Re-Animated #19: The Venture Brothers

"We're the Venture Brothers!"

So sayeth Jonas Venture, Jr. to his brother Rusty in the season 2 premiere of today's entry.

It was a weird, goofy "fuck you" to the audience.  But it also wasn't that.  It was also an artistic choice that suggested this offbeat cartoon, which had originated as nothing more than a violent "Jonny Quest" ripoff was going to have stakes.  That it could change.  That it was a cartoon that wasn't just a cartoon.

And change it has.  Mutated.  Evolved.  And taken bold choices.  Too many bold choices, perhaps.  But let's take a step back.

My earliest memory of "The Venture Brothers" was watching the pilot in a hotel room in Texas when I was in the army.  It was the second time the pilot had shown, alongside a few, stranger [adult swim] entries like "Penguins Behind Bars."  So why do I remember the second time better?

Well, back in those days [adult swim] was putting a lot more pilots on the air, presumably because they didn't have nearly as much content and, having commissioned a pilot, even if it never went to series, the result was likely still weird enough to warrant trying to get their money back with a showing.  One winter the absolutely unwatchable "Boo Boo Runs Wild" ran like clockwork every night at 12:30.  It was the only time of the evening I turned [adult swim] off.

One day I may do an entry on some of the [adult swim] pilots.  But suffice it to say that "The Terrible Secret of Turtle Bay" at first seemed like that.  It was a bit of a one-joke premise.  Dr. Venture is like Benton Quest, except he doesn't give a shit about his kids.  Hank and Dean are as eager and chipper as Jonny and Hadji but they live in a real world of strippers and muggings.  And Brock Samson is as dedicated a bodyguard as Race Bannon, but an ultraviolent lunatic.  Oh, and the accidental homoeroticism of Race and Benton was made all but overt.

And that was about it.  It was mildly clever, mildly amusing, and the animation was charming and hand-drawn (more on that in a moment) but otherwise the [adult swim] suits might have been forgiven for passing on this like any other "Korgoth of Barbaria" or "Cheyenne Cinnamon and the Fantabulous Unicorn of Sugar Town Candy Fudge."

Thankfully, though, they did send "The Venture Brothers" to series, and as I mentioned above, it evolved and evolved and evolved.  Which brings us to the season 1 finale...when the ostensible main characters of the show, Hank and Dean, were killed at the very end.  Cartoons are notably fond of the reset button, but not so "The Venture Brothers."  In fact, they did a send up of the very notion of the reset button when it turned out that Hank and Dean were clones - fifteenth or sixteenth generation clones, in fact.

Which leads us back to the quote I mentioned in the opening.  For the space of a single half hour "The Venture Brothers" hinted that it might be the sort of show to kill off its two teenage leads, and replace them with two middle aged brothers...er, one of which had been swallowed in utero and only recently escaped from his twin's body.  It never went quite that far.  But in subsequent seasons it never pulled back from marriages, breakups, deaths, and even, at the beginning of season 6, a completely new location.  And because, as I mentioned above, each episode is loving hand-drawn in a retro style, fans can often go several years between seasons without having their cliffhanger itches scratched.  Thus, while "The Venture Brothers" is only now entering its seventh season, it's not officially been on the air longer than any other [adult swim] show, including the eleven-season former champ "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" - at fifteen and a half years.

Jesus Christ, I just depressed myself.  How much of my life have I wasted on waiting for a cartoon?

What's notably interesting about the show being so long-running is that they completely preceded the Marvel fad before it overtook them.  Imagine having a main character on the show be an obvious spoof of Doctor Strange in 2004.  How many people would have even gotten the reference?  Being a superhero show, the creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer leaned heavy into the Marvel deep cuts at a time when the idea of, say, Ant-Man becoming familiar to a mainstream audience was pretty out there.  Now all the Marvel references are so embedded in their mythos it would be hard to extract any of them - and now they're no longer just for superfans.

Well, anyway, "The Venture Brothers" is delightful and kooky.  Most of the time.  As it's written by übernerds, it has a nerdy tendency to disappear into increasingly obscurer and obscurer pop culture references.  If a particular reference doesn't resonate with you, you might be fine as it might be a throwaway line.  It might also be a running joke through an excruciating, minutes-long debate between two characters (of particular guilt are albino Pete White and hydrocephalic "boy genius" Master Billy Quizboy.)  So "YMMV" might be a general blanket warning for any given episode of the show.

And while I admire their bravery in most instances, there have, naturally, been a few misfires.  Sergeant Hatred, a recurring (he's still in it, in fact) and unrepentant pedophile character, has raised more than a few hackles online. 

The new season is currently airing (hence me once again running Re-Animated a bit out of order) but you're not going to be able to just jump right in.  Trust me on this.  You're going to want to go back to season 1, episode 1, hell, you'll even miss stuff if you don't go back to the pilot, and watch the whole thing through.

Re-Animated #18: Final Space

Let's jump forward a bit.  If you've been reading the "Re-Animated" series all this time, you know that I've made a mostly vain attempt to cover adult animation in a chronological fashion.  Sometimes I run into issues (like realizing I hadn't covered "Space Ghost: Coast to Coast" before attempting to cover "The Brak Show" or just saying "Fuck it, I want to do Batman.")

Sometimes I jump around by mistake.  Sometimes by design.  Today I have a couple of reasons for jumping around.  First, because sometimes coming at things from a different angle can give us a different perspective.  And second, because this is a show that is currently airing, and perhaps by covering it I can drive you to discover something as its happening, rather than just in retrospect.

Today we discuss "Final Space."

"Final Space" is my favorite show currently airing.  I liked it almost immediately.  I was worried at first sitting down to watch it that it was going to be crummy, as many many recent cartoons have been.  (Of course, if you know anything about me, dear reader, you know that that wasn't going to stop me from watching it.)  But in all of those cases I knew immediately that the show was going to be crummy and only desperately hoped it would get better (usually to little or no avail.)

In the case of "Final Space" I started out a bit confused.  Our story opens with our hero, Gary, floating alone in space in wreckage with ten minutes of air remaining.  He discusses the matter with HUE, an unseen computer presence a la "2001's" HAL.  But it turns out that's just a framing device, and one that won't start to make sense until we revisit it week after week.  And the explanation for Gary's predicament is still pending, presumably until the season finale, although almost every episode teases in one way or another that this could be the week it happens - providing a throughline and a reminder that everything is not necessaril going to turn out okay.

We then jump back in time to Gary, the lone prisoner on an extremely advanced starship, reaching the last week of his five year sentence.  Gary has to do work on satellites, but even so I immediately wondered about the economics of assigning a long range starship and countless robotic servitors to a single prisoner.  But, okay, it's science fiction and a cartoon, two genres both notorious for logic-bending.

So instantly I'm getting hints of "Red Dwarf," one of my all time favorite shows.  But it's not quite that.  Nor is it quite "Alien," or "A Boy and His Dog," or "Blade Runner," or any of a hundred other shows it evokes.  One thing that delights me about "Final Space" is that while it wears its influences on its sleeve, it doesn't settle into the easy rut of slavishly modelling itself after them.  ("The Orwell," anyone?)  The show it perhaps owes the most to is "Rick and Morty," because it was doubtless greenlit on the strength of that redoubtable series' ratings.  But rather than coming off as a pale clone, "Final Space" actually takes "Rick and Morty's" strengths and builds on them.  Science fiction has a long, robust history, certainly ripe enough for two comedy shows to mine.

"Final Space" also has a delightful villain in the David Tennant-voiced Lord Commander, who pulls off the rare hat trick of being simultaneous cuddly, hilarious, and pants-wettingly terrifying at the same time.  Tennant almost singlehandedly redeems himself for that whole putting Eccleston out of work business of a few years ago with this showing.

The show definitely has a habit of leaning too hard on the "isn't Gary a lovable kook" shtick, but it manages to land just shy of grating.  And, ultimately, it makes up for Gary's aggressive weirdness with solid steaming helpings of heart.  Gary's loneliness and uncommon human decency are both palpable, which serves to undercut all the wackiness for wackiness's sake.  Gary's backstory is heartbreaking, as is his situation.  And the absolutely mutual unconditional love he finds in the alien blob Mooncake is one of the loveliest parts of the show.

All of the characters sparkle.  KVN, Gary's anti-insanity robot, takes the Rimmeresque role of being a total jerk, and has one of the greatest songs ever committed to celluloid in episode 2.  Avocato, the bounty hunter sent to bring Mooncake in, turns out to be an unexpectedly cool foil to Gary's aggressive nerdiness.  And, oh, by the way, absolutely no spoilers, but you need to watch the last episode.

Quinn, the more traditional hero of the Starfleet-like Infinity Guard seems to walk the razor blade of being Gary's long absent and therefore deified love interest and being a real person.  I was worried that whole storyline was going to delve into icky territory, but Quinn's character avoids a lot of the pitfalls of the usual virgin/whore dynamic by being proactive and clever, but also stubborn and solipsistic.  In other words, a well-rounded human.  So while it's clear that Gary's obsessed with a simulacrum, it's also clear that Quinn isn't that person.

"Final Space" is delightful.  I cannot stress this enough.  I want you to stop reading this blogpost immediately and go watch all of the episodes on Hulu, On Demand, or TBS.  Well?  What are you waiting for?  You can thank me in the comments later.

Re-Animated #17: Aqua Something You Know Whatever

Dancing is forbidden.

September, 2001.

Wow.  What a time.  I was beginning my sophomore year of college.  America was on top of the world, the undisputed and last of the super-powers.  The word "hyper-power" was being tossed around, because what did it mean to be the only super-power left, and utterly untouchable in every way?  The year of "2001: A Space Odyssey" had already arrived.  "Star Trek" and its utopian vision couldn't be very far around the corner.

Then we all know the rest.

It's interesting to think, though, that a scant two days before the formative act of the new century, a tiny, half of a show premiered as part of a two hour, late-night block on a children's television network, and in some ways rewrote the fabric of pop culture for years to come.  

Much to the chagin of modern-day me, I didn't catch the premier of "Aqua Teen Hunger Force."  In fact, we had only gotten Cartoon Network on the college cable system the semester before, so it was fortunate that I got to see "ATHF" at all.  Or perhaps it was part of Turner's plan to come into college campuses only once [adult swim] was on the horizon.  But more on that later.

Here's what I do remember, though, with such clarity that I could be living it right now.  At the time, I was planning to become a teacher.  In one of my education classes, two of the guys sitting in front of me were laughing their heads off, tossing quotes at one another about a guy with a moustache sleeping with a girl.

I used to be hip.  I used to be with it.  And I had no idea what the hell they were talking about.  So I asked.  Turns out they were talking about the classic "Chickmate" episode of "Sealab 2021."

The next Sunday night I tuned in to my first viewing of [adult swim.]  I was instantly mesmerized, not just by the bizarre, fast-paced stoner comedy, but also by the interstitials of old people swimming in a pool.  What was this?  Was there anything else like this?  What had I stumbled upon?

I remember exactly what played that night.  "Brendon's Choice" on "Home Movies," which I thought at first was some kind of "Dungeons and Dragons"-themed show.  And the very first episode with the Mooninites of "ATHF" which, according to my extensive research (read: Wikipedia) places the date at October 14, 2001.  I remember my roommate, normally a stoic academic, actually cracking up when I stepped out of the room to go to the bathroom down the hall.

"What is it?" I asked.

"They're fighting," he said.

He was referring to the scene where Ignignokt and Ur turn on the Aqua teens and blast them  with their amazing 2D graphics.  The scene was still going on.

"We're fighting," said the characters on TV.

What was even going on? I was so baffled by this new show, I thought the Mooninites were the stars and the Aqua Teens were the annoying interlopers.

I spent the next Sunday night furiously trying to find my new favorite programming block on Comedy Central. Except it wasn't on Comedy Central, it was on Cartoon Network, which was the reason I couldn't find it. Finally, in fury, I started switching channels after it had ended and finally found it. Luckily for me, [adult swim] replayed all its shows each night. So I tuned in to "ATHF" again, and was confused to learn that the milkshake, box of fries, and burger-like creature were the stars. Nary was a Mooninite to be spotted.

And then I was the one quoting things at people. "On the moon, nerds get their pants pulled down and get spanked with moon rocks" was my away message on AIM (kids, ask your parents) for a while.

For many people, "ATHF" and [adult swim] are synonymous. It was not only their most popular show (at least up until the advent of "Rick and Morty," which, naturally, we'll be covering in an upcoming installment of "Re-Animated", it was also their longest running, at eleven seasons (several of the latter of which were given goofy alternate show titles, a la the title of this blogpost), ending only recently in 2015. It may be overtaken soon by "The Venture Brothers," which premiered in 2003, but due to the vagaries of its production schedules, will only be entering its seventh season this year. "ATHF" was also the first (and to date, only) [adult swim] show to have a theatrical movie release, "Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters," including guest star the inimitable Bruce Campbell.

Now, remember I said that we'd talk a bit more about the college angle?  Well, this seems as good a place as any to delve into [adult swim]'s weird and unfortunate relationship with ratings.  The short answer is: they're not very good.  At least, by the dinosaur standards of Nielsen.  But you, reading this in 2018, are probably already more than familiar with Nielsen's shortfallings.  Nielsen doesn't capture streaming services, nor, as it turns out, do they capture college campuses.  [adult swim] has (or had, I'm not sure how things still are) a huge following on college campuses.  When looking at the Nielsen ratings, the [adult swim] suits often lamented that they were so low - and yet, during spring, winter, and summer breaks, when college students traditionally go home where Nielsen is a little more accurate, their ratings shot through the roof.  This led to [adult swim] taking a fairly laissez-faire attitude towards actual Nielsen ratings, and they began streaming almost all of their shows online, at a time when most networks were still worrying about that sort of thing being so piracy adjacent as to make no difference.  Nowadays, of course, every station streams its shows.  [adult swim] was an early adopter of the system that we now all rely on so heavily.

"ATHF" is [adult swim] and, by extension, modern adult animation distilled down to its purest form. A straight mainline of bizarre, bizarro, off-kilter, rapid-paced humor, gross-out moments, and even heart as you grow to love these weird characters. Get high, enjoy, and get back to me in the comments.

Re-Animated #16: Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law

Over the last two installments we talked about early [adult swim]'s recurring oeuvre of rehashing Ted Turner's recently acquired Hanna Barbera library, so we won't go over that again in great detail.  "Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast" was the pioneering show in this regard, and due to its budgetary limitatons, relied on a cheap-to-produce talk show format and surreal humor in equal measures.  Its spiritual successor and (sort of?) spinoff "The Brak Show" took the tack of relocating its characters from a superhero-populated galaxy of wonder to suburbia, and allowed the natural strangeness of the juxtaposition to inform a great deal of the humor.  "Sealab 2021" took perhaps the most obvious approach to repurposing an old adventure show as a comedy: keeping the setting and characters the same, and essentially continuing to write situational comedy, but where the situations are bizarre and the reactions are hyperbolic.

And then there's "Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law."

"Birdman" took perhaps the strangest approach to this unique opportunity to play in a pre-existing sandbox: they played it, for all intents and purposes, straight.  Birdman was the same Birdman who had fought crime in the sixties.  He had just decided to get a new job as a criminal defense lawyer.  As with Space Ghost, no one's long-simmering affection for Birdman was going to hamper a show making fun of him.  Nobody remembered who the fuck who he was, and he hadn't been that great in the first place.

And what about all of Birdman's supervillains from the sixties show?  They had all, similarly, taken on unlikely careers as judges and prosecuting attorneys, allowing for them to remain "enemies" in the adversarial courtroom system, while also having many coyote-and-sheepdog moments after they punched out for the day.  Harvey Birdman and such luminaries as Myron Reducto or Mentok the Mindtaker might snipe at each other over drinks, because they still sure as shit didn't like each other, but they weren't typically going to bash each other's brains out.

While the humor remained bizarre, it was never quite surreal or bizarro the way "Sealab" and "Brak" were.  In fact, while its contemporaries often and loudly smashed the reset button at the end of each episode, "Birdman" technically remained in continuity throughout the whole run of the show.  For instance, when Judge Mightor, who sat on the bench for most of the first season, runs into hiding to evade mafia don Fred Flintstone, he is replaced by Judge Mentok the Mind-Taker.

Oh, did I just kind of gloss over that Fred Flintstone reference?  Because I was just getting to that.  "Birdman" doesn't just remain internally consistent.  It also presupposes a world where all of the Hanna Barbera characters coexist and intereact.  This gives Birdman a chance to defend Fred Flintstone as a mafia don, as mentioned, but also to take up the case of the poor young marijuana addicts Scooby and Shaggy, Quickdraw McGraw/El Kabong for carrying a concealed weapon (a guitar), the custody battle for Jonny Quest, Atom Ant for being a terrorist, and so forth.

I guess what I'm saying is, "Birdman" was ambitious.  Damn ambitious.  It presupposed a world full of characters the audience was more or less going to vaguely remember from their wasted youths watching Saturday morning cartoons in the den.  It gave you a chance to catch up with those characters, see what they're up to these days, and what their behavior would have resulted in had they lived in a real(ish) world.  

And in keeping with such ambition, "Birdman" had a shockingly impressive voice cast, full of already-theres and soon-to-bes of the turn of the millennium.  The title character was Gary Cole (you know, Lumbergh from "Office Space?") but other voices included Lewis Black, Peter MacNicol, Michael McKean, Phil LaMarr, and a just-before-he-became-world-famous Stephen Colbert as Birdman's boss.  As with his character in "The Venture Brothers," Colbert disappeared from "Birdman" after he got his own show.

"Birdman's" ambition would also influence the burgeoning [adult swim] in other ways.  Having decades worth of characters and material to draw from, the writers took a kitchen sink approach to gags (doubtless, much to the chagrin of the animators.)  There's what the characters are saying - which is clever - and then there's what the characters are doing - which is often in contradiction to what they're saying - and then there's a veritable army of background characters watching, while pulling faces, tripping over banana peels, and anything else you can imagine.  Every 11-minute episode of "Birdman" was packed with a cornucopia of densely layered gags.  Where thirteen years before it was often said that you would be rewarded for paying attention to what was going on in the background of "The Simpsons," starting with "Birdman" you practically had to take repeated viewings on slow motion to catch everything that was going on in [adult swim.]  

This meant that "Birdman" was eminently rewatchable - a clear advantage on a channel which replayed all of its shows twice a night and was mostly watched by stoners and college kids who weren't paying a terrible amount of attention to begin with.  It would also seep into the [adult swim] ethos and deep into the DNA of shows like "Superjail," "Metalocalypse," and "China, IL."

But we're not done with the original hourlong block of [adult swim] shows yet!  And we've save possibly the best - certainly the longest lived - for last.  See you next time, Reani-matey-os!  That's your new...that's your new term for yourselves.

Re-Animated #15: Space Ghost Coast to Coast/The Brak Show

Welcome back, friend-os!

The year (chronologically, according to our ongoing timeline) is 2001.  After "The Simpsons" brought the idea of primetime, adult-oriented animation into the mainstream, there were a few clones, some failures, some successes, but nonetheless cancelled ("The Critic," "Duckman") and some had managed to weather the storm and become Sunday-night staples ("King of the Hill," "Futurama," "Family Guy.")

Then, after "Rejected" opened the door, came the experiments.  Weirdo-beardo experimental adult animation litters the airwaves today, but at the beginning of the millennium, they were pretty much all concentrated on [adult swim].  In the last entry in this series, I went over what Cartoon Network was doing and why, which boils down to trying to find new ways to repurpose the newly acquired Hanna-Barbera cartoons of yesteryear.

Now, likely some of you have been yelling at me for a while about not including "Space Ghost Coast to Coast," which debuted in 1994, in this blog series.  Well, the truth is, I was waiting for this entry to hit it.  Unfortunately, chronological order is not always perfect, but we do what we can.

"Space Ghost Coast to Coast" was one of the earlier experiments Cartoon Network did with repurposing the Hanna Barbera back catalog.  Space Ghost was one of the lesser-remembered characters of '60s animation, and one of the more batshit ones, which is saying something in the era of Adam "Bat Octopus Repellant" West. 

Space Ghost himself was a serious-minded character, but he flew around space with a pair of twins and a pet monkey fighting villains.  In a way, his less-than-stellar history made Space Ghost a prime candidate for repurposing in a way that, say, Superman would not.  You can imagine the jeers and proto-internet anger around someone's beloved childhood superhero being made an object of derision.  In Space Ghost's case, there were mostly crickets.

And so "Space Ghost Coast to Coast" came to be.  It is, in a lot of ways, a prototype for what would become [adult swim].  Using pre-existing characters allowed the writers to eschew normal origin stories, and the fiscal limitations of the whole product led to an unusual, surreal brand of comedy.  You can imagine, I suppose, this process. 

"Let's dub the character's mouth movements.  Nothing quite fits.  Eh, fuck it, let's just say some nonsense."

"We have a little clip of the characters doing something from the original show.  If we use it, we'll save on the animation budget.  Let's write a way in for them to go running off on a different planet or something."

And so forth.  But SGCTC followed a pretty simple format that allowed for these weird asides.  The concept was that Space Ghost, who took himself ridiculously seriously, was now a talk show host.  His former enemies, lava monster Moltar, the cat-like Brak, and space mantis Zorak, had now been shanghaied into being his producer, Ed McMahon-style sidekick, and bandleader, respectively.

Mostly the characters would bicker, their old statuses as enemies having never quite been forgotten.  Space Ghost, as a talk show host, would have guests on, who appeared in live action on a television screen within the animated studio.  In an early version of what would evolve into Tim and Eric-esque anti-humor, Space Ghost would either bicker with his guest, ignore him altogether, or force him to play the straight man.  We'd also see this concept by-and-large revisited in the later-era, live-action talk show "The Colbert Show."  The guests, depending on how game they were, would either become irritated or play along, in any case allowing for some amusing shenanigans.

I haven't revisited SGCTC in many years, but that's pretty much for the same reason I haven't revisited '90s era Conan O'Brien shows or even something I loved more recently like "The Daily Show."  And the simple reason is because talk shows don't age well.  Unless something someone was slumming it back then and went on to become a major celebrity or if there's some kind of universal, age-proof sketch, talk shows are disposable media of their era, and best left to it.  I imagine there are still diamonds from the SGCTC era, but I shall leave the business of sifting them from the rough to you, dear readers.

Now, with that as preface, we can talk about SGCTC's spinoff (well...or whatever) "The Brak Show."  "Brak" aired alongside "Sealab 2021," "Harvey Birdman," and "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" in the original [adult swim] lineup.  Even amongst such scintillating stoner comedy companion pieces, "Brak" easily won the race for most sophomoric.

Which is not to say that I dislike "Brak."  I enjoyed the show a great deal, and think it has been somewhat forgotten in the scrum of people saying which [adult swim] shows they liked best.  But "Brak" was, most likely deliberately, the "dumb" show.  Brak himself was exceedingly dumb.  Zorak also made the jump over from SGCTC, this time as Brak's cruel and exploitative neighbor.

His villain days long behind him, Brak mostly worried about being nice to people (usually while failing miserably and fucking things up) and singing jaunty tunes.  His father is an out-of-place normal-sized human surrounded by giant monsters, and a vaguely wise, vaguely psychotic figure with a Latino accent.  Think Desi Arnaz by way of Donald Trump.  His mother is possibly whatever feline race Brak is, originally with an American accent, then later with a British accent when the voice actress was replaced.  In keeping with the general ethos, the change was often mentioned but never explained.

And, aside from Brak's many anthropomorphized stuffed animals, rounding out the cast was perhaps "The Brak Show's" greatest creation, Mr. Thundercleese.  Thundercleese is a giant, world-saving robot with a soft side, often fussing about his goldfish and whatnot, but never in anything less than an insane, auto-tuned bravado. 

"Brak" was the first of the original [as] shows to be cancelled, after four seasons.  So, in a way, it feels like it made less of an impact than it did.  But for setting up the network's ongoing ethos, it's at least a quarter responsible.  So, if you've never seen it, it's worth a re-watch. 

On the next two installments of "Re-Animated," we'll be rounding out the rest of the original [adult swim] lineup.  Hope to see you there!

Re-Animated #14: Sealab 2021

It's been quite a while since I did a Re-Animated blogpost, so if you care to get yourself back up to speed, you can do so here. 

It wasn't my intention to take such a long break, but actually, unexpected though it was, it happened at the perfect spot in our written history of adult animation.  The last entry I did was on the subject of the animated short "Rejected," which marked, in a way, the opening of a new chapter in our story.  Although I've been hinting at it all along, the history of adult animation could very easily be broken up into the segments "pre-adult swim" and "post-adult swim."

And today we will cover our first proper adult swim show.

Now, as I mentioned in previous entries, adult swim was a strange sort of "half a network" which aired at first late-night Sundays and was treated by Nielsen as a separate entity from Cartoon Network on which it aired.  Much of the time was taken up by anime and old canned and cancelled (and sometimes later revived) cartoon shows from other networks.  But the original flagship for the network was a one-hour block of original shows: "The Brak Show," "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," "Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law," and today's entry: "Sealab 2021."

But...

A word on the term "original."

In the '90s Ted Turner acquired the old Hanna-Barbera library.  If you're not clear on what Hanna-Barbera was, just picture all of the crummiest cartoons of the '60s and '70s - "Scooby-Doo," "Huckleberry Hound," "Snagglepuss" and the like.  Yes, truly if "Looney Tunes" was The Rolling Stones of cartoons and Disney was The Beatles, then Hanna-Barbera was The Monkees.

So I'm sure it wasn't cheap, per se, but Turner probably got a lot of material for his buck, so to speak.  And he started playing all of the old Hanna-Barbera junk on his networks, Cartoon Network and later Boomerang.  So there was a little money to be made in playing those old reruns from the '60s.  But the people at Cartoon Network began to experiment with the catalog to see if they could get even more money out of it.

And out of one such experiment, "Sealab 2021" was born.

"Sealab 2020" was a Hanna-Barbera produced show, so I imagine it was grim to begin with, but it was also supposed to be an educational program about oceans and nature, so I can only imagine it was doubly grim.  (I've never watched it, except for the episode of "Sealab 2021" that I assume was an unretouched episode of the original.)  The Cartoon Network suits who were putting together what would eventually become adult swim, however, thought perhaps the animation, which was expensive to produce, could be paired with a new soundtrack and dialogue, which was easy to produce, to create a new, clever, perhaps avant-garde show, considering the dialogue would have to be tailored to pre-existing animation. 

The result was, apparently, unwatchable.  But the concept had set wheels in motion, and it wasn't a huge leap from using pre-existing animation with a new soundtrack to heavily editing pre-existing animation to make a still fairly cheap-to-produce show.  The avant-garde nature of the original experiment, of course, survived, and "Sealab 2021" became a pilot program of what would eventually develop into the adult swim ethos.

So the show itself was "about" a team of cracked scientists and pseudomilitary types living in a lab on the ocean floor.  Perhaps in homage to "Aeon Fluxx" the actual Sealab blew up at the end of every episode, with no reference to its loss in the official canon.  Rather than deal with actual sealife and interesting adventures a la "Seaquest," "Sealab 2021" focused on the stupidest possible antics of the crew.  In one episode, Captain Murphy is trapped under a vending machine the entire time and makes friends with a scorpion.  In another, they bicker over which of the men would be best to father Debbie's baby.

The writing was searingly hilarious and satirical, hanging in that odd grey area between being stupid, sexist, and racist and mocking stupidity, sexism, and racism.  If it clarifies anything: the creators would go on, in a few steps, to create "Archer," which shows much of its "Sealab" DNA to this day.

"Sealab" also was part of adult swim's rather unusual episode lengths.  Episodes clocked in at eleven minutes (fifteen with commercials) allowing for a single, unbroken viewing of each episode.  This allowed for a certain almost whiplash-fast speed for jokes, and densely plotted stories jammed into half the running length of a usual sitcom.  I suspect it meant that coming up with a full half hour of material and then being able to slice out half of the chaff allowed for only the best and brightest gems of humor to make it on the air.

Overall, "Sealab" is well worth a rewatch.  It remains a clever, transgressive show, and at eleven minutes an episode, watching a whole season is more akin to watching a long movie than binge-watching a show.  Definitely worth checking out.

Re-Animated #13: Rejected

Today we're going to talk about a single animated short which debuted in July of 2000.

The "Re-Animated" series has, for the most part, been a chronological account of the advent of adult animation.  But when you have shows like "The Simpsons" that have been on for 27 years or "South Park" that have been on for 20, naturally the timeline becomes a bit elastic and so I've covered things that "haven't happened yet" chronologically.

One of the worst cases of this is my constant references to adult swim, a network which did not exist yet in July of 2000.  But perhaps it's apropos, too, that I keep hinting at something so huge coming around the bend.

Don Hertzfeldts's "Rejected" is so short and yet so seminal to our story, that I feel like it couldn't hurt for you to just watch the entire thing right now.

 

Hertzfeldt was (and still is, apparently) a man of conscience.  By this time in his life he had found some moderate success with making short cartoons, particularly "Billy's Balloon," and had been approached to do commercial work, a logical next step in a burgeoning cartoonist's career.  But Hertzfeldt despised commercialism and instead essentially torpedoed his chance for wealth and fame in order to continue pursuing the sort of art he wanted to do.

His response to the offer was "Rejected," a master class in surrealism as well as a scathing indictment of both Madison Avenue's greed and "educational" television's hypocrisy.  Chronicling an imaginary Hertzfeldt's descent into madness (and the suffering of his characters as a result) as he pursues a career making advertisements, "Rejected" was both a mission statement and a masterwork.  After being nominated for an Oscar and winning 27 awards worldwide, you can again imagine the crossroads that a young Don Hertzfeldt must have stood at yet again, only to reject commercial work and continue to make his own iconoclastic creations yet again.

If I'm being too hagiographic, I hope you can forgive me.  Obviously, Hertzfeldt's story is rare in a world where becoming popular enough to sell out is a goal for most artists, myself included.  To actually wrap your fingers around the brass ring and then say, "Eh, nah, fuck it" is a compelling path, one I can't even imagine myself taking.  It would be like if the Big 5 called me today and said, "Here's a million dollar advance, you just have to write horse ranch romances" and I said, "Nah, fuck it, I want to keep writing about zombies and losing money."  Admirable in theory, but you know the real me would already be researching ponies.

Anyway, that felt like a long digression.  Here's what's really important about "Rejected."  Or, you know, maybe not, because it does stand on its own.  Nevertheless, as a nine minute abstract cartoon it is a prototype and ur-example of what adult swim would start doing just one year later.  Most adult swim creators cite "Rejected" as the inspiration and proof-of-concept for their own work.  The influence of Hertzfeldt's abstraction and the bizarre humor is obvious.  But let's also talk about the length.

Today it's taken as a given that if your TV show takes an hour and eleven minutes, it takes an hour and eleven minutes.  Almost every drama on cable, and some comedies and even a bunch of network shows now, get some wiggle room.  But in 2000 television slots were exceptionally rigid, and there were really only two kinds of shows: half hour comedies, and hours-long dramas.  The only exception in the television landscape was "Saturday Night Live," which was an hour and a half.  But SNL was an institution and no one was watching anything else on a Saturday night, so it wasn't like a fat, glaring example of an exception.  And who watches a full episode of SNL anyway?  You just tune in and out, so having it run a bit longer didn't really matter.

Most cartoons that had been created for television were constructed to be a half hour long.  Cartoons, though, had a long history of being five to ten minute shorts which played before feature presentations in movie theaters.  A few cartoon shows in the '80s and '90s used the format of those old Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons.  "Tiny Toons," "Animaniacs," "Taz-Mania," "Pinky and the Brain" and the like would play three to six cartoons in their half hour block, often with either a framing story, a through line, or the characters from one cartoon cameoing on another to give the whole show a greater sense of cohesion.  You might have been watching six individuated cartoons, but you felt like you were watching a single half hour program.

adult swim's great innovation was splitting the half hour.  I have no doubt they understood from the start that their audience for late night cartoons would be either stoned or drunk, and therefore would have difficulty following a complex storyline.  Knowing that, making a show eleven minutes long meant that you were only taxing your audience to watch the equivalent of a Bugs Bunny cartoon - long considered perfect fare for stoners.  And doubling down on the concept, through the use of surrealism and abstract humor, it almost didn't matter if you were paying attention at all.  It wasn't about following a complicated story, it was about random silliness.

Watching a cottonball person bleed from his (her?) anus until it fills the room is the sort of thing that you can laugh at whether you've been following along with the story or not.  And so Hertzfeldt, somewhat unwittingly, had pioneered a new art form: the half half hour stoner cartoon.  Once "Rejected" existed, the idea of putting something like this on later at night when college students would watch was a logical next step.

So "Rejected," while it stands on its own, would also usher in a new era in adult animation.  Which we're going to visit more in-depth in the next few installments.

Re-Animated #12: God, The Devil, and Bob

What would become the United States of America was colonized by weird, puritanical nuts about four hundred years ago.  I'm talking about the kind of people who when they passed by, the other illiterate peasants of the late Middle Ages looked at each other and whispered, "Those guys are a little too churchy." 

It's hard to get past that.  As much as we've advanced in four centuries, compared to Europeans we're still a little bit...too churchy.  Here in Pennsylvania you can't buy liquor on Sundays and you can only buy it from the state the rest of the week.  Our laws about sex and marriage are...well, let's just say weird and leave it at that.  Things in 2016 are certainly better tan they were in 2000 (yay, gay marriage!) but it's hard to say we've changed that much.  Mocking religion doesn't really get big play in the public sphere.  It doesn't play in Peoria, as they say, but what it really doesn't play in is the Bible Belt, which is both the metaphorical and the physical center of our country.

What has changed since 2000 is the way we consume our entertainment.  Entertainment has balkanized so that if I'm not finding a TV show I want to watch on the networks, I can probably find a cable channel to suit my needs, that is, if I don't prefer Netflix or, hell, even just YouTube.  In 2000, not so much.  A nascent version of how we understand cable today existed, but original programming was pretty much bargain basement.  "The Sopranos" had only started the year before, even "South Park" was only three, and we were still a solid decade and a half away from "Preacher."

It's strange, then, from a business standpoint, that ABC took the risk of putting a show like "God, The Devil, and Bob" on the air.  I was excited when it first came on, because yay adult cartoons, but I also knew, even as an inexperienced teenager, that it was only a few weeks away from cancellation.  I don't know if ABC was gambling that this would be their version of "South Park" and that the controversial nature of the show would at least generate some ratings. 

It did not.  I have to say, all things considered, the actual content of "GTDAB" was not nearly as controversial as the religious groups that immediately jumped to condemn it imagined it to be.  It was fine as a sitcom, but the only real reason it had to be a cartoon was because of the expense that would have gone into making all the Heaven and Hell special effects.  It had some funny moments, but otherwise it was a bit subdued.  "South Park" it certainly was not.

If anything, "GTDAB" was more respectful of religion than most shows even by default are.  Basically it posited a world where God and The Devil were real and were real characters, playing their Biblical roles, but well aware that it was the turn of the millennium and not the Bronze Age anymore.  Played by an avuncular James Garner, God was a bit wistful, perhaps more Jerry Garcia than vengeful demiurge, but loving and genial.  The Devil was less of an existential enemy to all that is good and right and more of an old friend of God's who finds himself disagreeing with him.  In their many scenes together they act more like an old bickering married couple than true antagonists, or perhaps a better comparison is the coyote and the sheepdog clocking in in the old Warner Brothers cartoons: they're aware of their jobs, but feel no special animus towards each other.

Bob Allman, as you can probably already guess from his surname, is the everyman who strangely becomes a sounding board for both God and The Devil.  The plot of the show, mostly a Maguffin except for ensuring that the main characters have a reason to interact, is that God is considering destroying the universe unless a human being can prove to him that they're worthy of existence, and having agreed upon Bob as our exemplar, The Devil constantly works to seduce him to the dark side in some way.

As I had predicted, the Bible Belt actively shunned "GTDAB" and the rest of America pretty much just shrugged.  Probably the show suffered from the problem of being neither fish nor fowl: religious types instantly thought it was mocking religion, and the sort of sarcastic types who might have enjoyed that found it entirely too prosaic and, if anything, pro-religious. 

Fortunately for posterity, those three episodes ABC aired in early 2000 were not the last we would ever see of the show, thanks to both the magic of DVDs and...you guessed it, my friends, the largesse of adult swim.  Overall, GTDAB is pretty good, though I couldn't tell you if it's survived the test of time, having not watched it in a solid five or six years.  But if you're looking for something for something that's pretty funny and mostly straightforward despite its pretensions to being groundbreaking, give it a shot.

Re-Animated #11: Mission Hill

I've talked a lot in this series about the importance of adult swim in modern adult animation, as well as the importance of "The Simpsons."  In today's entry, those two pre-eminent entities collide in an unusual and unexpected way.

For "Simpsons" die-hards, it's a genuinely accepted opinion that seasons 3-7 were when the show reached its apogee.  In retrospect, season 1 was weak as Hell, season 2 had a few highlights, but season 8 was when the show started to go off the rails.  Fans generally point to "Homer's Enemy" or "The Principal and the Pauper" in season 8 as when the show stopped being what it once was.  Of course, there are still incredible episodes in seasons 9 and 10, and vague flashes of brilliance ever since, but for simplicity's sake, let's just agree that seasons 3-7 were the show at its apogee.

One of the main reasons for that level of quality during that time period was the writing time of Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, who penned countless classic episodes before finally being appointed showrunners for seasons 7 and 8.  Oakley and Weinstein were "The Simpsons" at the time of the show's greatest success.

And then they decided they wanted to do something different.

One of the complaints that Oakley and Weinstein had about working on "The Simpsons" was that it was basically a show about kids and middle-aged adults, with no real ground in between.  Springfield was remarkably fleshed out with hundreds of supporting characters, but almost every single one of those characters fell into two categories: Bart and Lisa and the schoolyard or Marge and Homer and their friends and co-workers.

"The Simpsons" was also a suburban show.  Springfield, for all of its wild vacillating between being an apparent one-horse town and a major metropolis depending on the needs of the plot, was nonetheless always portrayed as suburban.

So Oakley and Weinstein wanted to write a show that was about teenagers and twenty-somethings, who in all of Springfield were basically represented by Otto and the squeaky-voiced teen.  They also wanted to do a show about living in the city at that formative age.  And thus was born the brilliant "Mission Hill."

"Mission Hill" was a brilliant season of television.  It was, in many ways (and for obvious reasons) the true spiritual successor to the greatest seasons of "The Simpsons."  The story focuses on two blue-haired brothers, Andy and Kevin French.

Andy is what we would today call a hipster: someone who is ultimately nothing but proud of being poor and hip, yet is deeply insecure even about his own coolness.  Kevin, meanwhile, is an unabashed nerd, and while he makes occasional protests that he is really just normal, is comfortable in his skin playing role-playing games and watching "Babylon Five."

The two brothers never got along growing up in the suburbs, and so Andy is happy to be rid of his dorky little brother when he moves to the Mission Hill district of the fictional Cosmopolis.  But when the elder Frenches decide to move to Wyoming - and Kevin insists on moving in with his brother instead - the sparks really begin to fly.

"Mission Hill" really made a go of being a show with two genuinely equal protagonists.  In Kevin-centric episodes, Andy could often take on an antagonistic role, and the reversal was true to some extent.  (Honestly, how much of an antagonist could an annoying younger brother be?)  And occasionally the episodes were dual-hatted, featuring both brothers sharing the spotlight, as in the episode when they fall in love with the same girl or the episode when an inexplicable news event turns the city into a latter-day "Dog Day Afternoon."

Overall, "Mission Hill" had all the elements for greatness: great characters, genuinely funny jokes, a killer cast, smart writing, and tons of room to breathe and grow.  It was also surprisingly well- realized.  The worldbuilding was phenomenal, even down to the importance of who drank what brand of beer.

But we can only guess about what "Mission Hill" would have evolved into, because it had the singular misfortune of being placed on The WB.  And, like "Home Movies" before it, The WB had precisely zero time or interest in promoting "Mission Hill."  And, like "Home Movies" before it, "Mission Hill" found new life on the early days of adult swim, which really should be viewed as something like a museum for all the detritus of late '90s attempts at adult animation.

So check out "Mission Hill."  It's available on DVD and I believe some adult swim streaming.  At only 13 episodes, it is redolent of lost opportunity, but what is there is brilliant, and deserves to be seen.  You won't regret it.

Re-Animated #10: Batman: the Animated Series

Up until now I've been using the "Re-Animated" series to build a cohesive story of adult animation from the debut of "The Simpsons" to the present day.  It hasn't been perfect, and if you've been following along you'll notice some holes in the story, some bigger than others.  It was always my intent, though, to finish that singular storyline in 2016 and then go back in later years to fill in some of the holes and maybe even stretch my legs a bit and cover some other, not-strictly-adult shows.

Today, though, I'm going to switch things up a little bit.  While perusing the internet a few days ago I came across the series bible for "Batman: the Animated Series."  It gave me a hankering to talk about "BTAS" on the blog, but instead of just a random post, it certainly seems to fit in the wheelhouse of "Re-Animated" so I'm adding it to that series.  So that's why this post will seem a bit out of order if you've been following along.

"BTAS" (isn't it a shame they didn't call it "Batman: Animated Television Series" or something considering the acronym?) is, in its own way, probably as important as "The Simpsons" to animation, though its influence is felt more in children's programming than adult (although, yes, it was very impactful on adult animation as well.)

I'll try to set the scene as briefly as a windbag like myself can.  The '80s saw a glut of children's cartoon programming based on toys.  Saturday mornings were basically about selling toys and cereal, and while there were exceptions, most shows were just shoddy, barely-concealed marketing ploys.  To put it bluntly, cartoons were crummy, and the general consensus in Hollywood was that kids were dumb and didn't give a shit and would watch anything put before them.

Now, before I get a lot of angry e-mails and comments from people my age, I want to point out that I made the caveat there were indeed good shows that came out of this muck.  No, I wasn't talking about whatever your favorite show that you're about to bring up is.  However, I will also recommend that using the amazing power of looking at things through not the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, you go on Netflix or Hulu and check out that show that you remember watching so fondly as an eight-year-old.  Come back and let me know how it is now that you're in your thirties.

The second thing you have to understand, and this is going to be the tougher frame of mind to put yourself into, is that superheroes weren't a thing.  Superman and Batman were the most popular superheroes in the world.  There had been a few Superman movies in the '70s, and Batman had finally been brought to the big screen in 1989 for a smash bit by Tim Burton, followed up with the sequel "Batman Returns" in 1992.  Outside of that, though, there was nothing.  I'll put it to you this way: nobody knew who Iron Man was.  They certainly weren't clamoring for his sixth movie.

So, based on the success of the Batman movies, Warner Brothers was essentially gambling that an adaptation of a popular movie would make for good crap programming for kids.  It wasn't a big gamble, considering the popularity of Batman, but bear in mind that we're talking about a time when superheroes weren't everywhere, kid's animation was crap, and adapting movies into animated series was commonplace.  All the ingredients were there for a forgettable hunk of junk a la the "Men in Black" cartoon series, the "Godzilla" cartoon series, or any of dozens of other examples.

So imagine how shocked everyone was when "BTAS" turned out to be good.  And not just good, but damn good.  Damn damn damn good.  "BTAS" had excellent writing, beautiful artwork, and incredible voice acting.  One thing that made it stand out from the bunch was that everyone just seemed to give a shit.  The people behind the scenes could have made "Bat Superhero-Themed Show Targeted at the Cereal-Buying Demographic #17" and probably met the criteria of what Warner Brothers had asked of them, but they didn't.  They made a show that was psychologically complex and beautifully elegant.  It was better than most of the adult shows made at that time.

As I implied above, I've gone back and watched some of the stuff I used to love as a kid, and, dear God, so much of it is literally unwatchable.  I can understand now why my parents didn't have the same verve for "Camp Candy" or "Captain N: The Game Master" that I did.  I have also gone back and re-watched "BTAS."  I will admit it seems less epic than it did when I was a kid.  I remember those 22 minutes seeming like sitting down for a summer blockbuster every day.  Divorced of commercials and the inexperience of youth, it seems more like any other half-hour television show.  Aside from that, though, the quality really stands up.

So, let's finally talk about what inspired me to write this post.  If you're a cartoon freak like me, you probably already devoured that show bible I linked to earlier in the post (and linked here again for your convenience.)  It's really not as long as it seems, by the way - a solid 75% of it is just animation cels.

What I found fascinating was all of the plot points that were in the bible that never made it into the show.  There was a lot of talk of Batman actively making Bruce Wayne look not just inept, but rather villainous.  He was to be the Martin Shrekli of Gotham, essentially, not an actively malicious person but one so greedy and ignorant that poor people would hate him.

As actually depicted in "BTAS," I always thought of Bruce (when he was "on") as more of an absent-minded professor than a greedy jerk.  I can certainly understand why those plans never made it into the show - it's not a great idea to undercut your hero, even if you consider his alter ego a distinct and manufactured person.

Also interesting was all the focus on Alfred being a trickster, delighting in making the Bruce Wayne alter ego look bad as well as faking Batman sightings in Gotham when Bruce Wayne is abroad and vice versa.  Alfred certainly had a dry sense of humor, but this is very much not the Alfred depicted in the show, who is overall a bit geekier than some of his more recent "edgy" depictions, but overall pretty level-headed and a down-to-earth foil for a character who's a billionaire and a superhero.

There are some villains and suggested plots that never got made (some with good reason) and others that, as outlined in the bible, were recognizably adapted into a different but similar episode of the series.  I was also surprised that Renee Montoya and Summer Gleeson were outlined in such detail in the bible.  I mean, I remember the characters, but it's funny how each of the characters kind of found their own level of importance in the show.  Summer Gleeson ended up being a barely-there talking head, while I gather the original intention was to focus on her attempts to unmask Batman in a non-villainous capacity.  It's not hard to see why that sounded like an interesting idea for the show, but it's also not hard to see why it never quite panned out.

So, anyway, that's my take on both "BTAS" and how it compared to its original conception.  Let me know your own thoughts in the comments below!

Re-Animated #9: Home Movies

In the late '90s UPN was in a similar position to Fox in the late '80s.  A new-ish network, it hadn't found its voice and didn't have a built-in audience.  From the '50s through, let's say, the '70s, the fact that a television network was broadcasting meant that some people were going to watch it.  By the '90s, cable was de rigeur and the last few Johnny-come-latelies to the broadcast scene were trying to figure out how to compete with the networks, who had monolithic audiences for their generic pap, and the cable stations, which could specialize and reach a core audience of fanatics.

I can't say exactly where "Home Movies" fit into UPN's plan.  It was never going to be a tentpole show.  It might have been a scrappy cult classic punching above its weight, a la "South Park."  Certainly by this time in history everyone had figured out that a clever animated show smart enough for adults but inoffensive enough for kids to watch could become a success.  "The Simpsons," "King of the Hill," and "Futurama" were already hits, and "South Park" was something kids weren't supposed to watch but did anyway.

"Home Movies" was an obvious attempt by UPN to tap into that market.  UPN brought Loren Bouchard, the executive producer of "Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist" which had run on Comedy Central, as well as H. Jon Benjamin, one of the stars of "Dr. Katz" in to make "Home Movies."  Presumably the main appeal of this creative team was that their shit was cheap, but amusing.

"Dr. Katz," which, the more I think about it, probably deserves its own entry in the Re-Animated series, but I'll have to get to that, utilized a rather unique premise for an animated show: it was improvised.  Essentially what it had consisted of was comedians coming in to sit on Dr. Katz's couch and give their standup routines.  A mild plot about Dr. Katz's family, including his son Ben (played by H. Jon Benjamin) served as essentially interstitials.  The whole script was basically improvised, then animated with the off-putting but extremely cheap "Squigglevision."

Squigglevision consisted of static images which appeared to suffer from palsy, giving the illusion of animation.  No one ever really moved, which was fine for a show about a therapist who sees comedians.

"Home Movies" used the same retroscripting process and the same Squigglevision (I hesitate to use the term) "technology.  In addition to H. Jon Benjamin, it brought in relative newcomer Brendon Small as a precocious eight-year-old filmmaker.  In the early episodes, the children made movies which were bookended by the family struggles of Brendon, Jason (Benjamin's essentially orphaned and maladjusted child character), and their friend Melissa, an overachiever with bad self esteem.

Unfortunately, movies are pretty much by definition an active art form, and while Squigglevision worked on "Dr. Katz" it seemed to be a detriment to "Home Movies."  The show was clever, but it was just damn ugly, and it never quite found an audience.  UPN cancelled it after airing five episodes.

Why, then, does "Home Movies" have its very own entry in the Re-Animated series instead of being rolled up into a post about weird failures and flukes of the '90s?   Well, my friends, you're about to hear a story which we're going to hear repeated, in generalities if not specifics, quite a bit throughout this series.

Remember last week's entry on "Futurama?"  Or two weeks ago's "Family Guy?"  Well, then, get ready to...not be surprised at all.  adult swim swooped in to save the day.  Really, "Home Movies" was the first show adult swim saved from the network ash heap, which is one of the reasons why writing this blog series is so difficult.  Where do you jump in?  When a show is at its prime or when it begins?  How much history do you need to dive into a show on its own merits?  Just writing this post I'm already sort of regretting not giving "Dr. Katz" its own entry, and writing "King of the Hill" made me feel like I should have done "Beavis and Butt-Head" first.

But such is the burden of all important historians talking about cartoons such as myself.  So, we shall proceed.

"Home Movies" was the first non-original show to air on adult swim.  In a way, its utter cheapness was its saving grace.  UPN didn't much give a shit about a show it had aired for less than two months in 1999 and had cost peanuts to make.  But adult swim was very much interested in a show that, if you could see past the ugliness of its design, was very clever and had a shitload of potential. 

Fortunately, between the era of "Dr. Katz" and "Home Movies" moving to adult swim, animation technology had moved by leaps and bounds.  Squigglevision had been a cheap method for making a show seem animated.  But by 2002, Flash animation was just as cheap as Squigglevision had been and you could have a product that was genuinely animated.

adult swim aired the eight UPN episodes of "Home Movies" and I suspect if that had been all they had it never would have caught on.  But after that, it began airing original, Flash-animated episodes.  No longer headache-inducingly painful to watch, the scrappy little gem that was "Home Movies" finally had a chance to shine.

H. Jon Benjamin - who we'll learn much, much more about in coming installments - is something of an improvisational and voice acting genius.  Originally "Home Movies" was supposed to focus on the kids and their attempts to build a surrogate family out of their various broken homes.  In the very first episode of the series, Benjamin voiced a character who I have always believed was meant to be a one-off, or at a minimum a background character, the churlish alcoholic soccer coach John McGuirk.  McGuirk briefly dated Brendon's mother and caused much chaos in Brendon's life.

Luckily, the show's creators realized what they had in McGuirk: a character even more juvenile than the eight-year-olds who meant well but could never quite get his shit together enough to be a good father figure for Brendon.  Instead, McGuirk stood out as a ridiculously bad male influence in Brendon's life: an indebted, misanthropic ex-con with a terrible job, a wreck of a life, and no prospects.  But, damn it, McGuirk was there!  He was always there for Brendon and the kids, and in a perverse way that made him one of the most loveable characters in television history.  The Platonic ideal of a deadbeat, and yet, he was always present in his surrogate son's life, McGuirk stood in stark contrast to Brendon's actual father, a lawyer with money, a good job, all the requisite life skills to be a decent parent, and yet he was a more-or-less complete absentee from his son's life. 

Andrew Small (played by a pre-gigantic blowup Louis C.K.) wasn't a terrible father, at least when he was around.  He and his son bonded over some pretty generic commonalities, like a shared love of pizza and hatred of golf.  But mostly it was blood that kept them tentatively in one another's lives, for a time at least, and by the end of the series, even if it's never explicitly stated, Brendon learns that family is what you make of it.  He stops pining for the father who, even when well-intentioned, just kind of isn't very good at parenting, and starts accepting the terrible, terrible paternal influence who is always, always there for him.

At its heart, "Home Movies" is all about family.  It's about broken children trying to come together as siblings.  It's about broken adults trying to figure out how to raise those kids.  And everyone, as my wife always enjoyed pointing out, was terribly miserable.  Their lives, making movies, playing soccer, and everything else, was just about distracting themselves from how miserable they all were.  The show had a raw, exposed heart and absolutely dripped with pathos.  And yet...it was never on the nose with what it was doing.  It never battered you over the head with its themes.  If anything, the themes of family were so subtle that it's only in writing about it now, in the wake of four seasons of damn hilarious television, that I can really analyze what the "Home Movies" people were doing.  You laughed out loud at the show because of the hilarious improve.  But you loved every single one of those damn, miserable people trying to scrabble to make it in this world.  It just was never that far off from how you feel about you own life.

Re-Animated #8: Futurama

I once read a biography of St. Francis of Assisi that tried to place the reader in the right context.  "St. Francis," it said (or words to this effect), "Lived a thousand years ago in medieval Europe, which seems to us like he was closer to the time of Christ.  But bear in mind that the church was already a thousand years old by then.  As old as medieval Europe seems to us is as old as the time of Christ must have seemed to Francis."

That always struck me because we do tend to think of things as either "old" or "recent" rather than really contextualizing them.  It is perhaps why we find historical fiction so perpetually fascinating: the constant push-pull of "look how much they're just like us" vs. "look how much they're totally different from us."

Consider now, if you will, the context of the world in the long, long ago of 1999.  "The Simpsons" was already ten years old - far older than any other adult cartoon.  It must have seemed at the time as though "The Simpsons" had been on forever.  Now, of course, we're even further from "The Simpsons" of 1999 than 1999 was from 1989.

And Matt Groening, the creator of "The Simpsons," it seemed, was restless.  Or, at least, wanted more.   He went to his Fox overlords with an idea for a new show, a funny little sci-fi focused show taking place a thousand years into the future.  Millennium fever was in full swing, no one quite knew if the Y2K bug was going to destroy us all, and at a minimum the year 2000 sounded amazeballs.  Taking a look at a perceived year 3000 was a brilliant way to send up all the millennial hysteria.

And Fox naturally said, "Yes, of course" to their golden goose.  With conditions. 

Ten years had gone by since "The Simpsons" had put Fox on the map.  And the scrappy young network of the '80s had evolved into a corporatocracy.  Creators didn't get to just put shows on the air.  Executive oversight was de rigeur. 

"This is how we do things now," Fox said.

"Oh," Groening replied, "Well, the old way is the only way I make cartoons."

And Groening packed up his pitch and left.  Which left the executives fumbling.  "The Simpsons" was still a hit.  "King of the Hill" was doing surprisingly well.  Sunday night seemed to be turning into a place where adult animation could not only survive, but thrive (more on that in future installments, my dear friends.)  Groening's proposal - which you've probably guessed by now is what would turn into "Futurama" - was probably going to succeed on the strength of his reputation alone.

So, the Fox executives recanted and allowed Groening to do things his way.  Which turned out to be one of the wackiest, nerdiest, weirdest blends of highly sophisticated math/science and lowbrow slapstick imaginable.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

Deliberately, aggressively nerdy, "Futurama" was never going to be for everyone.  The viewer surrogate (er...to a certain extent) and point of entry is everyman Phillip J. Fry, a down-on-his-luck pizza delivery boy who finds himself single, underemployed, unloved, and with nothing going for him on the dawn of the new millennium. 

Adding insult to injury, a prank call finds him celebrating the new year in an empty cryogenics lab with a pizza he'll have to pay for.  Bob's your uncle, and a thousand years later he wakes up, the last relic of the Stupid Ages.  After Fry meets his new robot best friend, Bender Bending Rodriguez, and on-again/off-again cycloptic love interest Turanga Leela, he ends up working for his dottering old great-great-grand nephew Professor Farnsworth and his delivery crew: Amy Wong (the richest girl on Mars), Dr. John Zoidberg (a squid-like alien with a questionable knowledge of human anatomy), and Hermes Conrad (a Rastafarian accountant.)

One of the earliest criticisms leveled against "Futurama" was that it lacked heart.  Essentially a workplace comedy about robots and aliens, with only one (relatively) grounded character it played more as a pastiche of "Star Trek," "Star Wars," "Logan's Run" and any other number of sci-fi forebears.  Without the family that formed the core of "The Simpsons" what was there to love?

"Futurama" quickly and ruthlessly eviscerated those critics with a handful of intensely emotional episodes, including one where Leela discovers the truth about her parents and all-time series standout "Jurassic Bark" about Fry's relationship with a stray dog.  "Jurassic Bark" has the power, nearly 15 years later, to still reduce my wife and I to quivering tears - and we're not dog people.

In its years on the air, Futurama had peaks and valleys, some execrable (or, perhaps worse, forgettable) but for my money there is perhaps no better single half hour of television than "Roswell That Ends Well."  What "The Simpsons" accomplished with "Last Exit To Springfield" - a seemingly flawless episode where every single joke landed and the story was still second-to-none - "Futurama" achieved with "Roswell."

I could go on and on about the vagaries of "Futurama's" quality, but it's worth noting that much of that is due to its many, many incarnations.  "Futurama" originally aired on Fox from 1999 to 2003, alongside "King of the Hill," "Family Guy," and its forebear "The Simpsons."  Then, like "Family Guy," it found new life on adult swim.

As we discussed last week, "Family Guy," via the vehicle of adult swim, opened the door for the resurrection of beloved series which had found new life (and new advertising revenue) on cable.  And "Futurama" followed in "Family Guy's" footsteps...so to speak.

Rather than a full resurrection, "Futurama" was granted new life as a series of four direct-to-DVD movies in 2008 and on.  Changing the format from a half-hour series to a full-length movie came with mixed results.  Sometimes what was a tolerable level of silliness for a half hour became unbearable for two.  Sometimes the chance to tell a longer story, with more time for characterization and foreshadowing, paid off.
Whatever the case, Comedy Central decided when adult swim's contract with "Futurama" was up to pick up all of the old Fox episodes plus the movies - which would then be sliced and diced into half-hour segments for air.  Then, in 2010, Comedy Central began airing new seasons of "Futurama" as a television show - effectively resurrecting it a second time - before cancelling it again in 2013 (for good?)

Oh, and then in 2014 "The Simpsons" aired "Simpsorama," a "Futurama"/"Simpsons" crossover.

Perhaps befitting a show so focused on time travel, "Futurama" has had effectively six (if not more) series finales.  "Bender Should Not Be Allowed on TV" was the original proposed series finale for Fox, which posited a meta-story where Bender gets a television show and then is cancelled for being inappropriate.  The story was considered too acerbic for a series finale, so "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings," a sweeter, more open-ended story was used as the original finale instead.

During its first resurrection as a series of movies ("Season 5") "Into the Wild Green Yonder" was meant to serve as a finale, where the entire crew escapes to some far off universe, allowing for possible future adventures but also to serve as an ending.  Then, when resurrected a second time, "Overclockwise" was originally intended to be the finale, but, again, was considered unsuitable, and "Meanwhile" served as the show's coda...at least, until "Simpsorama."

I doubt I'll believe that "Futurama" is over until everyone who worked on it is dead and buried.  But, then again, Channukah Zombie has been known to work miracles...

Re-Animated #7: Family Guy

Seth McFarlane today is a bit like Jay Leno was in his prime: ubiquitous, obviously hugely popular, and absolutely scoffed at and despised by the chattering classes.  Certainly, McFarlane has become elevated in the last two decades into that rare class of creators like Quentin Tarantino who are just as recognizable on camera as off, something scum-dwelling writers like myself no doubt all aspire to. 

I don't know that it's fair to say that McFarlane sold out or even bought his own hype.  If anything, I think he is genuinely delighted to be an entertainer, with his love of old-fashioned musicals and vaudeville, and a huge grin perpetually plastered to his face that doesn't seem to have an ounce of guile oiling it.  His Achilles' heel is, in my estimation, the same as another famous creative, Charles Schulz, who it was said found it utterly impossible to say "No" to anyone who offered him a tie-in, endorsement, or spin-off of any type.

But McFarlane's status as a titan of animation is a later development that we'll be addressing in quite a few future "Re-Animated" installments.  In the late '90s, he was just a cartoonist who had done a few one-offs about a man and his talking dog for Cartoon Network.  That show, " & ," evolved considerably into "Family Guy," which debuted on Fox after the Super Bowl in 1999.  "Family Guy" indelibly changed the face of adult cartoons - whether for good or for ill, we'll take a look at a bit now.

At the time of its premiere, and still to this day, "Family Guy" was largely derided as a "Simpsons" clone.  That's partly par for the course, as basically any adult animated series is going to be compared to "The Simpsons," but in the case of "Family Guy" there were also some major cosmetic similarities.  The main character, Peter, is a big fat dummy, a terrible father and husband, who can sometimes be goaded into showing some heart.  There are three kids: a son, a daughter, and a baby.  And Lois, the mother and wife, is longsuffering, a dutiful housewife whose common sense makes her not much more than a stick-in-the-mud.

Beyond that, though, "Family Guy" and "The Simpsons" are so different in tone they might as well come from different planets.  "The Simpsons" was witty, sometimes with jokes only the intelligentsia could understand, and, at its best, always had genuine heart and sympathy for its characters.  "Family Guy" was (and is) a joke machine, with all the advantages and drawbacks that implies.  Possessed of an acerbic, nihilistic sensibility, it also gleefully crawled in the gutter, at times even more so than "South Park," whose creators have made no secret of their disdain for their erstwhile peer.

"Family Guy" is crass, almost constantly racist, sexist, homophobic, and demonstrates just about every kind of un-PC attitude imaginable.  Its target demographic (as the show is often quick to point out) are mindless frat thugs.  Many "Family Guy" episodes have been pulled from the air or even shelved due to content, and its creators are open about their glee in pushing every button imaginable.

Did that last paragraph seem unkind?  Perhaps it was, but it's also true.  Which is not to say that I dislike "Family Guy," although I liked it a lot better in its early years.  The flip side of it being a joke machine was that the show was just goddamned laugh-out-loud hilarious.  If I could boil down "Family Guy's" essence to a single thesis it would be something like, "Anything, as long as it's funny."

This led to the show's signature device, cutaways, often to outlandish situations that made no sense in the context of the episode, but were funny for a one-liner.  The cutaways are just the tip of the iceberg, though.  "Family Guy" has never ceased to be a laboratory for comedy, experimenting with every imaginable variation of jokes and entertainment.  They routinely break the fourth wall, cut into the animated show with live-action clips, defy the laws of science and nature even within the world, all in pursuit of the laugh.  There's something pure and admirable about that.  And for a solid three years, "Family Guy" was putting out some of the funniest shit on television.

Then it got cancelled.  In 2002, ratings were not up to snuff for Fox to continue the series.  If that was the end of the story, this blog might be far more laudatory, a lament for a show cut down in its prime but remembered fondly by those of a certain age, like "The Critic" or "Duckman."

But the saga of "Family Guy" is far from over...

We'll be delving into this more (much more) in the coming weeks, but in 2001, Cartoon Network began executing a plan for a late-night block of comedy for stoners and college students called adult swim.  (Yes, I know, it's stylized with brackets, but I can't use brackets on my blog thanks to the html Nazis.)  adult swim had something of a surprise success by repurposing old Hanna-Barbera cartoons which Cartoon Network owned the rights to as absurd, post-modernist shows. 

The block was a success, but adult swim just didn't have enough programming, so they quickly began picking up other failed adult-oriented cartoons from other networks - most of which we'll be covering in future installments - to keep their audiences amused.  They purchased "Family Guy" for a song, and it instantly became the most popular show on adult swim and turned the weird, experimental sub-channel into a powerhouse practically overnight.

Re-runs of "Family Guy" in the middle of the night were getting better ratings than some network shows.  And the "Family Guy" renaissance on adult swim led to huge DVD sales.  It seemed that there had always been an audience for the show, it had just never discovered it at 8:30 pm on Fox.

And so, for the first time in television history, a cancelled show...was uncancelled.

(If you know of an earlier example, please let me know in the comments.  I know, at a minimum, it was an extraordinarily unusual occurrence at the time.)

Saying this today almost seems like no big deal.  Between Netflix, network jumps, crowdfunding, and all the powers of fandom on the internet, series being saved from oblivion seems to happen all the time.  "Arrested Development" came back.  So did "Community."  "Jericho" got an abbreviated extra season.  "The Mindy Project."  I could keep going.

But in the dark days, the long long ago, of 2005, networks were pretty much in charge and did whatever the hell they wanted and never resurrected a cancelled show.  "Family Guy" opened up those floodgates.  At the time, demanding that a show be brought back on the air was about as likely as an incompetent, racist reality show host being nominated by a major political party for president.

For a triumphant year or two, "Family Guy" came back.  And it ushered in that grand era of McFarlane ubiquity in animation I alluded to at the beginning of this post.  Of course, all good things and all that.  "Family Guy's" weak points began to show, and it wasn't much longer before a straw broke the camel's back, and more or less everyone agreed that "Family Guy" had become a soulless, clattering, misanthropic vehicle for jokes without a hint of a story to be found.  Of course, "Family Guy" had always been that way, but now the sheen's worn off, a bevy of imitators have surpassed or at a minimum diluted the brand of the original.

"Family Guy" joking about "prom night dumpster babies" was pretty edgy in 2005.  But now when I watch a blistering "Rick and Morty" dialogue about when and how it's okay to use the word "retarded," I can't help but think that the zeitgeist has passed "Family Guy" behind.  And maybe that's okay.  I'll keep watching it.  But, then, in case you couldn't tell from this series, I can't not watch cartoons.

Re-Animated #6: South Park

It's almost as strange to write now about the impact "South Park" had on the cultural landscape in 1997 as it was to write about the impact "The Simpsons" had in 1989.  Both shows are still on the air.  Both shows have had ebbs and flows, not to mention a variety of renaissances, which only an elder statesman of a television show can have.  Both are also intensely over the hill, targeted towards people my age who grew up on it, and no longer a part of the zeitgeist.  They merely...exist, trudging on, making money, running on all-but-used-up nostalgia.

Interestingly, "South Park" just had another supposed renaissance this past year, in its 19th (!) season, when longtime viewers seemed to unanimously agree that the formerly shattered, continuity-light if not anti-continuity show had benefited from an overarching seasonal plot, as well as finally becoming part of the cultural conversation again.  So it's probably not fair to say that "South Park" is a zombie show in quite the same way "The Simpsons" is, but when the headlines read essentially "Surprisingly, 'South Park' Still Capable of Satire" you know that they're not quite the titans they once were.

Ah, but to have been there in 1997 when the show first started!  That was truly a strange and exciting time.  "South Park" was Comedy Central's first true killer app.  "The Daily Show" was two years off, "The Colbert Report" was eight, and, to be quite frank, Comedy Central was a joke, and not in the sense that it wanted to be.

In 1997 Comedy Central was one of hundreds of cable channels, and the modern infatuation with finding a single prestige show and building your station around that had not yet really begun.  "The Sopranos" hadn't even started yet, for Christ's sake.  Cable channels mostly ran old movies and filler, and tried to carve niches for themselves.  Comedy Central at the time was running any movie that could remotely be called funny, hours of old standup from the '80s, and their best-rated shows were imported Britcoms like "Absolutely Fabulous" and "French and Saunders."  Their rare forays into original programming, like "Dr. Katz" were charming but it would be a kindness to say they had anything but niche appeal.

We were a Comedy Central house, though.  My sister loved the channel, and as a result we watched it a ton.  But when "South Park" appeared on the scene in 1997, suddenly everyone was watching it, not to mention gabbing about it on the playground.  (I wouldn't say water cooler - I'm sure adults watched it, but probably weren't admitting it in the workplace.)

"South Park" began life - improbably enough - as a viral video, long, long before the term was coined.  Today I could take a video of myself writing this stupid blogpost, upload it to YouTube in the space of, eh, a minute or two, share it on Facebook a minute after that and (if the fates align) it could go viral later that day.  Rewind to 2005, that was the advent of YouTube, the first real platform for short videos.  Before that, there was Napster and file-sharing, which, even with Napster, was a painfully slow process and even so, with the exception of music videos and sketch comedy, people weren't sharing short videos, they were looking for movies and TV shows.  Rewind to the early '90s, and event nascent file-sharing wasn't really an option.  Downloading a single photograph from a website was a painfully slow process.

In the early '90s "America's Funniest Home Videos" was about the only platform for what we would call YouTube poop today, and that shit was carefully culled for a family audience.  When two young Colorado boys, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, made a dirty, blasphemous video of Frosty the Snowman terrorizing children and fighting Jesus Christ with stop-motion construction paper in 1992, the distribution methods of the time ensured that it was basically something fun for their friends and college classmates to watch - a jumped-up home movie, essentially.

But good art will out (said the all-but-unknown author wistfully.)  In 1995 Brian Graden, a Fox executive, commissioned a second film - "Jesus vs. Santa" - as a Christmas card for his friends.  Graden showed the video to eighty friends.  The video was bootlegged with traditional VHS tapes and even bit-by-painstaking-bit on the then-nascent internet.  And thus was born the first modern viral video.

The success of "The Spirit of Christmas" (as the combined videos became known) led to Comedy Central acquiring "South Park."  And "South Park" was an instant smash-success.  The adventures of four foul-mouthed children getting into wacky, sci-fi hijinks every week led to huge ratings for Comedy Central, which sparked a moral panic (as seemed to be the case with just about every god-damned thing in the '90s) which probably just led to higher ratings.  In two years' time, "South Park" was big enough to justify making the leap to the big screen.  In the early days it was a true phenomenon.

"South Park's" success was a game-changer in a lot of ways.  For Comedy Central, it was the beginning of their ascendance into a pop culture megalith that only now is beginning to wane.  People tuned in to see "South Park" but they gradually began to stay for the rest of it, the same way my sister and I had.  And soon enough "The Man Show," "Win Ben Stein's Money" and other early remoras coasted along in "South Park's" wake, paving the way for later successes like "The Daily Show."

"South Park" may seem long-in-the-tooth now, but a reason for that is that it inspired a rash of ostensibly adult cartoons with a sophomoric, even juvenile sensibility, regardless of how sharp or intelligent the writing was.  Despite Barbara Bush's early pearl-clutching, "The Simpsons" was always a family show.  Though goofy, "The Critic" was never something you couldn't show on ABC in primetime after "Home Improvement."  And even Pat Boone would probably be fine with the muted, character-based humor of "King of the Hill."

"South Park," though was scatological, sexual, and asocial.  In the wasteland of basic cable it could afford to be, because the thought was no one was watching so cable channels could be more experimental.  Except then people started watching.  And like "The Simpsons" before it, "South Park" would inspire a slew of imitations and loving recreations.  Its success also led to more cultural cachet for its creators, who would go on to create "Team America: World Police" and "The Book of Mormon" to major critical and financial success.  But, interestingly enough, though they could have moved on many times, they've never stopped making "South Park."  There's something to be said for first loves, I suppose.