Well, what the hell, as long as we’ve moved on to discuss newer comedy animation in general, I’ll chime in.
Now I’ll bethe first to admit that newer comedy does little for me, especially that used in animated series. This goes all the way back to finding Ren & Stimpy often hilarious but frequently, unecessarily tedious & nasty, rather than the towering work of genius. (I prefer the New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and certain episodes of Freakazoid. I have an odd fondness for the old Ed Grimley cartoon as well, if not the live-action character.)
Space Ghost Coast to Coast. The maker’s of this obviously really enjoyed employing all the old animation sequences from the oh-so-serious original Space Ghost series in the service of pure idiocy, but a little of that went a long way for me. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. They had quite a moment when once, instead of an episode, they simply put a camera in the meeting room for a final script read.
The even weirder Cartoon Planet didn’t really do it for me, but I still laugh at this line:
Space Ghost: “<reading viewer e-mail>I love your show! It looks like it costs you about fifteen cents to produce!</reading> Missed by a nickel, Sport!”
So the Brak show was never even on my radar.
ATHF. I know I’ve seen at least a couple of episodes, but they are not coming to mind. It’s like a brief bout with gas: mildly discomforting, but over soon enough, and then forgotten.
Sealab 2021 I barely remember the series this is parodying, but the few episodes I’ve seen have been OK. Nothing to write home about.
The Simpsons has been coasting for years now. Someone needs to do a study on our need to keep thinking certain comedies are funny. For instance, when Seinfeld ended and Entertainment Weekly did a critical retrospective of the entire series. They found the last season, which they and their readers had seemed to regard as the strongest ever, hardly had an episode that rated above a “C”, much to their stated surprise. Once things make us laugh really hard, we tend to give them an extensive free ride that boggles the imagination. How else can you explain SNL having a 30th season?
Futurama was just never very good. It took me a while to figure out what it is. The Simpsons’ voice cast deserves every penny they can squeeze out of Fox, because lord knows everyone else working on the series has stopped trying. Cartoons are made or broken on sound quality. The animation in Futurama was light years ahead of the Simpsons, but which one is still on? How many times have we enjoyed an exchange between Mr. Burns and Smithers, particularly in the area of comic timing? Then add to that the fact that it’s Harry Shearer talking to himself, and that the lines were recorded at different times, and you realize you are witness to genius. Billy West, who is a great voice man and used to do fantastic stuff on radio in Boston before John Kricfalusi came calling, had to do similar work, and simply can’t pull it off to the same degree. It’s not just a question of the timing of the sound editing, but of being able to make the characters sound like they are responding to what the other just said. Shearer can do it, West could not, and the pace and tone of the show suffered in subtle ways for it.
Similar problems plague Family Guy. Most people’s favorite characters are Stewie and the dog, and it’s no accident that those are the two best voices on the show as well. The voice chosen for Peter is simply not well-suited to putting over the situations that are in the script, IMO. Others’ mileage obviously varies. Plus the whole cast looks like they put Wait Til Your Father Gets Home in a funhouse mirror. The whole thing comes off like a bunch of people not trying very hard.
