The Triumphant Return of Walter Fozbek!

Few things make me happier than getting to finally tie up a long-dangling loose end. 

You may recall that way WAY back in the summer of 2011, I wrote two long, weird posts about The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek by Steve Senn, a short, weird book that I mostly remembered for it's very short, very weird animated adaptation that aired as part of the anthology series "CBS Storybreak".  I strongly recommend reading those posts because there's a lot of information in them.  Like I said, this is a very weird book.  (You'll also get to enjoy some early-installment weirdness.  Who the hell is this person who actually enjoyed the taste of an IPA?  Certainly not I?)

As happy as I was to finally find the book, I still longed to watch the cartoon again.  I figured by now that it was lost to the ages, Lost Media if you will.  But it turns out that there's a small but dedicated contingent of YouTubers finding and uploading as many "CBS Storybreak" episodes as they can find.

And, miraculously, "The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek" is among them!  What a great way to kick off the new decade!  Here it is:



Goodness.

I remember practically every minute of this strange little cartoon. It's really close to the book, aside from a somewhat streamlined ending, "Flintstones"-ish prehistoric gags and all.  There's also a touch more existential angst.  Like, certainly "The Last Unicorn" this ain't.  But that scene where Walter (remember he's the only human in a world of anthropomorphic animals) is face-to-face with the fossil remains of another human (remember humans are extinct in this world); that kind of thing messes you up as a kid. 

Between the New Kids on the Block Christmas Special and "Walter Fozbek", this has been a very good time for “Yay I KNEW it was real!  And, now that I can finally watch it after 20-30 years, I completely understand why everyone looked so confused and slightly concerned when I tried to describe it to them.”

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Art! A cute pudgy Unicorn and her tiny Fairy friends to bless our 2020's.

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...

In Which we Wintess the Slow Extinction of Saturday Morning Cartoons

The exact reason for the gradual phasing-out in the late 1990's of animated programs for children airing on the big three networks on Saturday mornings is highly disputed.  Many argue that the readily available children's programming on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network rendered Saturday morning cartoon blocks irrelevant.  Others note that networks probably found the 1996 FCC mandate that required at least three hours of educational content for children too restrictive.  And still others will point out the most cynical reason: airing blocks of mostly infomercials instead of a block of cartoons on the weekend was the cheaper, more profitable option.

But whoever you argue this subject with, almost everyone will agree that the beginning of the end, the Chicxulub meteor of Saturday morning cartoons if you will, was the premier of "Saved by the Bell". And that brings us to this remarkable video lurking quietly in my YouTube queue.  It's the first-ever appearance of the "Saved by the Bell" characters on NBC, on a weird special promoting (ironically enough) Saturday morning cartoons.



Now as I said before,"Saved by the Bell" has shouldered a lot of the blame for killing the Saturday morning cartoon tradition... but let's take a look at NBC's lineup here, because the animated alternatives to "Bell" suggest that the death of Saturday morning cartoons was a more excruciatingly slow process.  We've got the very bizarre final season of "The Smurfs", the second-to-last season of "Alvin and the Chipmunks", and two animated "Alf" series, one of which is completely given over to parodies of other things.  New series included the improbable "Camp Candy" and "Captain N: the Half-Hour Nintendo Game Commercial".  A look at other networks' schedules from the same year reveals several long-incumbent series broken up by head-scratching new series.

So with this in mind, I am willing to say definitively that the reasons for the big three networks essentially giving up on Saturday morning cartoons are complicated.

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Art of the Day!

Random 90's Animation - "The Swan Princess" (1994)

Unlike the previous three films I've watched for my Strange Animated Films from the 1990's Made By Random Studios Marathon, I remember actually liking "The Swan Princess" quite a bit when I saw it back in the day.  Watching it again for this project, it is by no means a bad movie, but the Nostalgia Filter sure was strong with it.

This is the first animated feature from what would eventually be known as Crest Animation (formerly Rich Animation and RichCrest Animation; interesting evolution, that), a studio created and headed by Richard Rich.  You may remember that name from the Disney Animated Canon project.  Rich started at Disney in the late 70's, co-directed "The Rescuers" and directed "The Fox and the Hound" and "The Black Cauldron", and went on to found his own studio.  The film generally agreed to be his best independent film was also his very first independent film.  For some reason, this sounds familiar - but you may notice that far fewer people discuss Richard Rich's post-Disney career than do Don Bluth's; probably due to the fact that all but three or four of Rich's features have gone straight to DVD.

"The Swan Princess" is -if you will forgive me- an odd duck indeed.  For all the world, it looks like what people who dismiss all Disney animated features as cutesy Fairy tales and girly pink Princess B.S. assume every Disney feature is like.  (By the way, yes, such people exist, and this saddens me.)  About a third of the ways into "The Swan Princess", I was thinking, "Oh, so this is basically 'Sleeping Beauty'.  Now it's kind of like 'The Little Mermaid'.  This scene reminds me an awful lot of something in 'Aladdin'.  And suddenly, we're in 'Cinderella'."  I suppose this is, in a way, admirable.  Most low-budget animated fairy tale movies would only rip off one or two very popular Disney Animated Canon features.  This one has the brass balls to swipe from damn near all of them!

Now don't get me wrong, as I said, "The Swan Princess" isn't necessarily a bad movie.  As it happens, there are some very clever and creative moments in it.  Some of the supporting characters are a lot of fun and the background paintings are gorgeous.

In general, the problems stem from the fact that while this movie is a distillation of what people who haven't sat down and watched a Disney movie in years remember from Disney movies, it's hampered from having a very small fraction of the budget.  As a result, the animation is very inconsistent, and occasionally downright sloppy.  In particular, the less caricatured characters like Human!Odette and especially Derek look very strange after a while (oh my good God, Derek's giant mouth).  The songs range from slightly dull to utterly tedious, and some of the gags (especially the header image) run at very sharp angles to the rest of the film's overall tone.  And, so help me, the villain's final boss form really does look like a fruitbat.  Speaking of, if you avoid saying the word "Beast" this often, it eventually becomes really obvious and distracting.

Finally, since things like this have to be pointed out in a review written by me (heh): What we have here is a story about a human princess who is forced to be separated from a weird-looking unlikeable doormat of a prince who openly stated that he was only interested in her because she is pretty by being transformed into a big scary dinosaur that can fly, kill a child easily, and seriously maim an adult.  Remind me again how this is a curse?  (I know, but we're ignoring Rothbart being a total creeper for now, especially since the movie itself doesn't seem to know what to do with that plot point either.)

Overall, "The Swan Princess" is worth a look, and is certainly a better choice for children than, say, any of the DTV Disney sequels.  Next up, something that isn't on my official Queue list but I would be a total bockhead to ignore.

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Sketch of the Day!

Went to the good old Maine Wildlife Park and drew some birds that -and you have to trust the birder here- are far less vicious and scary than swans.

Far-Out Sci-Fi, Tricerafail, and Furries (of a sort) - _The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek_

Previously on "Tricia's Obligatory Art Blog"...



And far more importantly, I finally, after twenty-five years of searching, have my very own copy of The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek, written and illustrated by Steve Senn in 1980. Published by Avon/Camelot books. And henceforth to be referred to simply as Walter Fozbek or just Walter, because... that title. Imagine the fun of being a little girl circa 1985 and looking that one up in a card catalog or, God help you, asking for it in a bookstore. Anyway, I now have a copy in my giant skinny hands. And I have just read it.

(Trish gets a case of Pamola Xtra Pale Ale...)

Right. This book is weird.



(And not just because of the above illustration, which is very wrong on multiple levels.)

A long, long time ago in a Galaxy far, far away, I did a post about obscure Dougal Dixon works that had been dug up by the authors and readers of the website io9. Now unfortunately, most of the io9 discussion threads are unreadable now, but I do recall one reader's comment, prompted by the "human of the future" article, who missed the "far out, man" kind of sci-fi from the 70's. Sci-fi that really lived in the demilitarized zone between serious Science Fiction and Fantasy. Sci-fi that really didn't give a hoot about science at all (or maybe just a little) and was more concerned with blowing the reader's mind. Think "the Force is all around us; it connects every living thing" vs. "you can test positive for Jedi". (As you can see, this kind of sci-fi isn't all bad.)

So here we have a sci-fi book for seventh graders where a kid falls through a black hole and ends up in a world where, like, humans are extinct and the dinosaurs are the ones living in houses and wearing clothes and using money and driving cars and stuff!



Or, perhaps more appropriately...



As you might imagine, this is a story with vast, galloping herds of Furry Confusion. Before we get into that, here's what Dinosaur World looks like:



Weird, huh? The whole book, actually, is creepy in sort of the same way that -- I'm gonna go there! I'm gonna go there and you can't stop me! -- the "Cars" movies are creepy. Everything is clearly the same as it is in Human World, with maybe the barest differences, but the humans have been wholly replaced with something else.

And in Walter Fozbek, come to mention it, Human World ought to be Mammal World shouldn't it? Except during the course of the book, we come to find out that Dinosaur World is full of the exact same animals we have in Human World -- but the humans have been replaced by anthropomorphic dinosaur-people. Because the humans are prehistoric and the dinosaurs are modern here. Just go with it. At least the human replacements *are* anthropomorphized in Walter, so it isn't quite as bad as "Cars" (where the cars are just normal four-wheeled cars with faces who have desks and live in human houses and... just breathe).

There's a lot of things like this in the book I could talk about. But instead of giving myself a giant headache, let's enjoy the very 70's dinosaurs. The pterosaur-ladies and stegosaur-ladies seen in the previous post were very minor characters. Here comes a major one. Meet Dr. Krebnickle.



Dr. Krebnickle is the kindly scientist who helps solve the mystery of how Walter got trapped in Dinosaur World. But even better, he is an anthropomorphic Trachodon, which is awesome. Not to get too off-topic, but Trachodon's an interesting case; he was a staple of dinosaur books from my childhood and then suddenly wasn't in any newer books. The Dinosaur Mailing List explains what happened in this article. They don't mention it, but I think there's a very simple reason why Trachodon was so popular for so long:



Our old friend / frequent rip-off victim Charles R. Knight of course. He painted a pair of "Trachodon" once and because he was the all-knowing guru of dinosaur art, everyone had to copy him without question.

So, back to the lecture at hand, how did Walter wind up in Dinosaur World, where his cousin Ralph is a triceratops-person and everyone drinks Carnivore Cola? Here's the incredibly simple and obvious explanation:





So the lesson here, twelve year olds, is Don't Look At Animals Through Special Glasses That Allow a Physicist Who Has Captured a Black Hole in a Jar to View Other Dimensions. That leaves Walter with the problem of getting back home before anyone notices that there is a rampaging prehistoric creature loose in town. (Have to admit, I like the "Futurama"-ish touch of a planet of dinosaurs that fear the extinct humans as some kind of fantastic violent monsters.) Fortunately, Krebnickle has a Do Anything Computer that answers that problem with a poem. Far out.



What this means is that Walter and company must capture the lizard he saw so he can look at it through the Xenon glasses. More importantly, in 1980, dinosaurs are lizards. (sigh...) By the way, the aforementioned pterosaur-ladies and a gang of dimetrodon-people who weren't illustrated are dinosaurs. (sigh...) I guess it could be worse. There could be mammoth-people in Dinosaur World...

Anyway, Walter is found out and he and the lizard are both kidnapped by the prehensile-tailed tyrannosaurus in the above "very wrong" illustration. Fortunately, after some complications too ridiculous to mention here, they escape. Which leads to this happening:



Needless to say, Walter returns to Human World safely. The author can't resist one more act of crazy before we're done though. Check out his author photograph (and the plot summary by somebody who wasn't paying attention):



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Addendum: There is something dinosaur-people-y in the water this week. See also the AV Club and Vulture.

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Sketch of the Day!

I should not have done this.

Fuzzy Memories, Captain Kangaroo, and Walter Fozbek - "CBS Storybreak!"

Hang on to your hats, gang. This is going to be a weird one. Gonna take both of this week's posts to cover it.

So... today we've got another post that's going to be largely based off incredibly fuzzy childhood memory. I have done such posts before, and I really hope this is another case where kind folks write in with more information and helpful links, like so.

Today's subject is something I believe everyone my age watched and yet nobody seems to discuss: "CBS Storybreak". About the only places online with any extensive information about it are The Retroist and IMDB, which provides an episode list.

"Storybreak", often confused with the similar and far longer-lived "ABC Weekend Special", was one of several anthology series for children from the early 1980's. Each thirty-minute episode was based upon a book or folktale and the show went out of it's way to showcase children's literature that was either obscure or downright strange. The animators often played pretty fast and loose with the source materials, making some of the stories even weirder than they were. For most of it's run, the show was hosted by Bob Keeshan, and it ran alongside other more famous Saturday Morning cartoons of the era.

If you don't remember this series at all, your memory might at least be jogged by one of the most distinctive aspects of the show: The bitchin' opening credits sequence:



Hell and yes. Did you see that radical dragon-robot and the shiny pegasus? Bonus: VERY old-school sauropod.

The best-remembered episodes from what little I could scrounge up from discussion boards are, perhaps not coincidentally, the ones you are most likely to find while searching YouTube: "How To Eat Fried Worms", "Yeh-Shen", the truly mad "Arnold of the Ducks", "Dragon's Blood", and "Ratha's Creature" (the last one is the most likely to survive by the time you read this; it's been uploaded by the book's author). A few other episodes that stuck with me through all these years are "Robbut: A Tale of Tails", "Zucchini" (which is about a boy and his pet ferret; kids love non-indicative titles), "The Pig Plantagenet" (mad props to casually sticking such an obscure vocabulary word in a Saturday morning cartoon), "Hugh Pine", "Hank the Cowdog", the truly mad "Max and Me and the Time Machine" (traveling through time may transform you into a horse with glasses, naturally), "Witch Cat", "Grinny" (this one's often cited online as a source of nicely refined nightmare fuel), "The Monster's Ring", a very poorly disguised pilot for a "Raggedy Anne and Andy" cartoon...

...And season one, episode seven: "The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek".



Now, remember this was 1985. A budding paleoartist had very few opportunities to get an animated dinosaur fix. ("Fantasia" was "never ever ever" going to be released on home video, and about the only other options were the occasional Ray Harryhausen phantasmagoria on the afternoon movie or seemingly endless reruns of "The Flintstones".) When I saw the teaser for "Walter" at the end of whatever episode preceded it, nothing -but nothing- mattered during the following week aside from me watching this show. Kids are horrible little things, aren't they? My tiny seven-year-old brain only registered three words: "HOLY SH*T, DINOSAURS!!!"

Now, I'm sure "Walter Fozbek" blew my mind back in the day because from what I remember of my very oldest drawings, they looked a lot like how I remember the characters in the show (and I really hope somebody out there comes up with screenshots or something so that I can confirm this). Can I remember anything at all concrete about it? I do remember the whole thing was basically a funny animal cartoon (think "Ducktales") with 80's dinosaurs. There was some kind of weird plot twist involving this one human character, probably the usual Furry Confusion. Mostly, I remember being incredibly frustrated that I could not find the book upon which this episodes was based. This was long before inter-library loan or Amazon.



Well, thank goodness for Amazon, eh?

Twenty-five years later, I finally have my very own copy of The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek, written and illustrated by Steve Senn in 1980. Published by Avon/Camelot books. So if you'll excuse me for a little bit, I am finally going to read it. See ya Thursday!

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~*~ Intermission Time! ~*~

(And do enjoy this because, my goodness, the ad that starts around the 2 minute, ten second mark...)



~*~ On to Part Two! ~*~

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Sketch of the Day!

The Jim Henson Hour and "Monster Maker"

One of my unstated goals here at the Obligatory Art Blog is to write a bit about things that I recall from childhood that I have seen mentioned almost nowhere else online. And recently I mentioned that it usually turns out to be very hard to write about such remembered things when there is so little information about them online. I may luck out and find a book or video on the subject (and you may have noticed that the book/video often is the subject), but this happens very rarely.

Fortunately, there are a wide variety of Jim Henson fan-websites out there in this vast digital sea, so it isn't too hard to find information about "The Jim Henson Hour". This was a truly ambitious series that, back in the late 1980's, looked and felt like something that had popped right out of the Aether in spite of everything just to make me happy. Just watch the introduction here, which is basically Jim Henson Productions saying, "Look at what we can do NOW!" over a very awesome late 80's pop-rock instrumental. You knew you were in for something special when you saw this.



The series has never been released on DVD largely thanks to the number of hoops whoever has the rights to the show would have to leap through in order to settle things with whomever owns the rights to the shows' various segments and characters. See, "Jim Henson Hour" was an anthology show. It was very similar in format to "Walt Disney Presents"/"Wonderful World of Color"/"Magical World of Disney"/etc. A few - a very, very few- of the individual features on the show have been released on DVD. One or two more are on Netflix Instant, and we'll get to one of these in a bit. And of course, a few full episodes are available on that great repository of barely-remembered 80's television, YouTube.

Now, it's funny how your memory works when you are eleven. I remember watching this show for an entire summer, loving it to death and so happy to finally have a "Muppet Show" equivalent to call my generation's own. This is just the kind of show that, had it appeared ten years later, would have gained a rabid cult following online. Chiefly, I remember the show going on for far longer than it did (this in spite of the fact that I only recalled a handful of episodes) and being way, way popular.

You can imagine my surprise to learn that the show lasted for a grand total of under four months. Poor thing was relegated to the dreaded Friday night death slot and was, well, WAY geeky. Save for maybe three of them, the new Muppet characters didn't click with people and most of the rest of the show was dedicated to the Creature Shop strutting their stuff in obscure story adaptations and other, stranger things.

And that brings us to "Monster Maker". One of the better-remembered episodes, this was based upon a novel by Nicholas Fisk, who, I was happy to learn, is responsible for one of my very favorite science fiction short stories ever. I'm not sure what the book is like, but the short film adaptation is essentially the Creature Shop's love letter to... itself. I say that because they were proud enough of their creature puppets in the episode to showcase them in many different later compilations.

And the puppets are amazing. "Monster Maker" is a very poignant viewing experience in the year 2011. In an age of CGI whatever you want, there it is, it's kind of mind-blowing to watch this film about a special effects house that has to actually stop and think about such questions as, "How do we get these little monsters to walk"? "Can we build a dragon puppet that's large enough to convincingly interact with human characters?" When facing the Ultragorgon dragon, Harry Dean Stanton (in full-on Harry Dean Stanton mode) has a wonderful monologue about believable creature design and animation. Heck, the Ultragorgon himself is fantastic; he's the one thing I recalled very clearly from "Monster Maker".

I hadn't seen "Monster Maker" in full since the episode of "The Jim Henson Hour" in which it was featured way back in 1989. So it is with a very heavy heart that I have to note that everything in it aside from the monsters isn't very good. It is worth watching, especially at a scant 45 minutes, but I will warn you that the story makes not one lick of sense. Also, the lead kid gets a Jake Lloyd Award.

Since most of the show's problems have to do with the story, it's Spoilertext time! So, what was the moral of "Monster Maker"? I guess it was, "Children, give up your lifelong dream. Even if your dream is to work in a very, very specialized creative field that is hard to enter, and the greatest person in the business has already taken you in as an apprentice which is basically a million to one lucky chance. Or, you know, don't give up on your dream. Follow it right into the sun, even if the guy who took you in as his apprentice turns out to have been playing mind games with you all this time and is kind of a terrible person. Also, after either giving up on your dream or not giving up on it, go back with your father. Even if your father is kind of a worse person who has always openly discouraged your dream and wanted you to stay in the family's boring-ass auto repair business, and who deals with incredibly shady people for... some reason they never elaborated on."
I did learn this: if I am ever lucky enough to lead my own nominal studio, I am totally going to build a giant robot dragon puppet to use as a secret test of character on new interns.

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By the way, you'll notice that I am speaking about a barely remembered and way, WAY geeky late 80's television show while everyone else seems to be doing their Harry Potter retrospective. I, of course, did my Harry Potter retrospective posts two years ago. Derp.

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Sketch of the Day!



Of course, this show reminded me that it's been a while since I drew any dragons...

Who watches "The Littles"?

So what to blog about next? Well, how about a blog about my thoughts after watching "Here Come the Littles" (as promised in this older post)? They're livin' with ya, doncha know? Also, as a friendly reminder,

So I just watched "Here Come The Littles". And this post will be chock full of tangents. For those who don't care, I'll cut right to the chase and say that although the "Littles" series may indeed not be as good as I remember, the "Littles" movie is actually pretty good. I'm not sure how someone who'd never seen it as a kid would feel, but I liked it... and also, in my strange way, I can't wait to make fun of it.

Now for a long, long post about 80's kids and their nostalgia filters.

First off, DiC. No other television animation studio is so quintessentially 80's. Sure Filmation and Hannah-Barbera and even Disney had a bunch of hits back then, but take a look at DiC's list of shows. It's my childhood. I'm actually astonished that they have current series; I thought they evaporated sometime after "Hammerman".

I'm looking over that list of shows myself and, gosh, it's weird how your memory works as a kid. I remember Kideo TV as simply an anthology series; I'll just have to take their word for it that there were hosts and skits as well. I remember some other series like "The New Archies" (a title that makes no damn sense incidentally), but only because they were introduced in one of those other great quintessentially 80's things: Saturday Morning Preview Specials.


Ah for the days when every animation studio in North America decided, for some reason, to make series about adult-oriented comedians as little kids.

Anyhow, "The New Archies" was introduced on such a special with the following can't-miss selling point: "It's 'The Archies'. But, like, now."

You don't say.

Your sense of time is also messed up as a kid. When I sat down to watch "Here Come the Littles" as an adult, I was amazed by how short it was. When I saw it as a kid I thought it was hours and hours long. This may go a long way in explaining why kid's movies tend to run just over/under an hour and no longer. And the thing is, I remembered the whole thing. It's actually a bit frightening how I can retain a memory, however vague, of something I saw nearly twenty-four years ago. (And don't even get me started on the "Heathcliff" theme song.)

One more thing about DiC before I talk more about "The Littles". I can't think of another animation studio that had to alter it's "vanity plate" to inform us how it's name is supposed to be pronounced. Also, check around the internet a bit and you'll find that an entire generation was apparently scarred for life by the "Kid in the Bed" version. To which I say, "You clearly never saw an early Disney VHS video that opened with Satanic Laser Mickey." (I could provide a link but... no. I'd like to be able to sleep tonight. It's easy enough to find online. And when you do, imagine having to sit through this as a four year old in order to watch something like "Winnie the Pooh".)

Anyway, "Here Come the Littles". The animation is actually very good for DiC. The story is pitch dark, which is actually fairly typical of the era. And best of all, it has previews of other DVDs of DiC shows from the same era. Shows I was darn certain I was the only one who remembered, like their cheap-rear-end "Care Bears" series and the surprisingly trippy "Sylvanian Families". I may need to watch the latter just to understand WTF is going on in that opening sequence.

I also just realized that I posted a rambling, barely coherent reminiscing about DiC animation when everyone in the entire illustration world is blogging about the "Watchmen" movie. <:/