DingDingDingDing! We have a winner! I can still hear that goose laughing…That was the weirdest cartoon. Well, with exception of some of the old Betty Boop stuff. Now them’s cartoons! DZ, missed the SCTV bit, but I’ll never get that stupid theme song outta my head. It was that bad.
Re: Beanie & Cecil. IIRC, it was a ‘live’ puppet show first, then Bob Clampitt just animated the puppets. That’s why you never saw Cecil’s ass. Bob’s hand was up it (metaphorically speaking).
And Cal, re CR: I guess it was the bad animation that threw me. I mean, most of the time there wasn’t even a background ferchrissakes! [Elvis] Flippy, man. Real flippy.[/Elvis]
Yes, it was AC/DC (hangs head in shame). Note to self - don’t post late. Check.
poohpah, I believe you’re thinking of ‘Deputy Dawg’. It was a racoon that said, “it’s possible, it’s possible…”. There was a possum and a gopher named…ready…Vincent van Gopher. Hooo - Weeee!
I highly recommend Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, however. They took the cheesy cartoon characters and remade them into a campy show that only a GenX-er could love. Ditto with Sealab 2021 with Erik Estrada!
Good lord yes, both these shows have had me in stitches. Birdman has been on a lot less but man o man, those shows are priceless
Some gems from the show:
Apache Chief decided to sue a coffee place after he spilled hot coffee on himself and cannot ‘grow’ anymore. Loads of subtle references to Apaches growing power “Well looks like chief got his teepee back”
The Dr Quest/ Race Bannon episode is destined to be a classic.
Sealab 2021 just absolutely rips the entire adventure genre that HB loved to use during the 60’s/70’s/80’s and turns it on its ear. Every episode has been a goldmine of blantent and not so blantent digs and the characters are nuts! And I agree Erik Estrada is the shit!
Klasky-Csupo is just Hanna Barbera by another name <sigh>.
At least ADULT animation doesn’t suffer from this so much. At least The Simpsons/Futurama, King Of The Hill, South Park and Family Guy don’t look like obvious ripoffs of one another.
(repeats to self: ‘preview is my friend, preview is my friend, preview is my friend …’)
That list.
Any post-John K R&S (I think we’ve made this clear)
Most early 80’s Hanna Barbera (e.g. Gary Coleman Show, Pac Man, Donkey Kong etc)
Sonic The Hedgehog
Crocadoo (really badly animated Australian cartoon c. 1998)
Secret Squirrel (the remake they show on Cartoon Network - the original kicked ass!)
The Powerpuff Girls (I just want to use them for Soccer practice)
Anything with the suffix of ‘mon’.
Any Klasky-Csupo/Nickelodeon Sausage Machine stuff (Hey Arnold, AAhh Real Monsters etc). If you look closely, they all have the same shaped heads! It’s all just Rugrats with different skins. Which would be ok if the cartoons were ok, but they’re complete shite.)
Well, we will have quite an extensive list from 'ol bouv, we’ll start with older cartoons (pre-90’s):
Flintstones
Jetsons
Tom and Jerry
Any Scooby Do with Scrappy, and the movies
Smurfs
Snorks
Harvey caroons
Mighty Mouse
Underdog
Popeye
Super-Friends
The Chipmunks
The newer cartoons I hate:
Dragonball Z
[insert thing here]-mon
Ranma 1/2
Transformers: Robots in Disguise (Why, God, why?)
A lot of other anime I don’t know the name of (it’s not all bad, though, I do enjoy Robotech and Akira)
The newer Rugrats (the pre-movie ones were good (most of them))
Johnny Bravo
Courage the Dog
Powerpuff Girls
Well, I’ll stop now, I’m starting to get sick to my stomach thinking about all these horrible pieces of animation.
It’s already been mentioned, but when I saw the title, my first thought was Captain Planet. It’s nut-bustingly bad. Bad writing, bad plots, bad characters, bad animation, bad bad bad bad bad. Not to mention being preachy enough for…well, a metaphor escapes me. Let’s just point out that Whoopi Goldberg voiced the Mother Earth character and leave it at that, OK?
I think I’ve seen this- in college we would sometimes see a cartoon about a Jimmy Durante cat that would go into books. He would punctuate his speech with peppy (translation: lame) little tapdances at various moments. We would always make jokes about him going into a Harlan Ellison anthology. “Tippity tappity flippity… floppity… flehhhhhh… I have no feet, and I must tapdance.”
And I must second the vote for the 60’s H/B Tom and Jerry, especially when Tom and Jerry spoke (bad enough) and were voiced by Paul Lynde (even worse.) Not the absolute worst of all time, but very close.
I must also mention “Digimon.” Not because it’s bad, but because it’s so very… intense. It’s a transparent Pokemon rip-off, but one with fairly sophisticated villains which are light-years beyond the “I LIKE being bad!” of Skeletor et al. And the cartoon is very nightmarish, the cartoon that ten or so years from now will have college students saying, “Man, do you remember Digimon? How the hell did they allow that on TV?” The only episode I’ve seen is a 2-hour season finale in which the uber-badguy captured the good guys and picked up a little My Pretty Pony kind of creature, but she was a mummy My Pretty Pony. The bad guy was telepathic, and told her to think of her worst nightmare so that he could make it come true. The Mummy Pretty Pony, of course, couldn’t keep herself from thinking of her worst fear.
Add to this the fact that people actually die in Digimon, and even die on deliberate suicide missions which they know they cannot survive, and it makes for a very different experience than, say, He-Man. (For that matter, I think the Pony’s father died in the course of her encounter with the uber-badguy.)
I always hated ‘Captain Planet’ but because I had little brothers who were better whiners, I watched it alot. I always felt bad for the kid who got the ‘heart’ ring. What a rip off. The other Planeteers got cool things like ‘fire’ and ‘water’ and ‘wind’ and he got stuck with ‘heart?’ What did it even do?
Really. It softened your heart so you’d succumb to the planeteers requests. In one episode that I saw Matee (I think that was the kid) used it to make this business man give a beggar spare change. He also used it once to invest a statue with the ability to inspire people.
Curse you, Torgo. Curse you all to hell. I went to great lengths to describe what a horrible effect even the mention of those cartoons have on me, and then you have to go and bring them up again. I hope everyone understands that we are not to speak of the 60’s Tom & Jerry cartoons on these boards again.
(Actually, I was a little confused, since as soon as I started complaining about the cartoons I kept thinking “DICKY MO!” to myself, and I usually use the handle “Torgo” in every other message board. I was wondering if I had been sleep-posting or something…)
See, now that’s just wrong. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you just haven’t seen enough of them, because The Powerpuff Girls is easily the best animated series made in the past 20 years.
folks remember, this isn’t great drama or comedy. its 30 minutes every saturday morning on a budget that doesn’t include a writer. so think as a child. yes Tom Slick was good. so was the Wacky Racers. but Bennie and Cecil . no.
Fist.of.death…
OK, folks, I can understand not quite finding them one’s cuppa - but imho Courage the Cowardly Dog and Sheep in the Big City are two of the most interesting shows on television. Courage takes some getting used to stylistically - I’ve come to love it, especially the use of photographs as background ([sub]there’s, like, a real, animation-y word for this that I can’t remember[/sub]), that said, it’s definitely not conventionally pretty. But the writing! Brilliant. And sometimes, unbelievably touching - such as an almost wordless episode wherein Courage befriends a bell-playing hunchback, begging door to door.
Sheep owes enormous debts to Bullwinkle, not only visually, but in its terrific wordplay and self-awareness (which thus far has managed not to collapse into smarminess a la Tiny Toons).
Perhaps what you don’t like is that both of these 'toons are pretty nonlinear - which I happen to like, but again it takes some getting used to. Things happen without much explanation and often without much resolution. But that’s life, most of the time…
I also have some affection for Johnny Bravo - I actually think Carl added much more than detracted. The show’s continued on for too long, but that’s true of most television.
Powerpuff Girls - and especially Buttercup - rules.
Now, for the truly bad - I second Captain Planet, its combination of the schlockiest of animation with he toothgrindingest of inane political correctness truly qualifies it as sui generis. I mean, it’s one thing to make a numbingly bad cartoon - but to make a numbingly bad caroon and think you’re doing the world a tremendous favor by doing so is so over the top that not even Caspar the Friendly Ghost can come close.
BTW, anyone else hate Woody Woodpecker? I mean, it must’ve been really bad to inspire a 9-year-old to turn off the TV when he came on.
Re “Sheep ITBC” I have to disagree. I appreciate clever cartoons and a heaping helping of interesting asides and some irony but “sheep in the big city” is mind achingly bad. The idiotic plotlines, horrid animation and occasional forced attempts to be clever can’t save this steaming pile of well… anti-goodness. This POS can’t hold a candle to Bullwinkle.
There was one about a bunch of wacky characters who raced against each other, including Dastardly and his Dog Muttly (the villians and the only remotely redeeming feature.)
Anyway, it was a cartoon about the superhero team of Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson, and Wayne Gretsky. MJ was the leader, Jackson was the mindless muscle (Bo knows… umm… BO SMASH!), and Gretsky was an… airhead? Was the show racist against Canadians or something?
I’m not quite sure what the point of the show was, other than another way for the main characters’ real-life counterparts to land another fatass check. And for not really doing that much at all. The real Jackson and Gretsky spoke about two or three lines of dialogue before ever show and MJ just finished them off with the only line he ever spoke on the show, “Don’t worry. Prostars are on the way,” using the same acting technique that he used in “Space Jam” (“All I really have to do is show up and read this… script… thing, and KA-CHING!”)
This actually reminds me of another horrible cartoon starring MacCuly-- MaCaly-- Ma-- the fucked up kid from “Home Alone.” The show was called “Wish Kid,” but as it stands, it’s late and I don’t have the energy or the time to go into that one. If anyone else can remember it (psh! yeah, sure) feel free to pick up where I left off.
Well, it was one of three shows:
Laf-A-Lympics (which was AWESOME, it had many more events than racing, though)
Wacky Races (you are probably thinking of this, and yesm I hated it)
Or, Space Races (like wacky races, but in space. And the main good guy TURNED INTO the main bad guy by pushing a button on his dashboard. It was actually very clever.)
I agree 100%. (We’re not penalized for going off-topic in Cafe Society, right?) “Sheep in the Big City” has the feel of somebody who thought that if the asides and “third-wall” stuff in Jay Ward cartoons were funny, then doing the same thing 100 times will be 100 times as funny. Instead, of course, it just comes across as being cringingly unfunny. I would give it points for being a cartoon with a non-traditional (i.e. non-Disney, non-Hanna Barbera, non-WB, non-Ruby Spears, etc.) art style, but then the art style is just not appealing, IMO – there are plenty of other examples of cartoons with simplified, non-traditional character design that are still appealing, like the “Powerpuff Girls” and “Time Squad.”
