There’s a lot going on in the world today: Russia seems determined to egg us onto yet another battle front; people who failed business math, and don’t understand profits as a percentage of investment, get all worked up over oil companies’ 10% “record” profits, while ignoring …say…Microsoft’s 30%; Americans are preparing to hold their noses and vote for a candidate from either of two increasingly similar political parties; China’s hosting of the Olympics keeps exposing the country as one huge Potemkin Village, despite their laughable efforts to hide anything from the media. With this rich buffet of topics, I’d like to wax indignant on something near and dear to my heart…cartoons.Now, just so you know where I’m coming from, I think the Coyote/Roadrunner cartoons are the apex of animated entertainment. I think The Wall is overrated, and Ralph Bakshi is underappreciated (I liked Cool World, even if Brad Pitt does scrub it off his résumé). I hate the Big Eyes/Small Mouth school of anime, and would pay good money for front row seats to a Heavy Metal vs. Akira showdown, just to watch Den and Taarna rip into the Capsules and Clowns.
So that’s where I stand.
There’s a cable channel called Boomerang that shows classic cartoons. We recently watched a whole lot of this when we visited family, because it kept the kids entertained. To the wee ones, it was simple entertainment; to me, it was a dumping ground for all of the execrable Hanna-Barbera and a.a.p. cartoons ever made. With the single exception of Hong Kong Phooey, I loathe H-B cartoons. They are annoying garbage with idiotic plotlines and vapid characterization. It’s like the creators came up with a list of catch-phrases, then built entire series around them. Or they ripped off popular live-action shows by turning The Honeymooners into The Flintstones, and morphing the Three Stooges’ Curly into Jabberjaw. And does anybody in the world like Popeye? I’ve never met anyone who would cop to liking that cartoon, yet it has its own dedicated block of time on Boomerang.
Don’t even get me started on Scooby-Doo. Yeah yeah…Shaggy’s a stoner and Fred’s useless. Velma is a lesbian and Daphne is a diva. I don’t care. We didn’t even see the ‘classic’ versions; we saw the Scooby-Doo movies with the special guest stars. This tickled me, too: in the opening credits, Scoob and the Gang are shown encountering Batman and Robin, the Harlem Globetrotters, Laurel and Hardy, the Addams Family, and other fairly fun franchises. So who did we get as our special guest star? Jerry Fuckin’ Reed. Don’t get me wrong, I like Smokey & the Bandit as much as the next guy, but come on.
The other kids’ channel we see a lot of is Noggin, because we have a preschooler in the house. So we get treated to soft and fuzzy cartoons like Max and Ruby and Oswald. For the most part, these are okay. They set out to teach values in an easy-to-follow format, with simple characters and uncomplicated plots. That’s fine. I don’t even mind Dora the Explorer (though I’d love to see someone shoot Boots the monkey and mount his head on the wall of their hacienda). The spin-off from Dora, Go, Diego, Go, annoys the shit out of me, though. The only cool thing about the show is Rescue Pack, which can transform into boats, gliders, skateboards, or what have you. That’s a handy gadget with a great geek factor. Supposedly, Diego can talk to the animals, but the creators must not be too sure about this ability, because he never uses it to find out what the hell is going on. The animals he rescues have got to be the stupidest ones on the planet, too. I have seen no less than four episodes where a bird had to be rescued because it got its wing stuck in a rock cleft. One in particular irritated me because a puma or something was creeping up on this poor trapped bird, and Diego drove it away. I was surprised that the next episode wasn’t him having to find the poor starving puma something to eat. What a meddler. The other annoying thing about this series is that the creators keep increasing the drama. They’ve started putting on special episodes on the weekends where Diego has bigger adventures. The first of these was a trip back in time to rescue a dinosaur. How does this make sense? He has to travel back to a time when these creatures weren’t extinct in order to save one of them so he can return to his own time when they’re still extinct? Huh? Didn’t the writers ever read A Sound of Thunder? (And don’t bring up that movie, please.) The “amazing” adventure this weekend involved newly-hatched sea turtles who couldn’t find their way to the ocean because the moon had been struck by a comet and fell out of the sky in pieces.
Really?
Diego has to put the moon back together?
Because of sea turtles, and not the cataclysmic destruction the loss of the moon would cause?
Really?
I just wonder how they’re going to escalate it from here on out. I mean, once you’ve repaired and replaced an orbiting body, helping a tapir stuck in a termite mound isn’t going to be as thrilling, you know? I fully expect to see a preview where Diego takes on the entire Norse pantheon as he attempts to rescue the ravens Hugin and Munin, who have gotten tangled in the ropes binding Odin to the world tree.
Is it too much to ask to get a little classic Warner Brothers every once in a while? I mean, they only have four of their cartoons in the National Film Registry, in addition to having five Academy Award winners (as well as an additional twenty nominated). This compared to none for Hanna Barbera. Most people can’t tell you the name of any one of the Snorks, but everyone can sing ‘Kill the wabbit’.
That’s all, folks.
No comments:
Post a Comment