre/format seemingly forever).  There were a LOT of romantic comedies with jarring grossout humor in them for a long time after "Mary".

Let's go on a little tangent about grossout humor.  Now, as I grow older, I find myself becoming more and more sensitive to -and this is a very scientific term here- gross sh*t.  As with "We're Back!", I found myself desperately running for a beer during several scenes in "Osmosis Jones", but for entirely different reasons.  I'll say it right now: if you do not like grossout humor, then today's movie is going to be the worst kind of endurance test.

Back to your friend and mine, the studio executive.  Because "There's Something About Mary" was such a huge surprise hit, you can see where the exec would think, "Oh yeah!  You know what would be an amazing idea?  Let's let the Farrelly brothers direct an animated film!  Our animation studio is pretty dead in the water anyway, so why not let them do whatever they want with it?  It's such a perfect idea, it can't fail!  I think it's the best plan I've ever heard in my life!"

"Osmosis Jones" turned out to be one of the most spectacular bombs in the history of animated films, losing nearly sixty-two million dollars in it's theatrical run.  It was the last significant gasp of the Warner Bros. theatrical animation studio, and therefore was a hell of a note for them to go out on.  It should be noted that in one of the two episodes of "The Rotoscopers" about "The Iron Giant" (tragically, I forget which), it was revealed that Warner Bros. theatrical animation was essentially left to it's own devices and the filmmakers could basically do whatever they wanted.  This does help explain why "Iron Giant" and "Osmosis Jones" are the way they are, though essentially opposite sides of the same coin.

Because what we have here in "Osmosis Jones" is the Farrellys at their most uninhibited.  I remember enjoying this movie the first time I saw it, as a stupid teenager who was distracted by the gorgeous animation and who still thought gross sh*t was funny instead of repulsive.  As an adult... Oh God, Oh GOD, oh God.  I didn't recall this movie being so... graphic.  My good God, that scene with the toenail...  That other scene with the oysters...  That F**KING scene with the pimple...

Here I was watching this movie in the afternoon, and doesn't my family ask me, "Hey, honey, you want to go out to the seafood restaurant for dinner later?"

But to be fair, nearly all the really horrible gross-out scenes are in the live-action bits and perhaps it's time to talk about the very odd format of this movie.  This is the story of a man ruining his life and breaking his annoying and unlikeable daughter's heart -- and well over half of it is told from the point of view of his anthropomorphized immune system.  (This setting was evidently chosen to give the Farrellys the greatest opportunity ever for what the rating disclaimer describes as "body humor".)  Overall, the live-action scenes are annoying, nauseating, and distracting.  Any time the movie switches back to them is jarring as f**k, especially towards the end, so let's ignore them entirely for the rest of the review.  How's the animation?

It's beautiful.  Well, very close to beautiful at any rate, because even disgusting things can be beautiful.  The production design and effects are very imaginative.  Michel Gagne was involved here and his mad genius is all over the place.  The character animation is energetic and I love how they aren't afraid to showcase just how weird the characters are.  "Jones" has a hidden gem of a villain character, and overall it looks like the artists had an awful lot of fun working on this.  It's as if they knew that this was going to be their last hurrah, so they went all out.

Of course, to see all this wonderful and inventive animation, you have to endure the disgusting live-action portions.  And also, this scene right here:



Yup, you guessed right.  Those are animated versions of Kid Rock and Joe C.  Their long musical number has, remarkably, aged worse than the "Ninja Rap" scene in the second "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" movie.  The 90's!

Extremely Delayed Addendum: It could be that I may have the history of this film entirely backwards; that it started as a fully-animated feature with live-action bookends (if even that), and the Farrellys were recruited to film more live-action to edit into the movie because of executive meddling reasons.  Thing is, I have no other evidence that such was the case aside from the comments in this AV Club review.

And so, our Strange Animated Films from the 1990's Made By Random Studios Marathon is in the rearview mirror.  It's been an amazing trip, and I'm glad you shared this magical adventure with me.  Now, with that said, a few very interesting '90's animated films are in the old Saved Queue, and who knows if or when they may pop up? 

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Sketch of the Day!

Ride that Shoopuf!

Random 90's Animation - "Cool World" (1992)

Important Disclaimer for Concerned Parents: "Cool World" is a PG-13 rated film about a comic book artist whose character wants to have sex with him.  This review will contain adult language and content and thus may not be appropriate for young children or people who act like young children.


Come with me, dear readers!  We are going on a magical adventure through the imagination of Ralph Bakshi!  On our journey, we will see all the wondrous things Mr. Bakshi sees when he closes his eyes!  Won't that be so much fun?

You... you don't want to go on an adventure through Ralph Bakshi's mind?  Well, frankly I don't want to either.  But unfortunately, you can't have any kind of effective discussion of bizarre animation from the 1990's without addressing "Cool World".  And so, we are on our way.  Please keep your hands and arms inside your boat at all times, and for the love of God do not touch the water or even look at it.  (I sincerely hope that's water...)

Love him, hate him, or dismiss him as a creepy old man with seriously reductive depictions of women in his films, you cannot argue with the fact that Ralph Bakshi has had one of the most fascinating careers imaginable as an artist.  I once read a recent history of animation book (the title escapes me) that dedicated twice as much ink to Bakshi as it did to Don Bluth and noted that "only Walt Disney has made more animated feature films".  Huh.  "Cool World" is thus far the last of these films, and if Bakshi never gets around to making another feature, this will be a hell of a note to end on.  And this is because this movie is essentially seeing what happens inside Ralph Bakshi's subconscious.

This is a strange thing to observe, since "Cool World" was famously born out of a perfect storm of executive meddling and flat-out desperation to get the damn thing finished.  The film started life as a hard-R straight-up horror film about an artist literally haunted by his vengeful character who wants to seduce and murder him for creating her.  That script was so heavily altered during production (oftentimes without Bakshi's knowledge, since changing everything about a movie without the director knowing about it always ends well) that halfway through filming the thing, lead actress Kim Basinger was operating under the assumption she was in a children's film.  This is all so fascinating and helps to explain so much about why the film is such an incoherent mess that I am almost sad that the DVD is bare-bones.  Bad movies deserve elaborate making-of documentaries too - maybe even more than the good movies do, just so we can see what went wrong.

The plot of "Cool World" is, and I quote:



That's hardly an exaggeration. Gabriel Byrne(?!?) plays Jack, an underground cartoonist who has been in jail for a while for... reasons...  Come to mention it, the most important thing to know about "Cool World" is that it gives no f***s about silly things like why a main character is in jail or how the rules of its imaginary world work or why anything is even happening.  (Edit: apparently, we are told that Jack murdered his wife's lover, but we are informed of this in a very easily-missed line of dialogue.  Okay, then.)

While in jail, Jack invents both the comic "Cool World" and the character Holli Would, who is horrifying sexism incarnate.  Imagine the weird, sleazy, scary, trashy relative of Red Hot Riding Hood that Red hates to talk about and you're almost there.  Come to think of it, though, ALL of the characters in this movie are weird, sleazy, scary, trashy, gross, and basically impossible to like.  Those are literally their only interesting and memorable personality traits.  Hell, come to mention it, the whole damn movie is weird, sleazy, scary, trashy, smutty, gross, and impossible to like, but I think you've all gathered this by now.

Anyway, Jack creates the comic "Cool World" and is thereafter haunted by visions of Holli Would seducing him.  Because surely it's every artist's dream to have one of their own brainchildren all up in their personal business, am I right?  There wouldn't be anything awkward or questionable about that.  And there is certainly nothing uncomfortable about watching it in a movie directed by Ralph Bakshi, is there?

Wait, hold up.  Thankfully you do not have to wrap your brains around that just yet.  Because I forgot the opening sequence of the movie, which is utterly mystifying and makes me wonder if this isn't our second movie in a row that could be interpreted as a wacky trip on powerful hallucinogenics.  Or perhaps that the film itself was made by people on powerful hallucinogenics?  Listen, as much as "LOL, this moovee wuz maed on teh drugs" is cliched, just LOOK at this thing! 

We open with Harris, a soldier played by a very young and clearly only here to pay off some overdue bills and bad karma from a past life Brad Pitt.  His character is about as close to a protagonist as we're going to get here, and he's the only kinda-likeable person in it.  Anyway, Harris comes home from World War Two, takes his... mom...? on a motorcycle ride, and they both die in a horrible crash.  Once this sequence of events has sunk in (except it really doesn't), Harris wakes up in Cool World (the place), which apparently exists independently already before "Cool World" (the comic).  Maybe.  Kinda.  Remember, f***s given by this movie with regards to how things even work in it = zero.

Much later on Jack crosses over into Cool World and has totally hot, graphic, boundary-obliterating forbidden sex with Holli and the audience gets to enjoy every minute of it, especially if they're into cartoons banging humans, and in particular if they are into cartoons banging the very humans who created them.

AH-hahahahaha!!!  I'm lying!  Jack and Holli *do* have forbidden sex.  That does happen.  And it happens mostly offscreen and in the most coy and childish way imaginable (see above screenshot).  I promise you I am not kidding.  Remember, this went from a hard-R Ralph Bakshi movie to a PG-13 Ralph Bakshi movie, but with all the sleazy sex and violence intact.  It's kind of impressive how the scene that was the very selling point of this movie is almost utterly ignored once we get to it.  (You may argue amongst yourselves whether or not the PG-13 rated Ralph Bakshi movie about sex is a stranger creature than the Ralph Bakshi Christmas special for children.)

Anyway, somehow this forbidden act turns Holli into live-action Kim Basinger and also gives her and Jack weird cartoon powers or... something.  So, fellow artists, do not ever have sex with your own characters in the unlikely event they come to life and seduce you, I guess.  Holli is now able to escape into our world.  And believe it or not, that's where the movie gets weird.

I really don't know what else there is to say about "Cool World".  I should mention that the animation is very inconsistent in quality and there are characters and objects who honestly look like they're from something else entirely.  On top of this, the mixture of live-action and animation is really bad.  Like, headache-inducing bad.  There are scenes where human actors wander through cardboard sets and scenes where animated characters interact with photographs of the real actors.

Is "Cool World" worth watching at all?  Well the weird thing is, for all that Bakshi told the animators to do whatever they want and so there are always strange, creepy, distracting things happening in the margins of the movie, and for all that the whole plot is about kinky forbidden sex, the movie is just NOT interesting at all.  Ultimately, I found it pretty rancid and hard to sit through.  If you've never seen it, and you like Ralph Bakshi's other movies, it may still be bizarre enough to be almost worth watching out of curiosity.  But you will need to have a strong drink handy if you do.

Art Evolved members should have a particularly strong drink ready for our next movie...

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Sketch of the Day!

We need something cute after all that.

Happy Ethnic Stereotype Enforcement Day, fellow Stereotypes!

And curse that brat what gave me this accursed Aeroplane Doom Virus! Try to disrupt my perfect Two New Posts a Week schedule, will you? Well...

(SFX: Me coughing a lung inside-out.)

Yeah, screw it. Have more random Links of Interest.

The Onion has been rather hit-or-miss the past few years but every so often, they produce a new classic. This recent Op-Ed piece... is beautiful. May I suggest this as a musical accompaniment?

My sister recently alerted me to this song, which is apparently a thing.

Comics Alliance has a spiffy take on the old chestnut, "Guys, some Pokemon 'dex entries are really freakin' upsetting."

By the way, is it me or did Scythemantis' piece "Pokeymanz Pokeydex" (nightmare fuel warning) prepare us for the Tympole line?

Flickr user Kerrytoons has a gold mine of Saturday Morning Cartoon advertisements from years past. I may have to do a full post about them later.

And since it is seasonally appropriate, I give you the awful, the okay, and the amazing among movies based upon Irish mythology. I also have finally reviewed "The Peanut Butter Solution". I have a feeling this is the one review that’s going to get the most "holy s**t, THAT’s what it was called!!!"-es.

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Sketch of the Day!

My aunt and uncle's cats!

Oscar Nominated Shorts!

A couple of shorts nominated for Best Animated Feature have thankfully popped up online. I'm going to link to them (rather than embed, because of formatting issues) and share my thoughts. Watch them while you can!

"Madagascar: Carnet De Voyage" - I can't tell what kind of animation is used here and that's a very refreshing thing to be able to say! What I love about this short is the way it captures what it feels like to re-read my old Sketchbooks. Also, Lemurs!!!

"The Gruffalo" - Based off a children's book and aired for an all-too-brief-and-I-am-cursing-myself-out-for-not-alerting-you-dear-readers period on ABC Family during their 25 Days of Christmas. Absolutely delightful with unique character designs and atmospheric animation.

"Let's Pollute!" - The full short isn't available online, but the link goes to a clip and apparently you can download the full short on iTunes. The style is a lot of fun and seems to be a parody of the educational animation produced for "The Wonderful World of Disney" and EPCOT center. (In fact, do I detect a direct dig on the current Universe of Energy?)

"Day and Night" - Needless to say, Disney's lawyers aren't allowing this online. Wah. Then again, since we've pretty much all seen "Toy Story 3", we know how good this is.

"The Lost Thing" - And here is my favorite short of the lot. It made a rainbow in my heart.

I MAY, this is obviously a big "MAY", attempt a live-blog this awards show. In any case, get your drinks ready.

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Great Backyard Bird Count Results!

I did my counting while on what was originally going to be a ski trip this past long weekend. I say "originally" because the weekend was plagued be extreme winds. We did get out and walk around a little but there were very few birds to be observed. The tally below covers Friday afternoon and the entire three-day weekend.

Habitat(s): coniferous woods, agricultural, rural, freshwater

Checklist: Canada Goose, Mallard, Hawk (unknown species), Gull (unknown species), American Crow, Common Raven, White-breasted Nuthatch

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Art of the Day!

It's Hipster Tiktaalik!

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.

----

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

Deep, Unanswered Questions about 80's and 90's Cartoons

The next three posts will be three related features rescued from LaGremlin Land.
Now, I first came up with this way back in my senior year of high school. I was living in a pre-Internet world, remember, and specifically in a pre-Cartoon Overanalizations, pre-TV Tropes' It Just Bugs Me world. Some of these have been addressed at both websites, which happily implies that I'm not weird for wondering about these.
Originally posted way back on 4/11/01.

* - In the "He-Man" and "She-Ra" series, what did Orko look like under that cloak? And was Skowl's flying appendages his wings or were they his actual ears?

* - What ARE the Wuzzles? No, I know what they are but I mean where did they come from? Some kind of bizarre Island of Dr. Moreu type top secret genetic engineering experiment or something?

* - Speaking of "the Wuzzles", why the hell did every one of them, regardless of whether they were part insect or not, have those fly wings on their backs? Were they ever functional? Is there origin then more akin to the David Cronenburg version of "the Fly"? (NOTE: I would expand on this later. Stay tuned.)

* - Let's get another big one out of the way. Why were there only three female Smurfs? Bear in mind that none of these female Smurfs were born in a normal way (both Smurfette and Sassette were created artificially, and I'm not sure of where Granny Smurf came from). Furthermore, if a Smurf village isn't normally supposed to have females in it, then do Smurfs reproduce asexually? And if so, why is Papa Smurf older than the others?

* - Why do the other Smurfs keep taking surprise boxes from Jokey? Don't they know by now that they'll blow up? And why hasn't Jokey been arrested or something?

* - On "Thundercats", each member of the team was an anthropomorphic version of a different species of wildcat. Okay, fine. But on Thundera, their home planet, were there many members of each different species? Did they tend to stick to their own kind romantically or could they interbreed? And would resulting children be sterile hybrids (as in the real-life Liger)?

* - Speaking of logistical problems in a world of Furries, take the case of "the Get-Along Gang". Montgomery is an anthropomorphic moose. As if that isn't disconcerting enough, he has antlers. Are they considered weapons in his world? Are they even functional? And considering that male moose in real life don't grow their antlers until they're adults, then how old is Montgomery (considering the age-range of rest of the Gang is about ten-ish in human terms)?

* - Doesn't it strike anyone else as weirdly racist that the official Gang members were all mammals, while their bullies were reptiles? Yes, I know the Gang hung out with that turtle kid, but he was never really treated as an official member, more like the Furry take on the Token Kid That Is Not White. And how come we never saw any anthropomorphic birds or fish?

* - Finally (and in my opinion, the biggest damn Furry Logistics Problem of all) there was one very memorable episode of "the Get-Along Gang" where the Gang ends up in a snowy town whose residents are on the look out for a missing baby elephant.
A normal, non-anthropomorphic elephant.
FROM THE ZOO!
Now don't you think that if you're going to populate your world with humanoid animals, maybe you should bite the bullet and populate the zoos and pet stores with humans?

* - How old is Rainbow Brite? She looks to be ten, but consider that she's been in charge of providing color and light to the entire Universe forever. Doesn't that make her (and the Sprites, and Starlight, and the Color "Kids") as old as the Universe or older? If so, then what is she, a goddess?

* - On the other hand, maybe time is different on the planet that Rainbowland is on. Maybe while ten years have gone by on Rainbowland, thousands of years have passed on Earth. But if time goes slower on Rainbowland then on Earth, how come Rainbow Brite's Earthling friend, Brian, is still about ten years old every time they run into each other? Why isn't he suddenly eighty-four or something? Does this mean that Rainbow Brite can time-travel? (It's already well established that she can travel through outer space.)

* - Are Chief Quimby and Dr. Claw one and the same? On "Inspector Gadget", Chief Quimby knew exactly what Dr. Claw was up to. It seems very suspicious to me.

* - How come Penny and Brain never b**ched about getting no credit for saving the day? Did they ever snap and go insane? Is that why the spin-off series didn't go into the character's futures but chronicled their past instead?

* - And, finally, what IS Inspector Gadget anyway? A robot? A cyborg? If he's a robot, why does he have a niece? Or is Penny just posing as his niece so he can feel more human? Does anyone else suddenly hear the sad score from "A.I."? (This should go without saying, but we are ignoring the abysmal live-action Disney film.)

* - Any time the adventuring team on the surprisingly good "Dungeons and Dragons" cartoon found some way or other to get home, the porthole was only open for a very short time and a LOT of that time they lost was spent debating whether to take Uni with them. Ever get the sense that Uni was trying to keep the kids from getting home? Was this her own plan or was she Venger's pawn? Or was the whole thing Dungeon Master's idea?

* - Speaking of Venger and Dungeon Master, there's a famous episode where D. M. calls Venger his son. Now, I know he might have meant it figuratively but what if he didn't? And if Venger is D. M.'s kid, then can you imagine what his mom must have looked like? (We are ignoring the never-finished final episode, where much of this is explained.)

* - Would anyone else feed Uni to Tiamat during that very first encounter in the opening sequence or is it just me?

* - How does "Muppet Babies" fit into "Muppet Show" continuity? Is it about the Muppets as kids, or is it about the second generation of Muppets? If it's about the Muppets as kids, how come both Robin and Bean Bunny show up if they're supposed to be the youngest Muppets?

* - And we NEVER saw Nannie's face. We never even saw her above the shoulders. What the heck did she look like? Consider that it's left unclear as to whether she's just the babies' caretaker or if she's their mother. And if she isn't their mother than where and who are their parents?

* - The cast of the surprisingly not-terrible "My Little Pony" cartoon changed several times as old ponies in the collectible toy line were retired and new ones introduced. Okay, but Megan and Spike remained in the cast each season. Didn't they notice that some of their friends had vanished?

* - Furthermore, all the ponies in Ponyland were female (the males were conveniently "on a race around the world" and only appeared in one episode). Where the heck did the baby ponies come from?

* - Aside from the fact that it rhymed, why did they call it the "Care Bear Stare"? They weren't staring so much as zapping people with pictures on their tummies. What did getting "Stared" feel like? Being bombarded with giant Lucky Charms?

* - And aside from alliterative appeal, why were they called the Care Bear Cousins? Were they the Bear's actual blood relatives? How can a bear possibly be related to a penguin?

* - Why did the opening of the second "Care Bears Movie" completely contradicted the Cousins' origin story from the first one? Did they think the kids wouldn't notice?

* - The second "Care Bears Movie" was subtitled "A New Generation", so maybe it's about the second group of Care Bears. But if that's true, what happened to their parents from the first movie? Why do the "new generation" Bears act and look EXACTLY like the first batch? Were they cloned from the first Bears after they died in a horrible accident (maybe the giant heart from the first movie's end title sequence fell and flattened them during the final group portrait)?

* - The "Silverhawks" were a superhero team of cyborgs who ran around exploring space, fighting bad guys, the usual. So why the heck did they have a country singer up there with them? Yeah, I know he was a cyborg too, but still, what kind of help is he going to provide? Scaring space monsters away with a rousing rendition of "Achy-Breaky Heart"?

* - Was "Silverhawks" actually supposed to be some kind of cybernetic "Real World"? Like a bunch of totally random people (and their mascot hawk, of course, and whatever the hell Copper Kid was) get turned into cyborgs and sent into space and we get to watch what happens?

* - How big were "the Snorks"? Some episodes show them as being about two or three feet tall but others place them at only inches high, or even about the size of a cocktail shrimp. And, once and for all, if they were tiny, then were they related to the Smurfs or not?

* - What's the deal with the Snork's "snork" anyway? I guess it's a breathing organ, but how does it work? Does it work like a gill or like a snorkel? If it works like a snorkel, then how come you never see the Snorks surface for air? There was also that one Snork who had two snorks, and a couple of characters with snorks on their face where a human would have his nose. Are they some kind of advanced "Super Snorks" or are these primitive features (akin to a horse being born with dewclaws)?

* - Say, how does the Scooby Gang keep functioning? They have no jobs; they tool around in a van all day and solve mysteries just for fun. What do they do for money? For example, how do they afford to go to the fancy ski resort in the mystery of the Abominable Snowman?

* - Were the guest voices in "Scooby Movies" picked completely at random or what? They had the cast of "Batman" in one episode, the Mamas and the Papas in the next one, and the Harlem Globetrotters in the next. Tell me they didn't pick the names from a list of people who liked "Scooby Doo" and wanted to be a guest voice out of a hat or something.

* - With regards to "The Chipmunk Reunion", which, as you'll see, ended up raising a LOT more questions than it purported to answer: Why did some of the forest animals wear clothes while others didn't? If Dave lived in a really nice little cabin out in the woods, why did he move out of it and into the suburbs? Or was he staing there temporarily for "mental health"? Wouldn't it have been less traumatic for Ma Chipmunk to ask Dave if she could move in with him for the winter along with her children? What did the Boar have against the Chipmunks? And finally, ARE the Chipmunks actual chipmunks? I ask this because in the finale, they're dancing around with some other rodents who look a LOT more like real life Chipmunks than the Chipmunks do.

* - What does the bathroom in CatDog's house look like and how do they use it?

* - Actually, forget CatDog. On "DragonTales", what does the bathroom in Zack and Weezy's lair look like and how do *they* use it? More to the point, what happens when one or both of them wants to start dating?

* - And what was the go with the Dinosaur Family in "Pee-Wee's Playhouse"? They were dinosaurs and they lived in a MOUSE HOLE. The father was a Triceratops, the mother was a Styracosaur. The twins were... I don't know what the hell they were (my first inclination is to call them Parasauralophi, but... no), and they didn't look anything like their parents. And they have a monitor lizard for a "dog". And the holiday special implies that they are Jewish. Yeah, I know this is "Pee-Wee's Playhouse", but...

* - Wouldn't it be a little awkward to live in Pee-Wee's Playhouse, seeing as everything (including the food) is alive in there? Think about it.

* - And finally, how come those of us who grew up with these shows don't have a laundry list of mental disorders from trying to figure all of these out?

Yet more thoughts on bad and/or weird cartoons

This is "Small Fry" by Max Fleisher:



Thanks to it being aired endlessly on "The Disney Channel" (I can't figure it out either; they must have acquired the Fleisher catalog at some point during the 80's), I have seen this little slice of WTF more times than "One Froggy Evening", "The Old Mill", "What's Opera Doc", "The Band Concert", "The Brave Little Tailor", and "Duck Amuck" combined.

I especially enjoy the mother's line near the end, "You got your feet all soakin' wet!" Try being five years old and trying to wrap your brain around that one.

While on the subject of bad cartoons we used to watch as kids because we didn't know any better. I recently rented "Mission: Magic!" I did so only because it was available on Netflix and because (this is absolutely true) every History Of Animation book that has ever mentioned it ends it's plot summary with, "Yes. This series actually existed."

"Mission: Magic!" is an early-70's Filmation series about a magical teacher a la Miss Frizzle in the better-known Magic Schoolbus series. She and her students go on adventures through a dimensional porthole in her blackboard, where they are assisted by an owl, an Egyptian cat statue who comes to life, and a pre-"General Hospital" pre-"Jesse's Girl" Rick Springfield. At the end of every adventure, during a "Yellow Submarine"-esque sequence, Rick sings a song about that particular episode's lesson.

Yes. This series actually existed. Actually, thanks to the magic of the Internet, I can prove it actually existed. Here's the opening:



Now you're probably adding this thing to your Queue out of sheer curiosity right now, aren't you? Well, let me emphasize something easily missed in the above summary: "Mission: Magic!" is an early-70's Filmation series.

You can't remove it from your Queue fast enough, can you?

I grew up with tedious reruns of early 70's Filmation series and let me tell you, to this day watching such series can make me disillusioned with all animation everywhere. They are exactly what Chuck Jones meant when he complained of "Illustrated Radio". It almost looks like they drew each of the characters once and just copied and pasted that one drawing wherever needed. (In "Mission", they don't even bother to pretend they didn't do this. Pay close attention to the "R" on Rick's jumpsuit.) And for some reason, each and every one of these series has a laugh track. I have a big, big problem with canned laughter.

So why in the world did this series warrant a DVD release? I guess because it's so very much a series of it's time. I didn't like it, but certainly the people who watched it on Saturday mornings will enjoy watching it again. Hey, I rented the entire first season on "My Little Pony" so who am I to judge?

Or it could be for some other reason, but who knows what that could be?

Nerd Rage and Further Worst Cartoon Thoughts

I saw the following in Friday's paper and... I HAVE to share because... it's pretty astonishing:
Thank you, Gatehouse News Service Guy! Thank you for sharing your condescending thoughts on an art form you clearly have not bothered to learn anything new about since you were scarfing Frosted Flakes in front of "Maia the Bee".

So anyway, as of right now, both "Worst Cartoon" polls have been tallied and winners have been chosen. "Worst Cartoons Ever" has picked "Rubik the Amazing Cube". "Rubik" is notorious online because it is the best artifact of a time period in the late-70's/early-80's when you could make a cartoon about anything. It looked like this:


Meanwhile, the unfortunately-named Topless Robot blog's winner for worst cartoon episode ever is a particularly angsty episode of "The Littles": Now, really, I shouldn't worry too much about these choices because they're each all part of a silly contest and it was all really just a few people's opinions right? Yet, it sticks in my craw because, honestly, get past the nature of the title character and "Rubik" isn't all that different from every damn "The Adventures Of Some Kids and their Pet Walking Talking Deus ex Machina" cartoon of the era. And the worst I can say about "the Littles" ("Here Come the Littles"is available on DVD so I just added it to the top of my Netflix queue to check and see if my nostalgia filter is strong with this film) is that the first ten seconds of the main titles are what the Uncanny Valley looks like. Anyway, being an animation fan means that I have seen worse. Far, far worse. (And hell, those are just from within my lifetime.) Just off the top of my head: The 60's Looney Tunes, like this not-Chuck-Jones-involving Wile E. Coyote short. Any and all of the various "This is where 'The Simpsons' ended for me" episodes. (For the record, mine is "Lisa the Skeptic". Great idea for "The X-Files" but damned bizarre for "The Simpsons".) The various prime-time series that sprang up in the wake of "The Simpsons", of which "Capitol Critters" is probably the most astonishing. A whooooole lot of series from Hannah-Barbera (how many times can you recycle the basic idea behind "Scooby Doo" anyway?), Filmation, and Ruby-Spears. More than a few cartoons based upon real people, such as "Pro Stars". "Fraidy Cat", "Caillou", "Dino Squad", "Father of the Pride", "The Mighty Ducks", "Free Willy", "Mega Babies", "Loonatics". All the DTV rip-offs of other movies. And a lot that I have nicely repressed. The only real problem is trying to decide what the biggest waste of celluloid I've ever seen is. Let us wash off the nerd rage and awful cartoons with this little slice of happy:

Drawing must also be Serious Business -and- Jumping on the "Worst Cartoons Ever" bandwagon

Drawing must also be Serious Business!

Therefore, I have invested some Christmas money in the two anatomy books at right and borrowed the third from the library. Reviews will be forthcoming (though I can tell you already just by thumbing through the three that the Goldfinger is a bit of a disappointment given the $30-$50.00 [!!!] asking price.)

Inspired by Worst Cartoons Ever (natch) and Topless Robot, I've decided to bring up the following Great Moments in Animated Adaptations. I have a bit more to say about the results of their "Worst Cartoon / Cartoon Episode Ever" surveys but it can wait. For now, we have Serious Business to attend to.

It is time. Dear reader, you must decide which of the following two series (which, thankfully, never got off the ground) is the more boneheaded adaptation of a popular Anime for the American market.

You probably have already heard of the Saban (but not really Saban's fault apparently) Nightmare, a proposed adaptation of "Sailor Moon". If you haven't, it would have looked like this:

At least now we know what "Blossom" would have been like if it had been about a superhero. And you have to appreciate how they take the show's title very literally.

This is "Doozy Bots", a proposed adaptation of "Gundam SD". It is not as well-known, but is, in my humble opinion, worse:


Feederwatch Friday!!! It snowed! That was kind of interesting, but other than that, nothing much happened. The male and female Cardinals visited together for the first time this year. Awwww... Though mention of Cardinals (still talking about the birds here) puts me in mind of this Onion AV Club interview. There is a line in it that brings up another subject I'd like to cover next post.