A Happy Holiday To All!

Here at the Blog, we've explored all kinds of holiday specials, the good, the bad, and the weird.  In all those years, one special evaded me.  It was a Christmas special I only saw once ever and remembered... not fondly.  Not fondly at all really.  In fact, I remember it being pretty bad.  The thing is, how bad was it, really?  It seemed this would forever remain a mystery.

Until this year.  The YouTube search finally came through.  Some wonderful crazy person (screennamed Ram Jam) finally uploaded it.  Cue the jingle bells and popcorn drum machine and sparkly synths, and journey back to 1990 with me, cause it's time for "Merry Merry Christmas".  It's time for the New Kids on the Block cartoon Christmas Episode!



So.  It's not just that this is as bad and weird as I remember from the one ever time I saw this during the one ever time it aired.  It's worse and weirder.  It's like they purposefully went out of there way to make a "Star Wars Holiday Special" for boy bands.  My favorite WTF moment is that moving "Biscuit in a Santa Claus suit stares out the car window contemplating the magic of a Christmas night in New York City as Jordan Knight falsettos the sh*t out of a sad/inanely cheesy Christmas song" scene.  All the songs are from the "Merry Merry Christmas" album which... is a Christmas album that exists.

I also think we can all agree that this is a (very very distant) second-best ever production involving Donnie Wahlberg where there is a sad weird kid and mystery everywhere and a character who turns out to be a ghost in the end.

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Since I know maybe three of you here are as thrilled about this crappy decades-old cartoon as I am, here is another present.  Over the summer my aunt, cousins, and friends all got puppies.  One day the three little sweeties all came over for a puppy party, and how could I resist?  So here are cute drawings of cute dogs!  Happy, merry, holly, jolly season's greetings here!

My Summer of Sequels: "The Little Mermaid - Ariel's Beginning" (2008)

We've made it!  We're at the end!  We've only got one more movie to tackle!

And if you are at all curious about any of the DTV sequels I did not cover during this project, you better watch them and write about them on your blog yourself.  Or go watch the much more extensive two-part episode of The Nostalgia Chick on the same subject that -and you have to believe me here- I just now became aware of.  Because I cannot emphasize enough that I am done with these damned things.  Forever.

So DisneyToon made direct sequels, distant epilogue sequels, next generation sequels, alternate point-of-view interquels, all-dog country band involving midquels (once again, writer who came up with that plot point, what the f**k?), and even an alternate-universe time-travel retcon-the-whole-original-to-hell-and-back-quel.  And if I am not mistaken, "The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning" (which sometimes goes by the utterly confounding title, "The Little Mermaid 3: Ariel's Beginning") is their only true prequel.  And boy, don't we all love prequels?  You bet!  Prequels are always a good idea!

I very strongly believe that of all the sequels I have subjected myself to during this project, this one was the very worst.  And a big part of the reason why is that, like many prequels, it is ultimately pointless.  We know where these characters end up.  Any drama in the prequel is kind of silly, since no matter what happens during the movie, we know the characters survive to be in the original movie.  Since the characters are who they are in the original film, there isn't much new you could learn about them in a prequel that wouldn't directly contradict things in the original.

And then, there is the question of conflict.  Now, think back to "The Little Mermaid".  There actually was a briefly referenced potentially interesting back-story mentioned there: Ursula states that she once lived in Triton's palace.  I was thinking maybe the prequel would tell that story. 

Well, guess what?  There is a bombastic power-hungry female antagonist named Marina in "Ariel's Beginning".  She's part of the palace staff and is obsessed with her appearance, which leads this this bit of WTF in the end credits:



Yeah, really.

Anyway, Marina deeply resents Ariel and Triton.  She has a villain song solo, a desire to do horrible things to all the nice creatures in Atlantica, a purple color scheme, deep blue and violet rings around her eyes, crazy hair, pet eels... 

...and she very definitely does not turn into Ursula by the end of the movie.  It's flabbergasting, since the whole movie seems to be building to this.  She's locked in jail, with the weird implication that everyone forgot about her by the time the original happened.  And this is the LEAST stupid thing about "Ariel's Beginning"!

Because here's the thing.  During the making of "Ariel's Beginning", if there was a right decision and a wrong decision to be made, the filmmakers instead took a third option: make a stupid decision.  And the entire film is profoundly stupid.  Like a lot of the sequels I've seen during this project, it genuinely feels more like a really really crappy fanfiction than an officially authorized Disney movie.  But this time, it almost feels as though the writers were actively trolling the young Ariel-loving target audience.

You know how I said that most of these sequels could more accurately be subtitled, "The Search For More Money"?  This one could more accurately be subtitled, "Whatever!  You'll Pay To See It!  F*** You!"

Here's the conflict of "Ariel's Beginning".  Triton forbids Ariel to do something.  Ariel does it anyway.  Triton gets mad.  Ariel flees to pursue the forbidden thing.  Triton realizes he has gone too far and is very sad, so he sends a rescue team.  Ariel saves the day somehow.  Triton admits he was wrong, sets everything to right, and good times are had by all.

I swear I am not kidding.  The plot of the prequel to "The Little Mermaid" is "The Little Mermaid".  I know we've run into DTV sequels whose plots are essentially identical to their originals, but the fact that this happens before the original makes it so much worse.  It ends up looking like the characters in the original movie have not learned a thing from the previous similar events.

That and you've got the details of the plot, which is that long ago, Triton got to see his wife and mother of their eight or nine daughters get run over by a pirate ship(!?!?!) while all the merpeople were having fun and playing music.  And so Triton declares war on... music.  Not pirates.  Music was the problem there.  Ariel grows up without music until she learns that it is a thing thanks to Flounder and Sebastian, and you can guess the rest.

So we get to see Flounder beat-boxing and playing air-guitar, which is even more tedious than it sounds, and we also get to see him generally acting not the least little bit like he does in the original (for extra fun times, he also has been given a screechy, earsplitting, hyperactive little kid voice -- though thankfully not a lot of screentime).  The animation is sloppy, to the point where they forget that the whole thing takes place in water and they forget to do things like not break the 180 degrees rule.  I have not got the slightest idea what in the hell the aforementioned villain was exactly trying to accomplish.  Or, come to mention it, why any of the characters were doing the things they were doing.

There's also the fact that it was very prescient of me to watch that Patton Oswalt sketch linked above some time before I watched this.  Because in opening scenes of this prequel, Ariel is a little girl and her mom dies and she's sad.  Honest to God.

And oh, the songs.  They are a disgrace.  When your best song is a cover of "Jump in the Line" (no, they couldn't even be bothered to write a new original song for Sebastian; that tells you everything you need to know about this "Little Mermaid" prequel), and even the villain song is terrible, you don't deserve to even have "Little Mermaid" in your title.

"The Little Mermaid 3" was famously, mercifully, Disney's very last official DTV sequel.  All told, they spent fourteen years making sequels and made nearly thirty of the damn things.  It was a very weird and mostly regretful period in the studio's history.

There is a part of me who is glad that I satisfied my morbid curiosity about this, but it's going to take an awful lot to detox my brain.

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Sketch of the Day!

Hipster Tiktaalik was hating DTV sequels before it was cool!

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. <:/

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.