What Are You Watching?

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

The thing about Xanatos that worked, though, is that while he was always a step ahead of the Gargoyles in his scheming, he was also portrayed as a character first and a villain second. He did end up losing sometimes due to his own personal character flaws, as well as sometimes giving into his own compassion and good-natured humanity which he clearly possessed. To me, the end the original run of the show is the end of the series, and I don't personally consider The Goliath Chronicles or the comics (which I know that Weisman had a hand in the latter) as part of Gargoyles' overall story when I think of the series. So, as far as I'm concerned, Xanatos' character arc concluded with him offering a helping hand to the Gargoyles, abandoning the person he used to be given his new perspective on life. That to me just makes him an interesting character and that's why it actually works when he one-ups the heroes. On the one hand, he may be what you think of as your typical mustache-twirling villain, but on the other hand the actual humanity present in his character keeps him from feeling too corny in that regard.

With the Light, I fully agree with you, and I believe I even stated as much several years ago back when the show was first airing. I found it groan-worthy how almost everything involving that organization ended with a cringe-inducing "all according to plan" villain moment. It didn't make them seem more threatening, it just made them seem more goofy and more like what you'd expect from a stereotypical 80's Saturday morning cartoon made to shamelessly sell toys.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Vaguely related, but I remember that time Weisman made Neil Gaiman mad because he mischaracterized Death in a Captain Atom comic he was writing. And since YJ seemingly has no embargo whatsoever for any DC characters, with even some Wildstorm and Milestone characters showing up this season, I expect Weisman to introduce a Vertigo character or two to further add branches to an already thick tree. Maybe even introduce the Endless into the show to get back at Gaiman.

[Dr. Insomniac]

First episode of the Harley Quinn show was funny, if a little too edgy. It's confusing to hear Diedrich Bader as Batman again when this show has the exact opposite tone of Brave and the Bold.

[Avaitor]

It's happening- AVERY ON BLU!!!!

Okay, so his MGM work isn't as hard to find in recent years as it used to be- the second LT: Platinum Collection has a dozen of them, and there's a bit more on the VRV app. But this is still pretty exciting.

[Mustang]

Been watching X-Men Animated Series (90's Cartoon). I'm currently on the 3rd season. I still have to get season 4 and 5. Batman Animated Series and Justice League maybe better than X-Men in a lot of folks opinion, but dammit, X-Men is me. My childhood is X-Men so the first time transitioning from the 90's cartoon to Evolution I'm like "what the hell is this", in the end it was good stuff, but my initial reaction, yeah I wasn't having it. Going through some of these Phoenix episodes and then just seeing this version of Wolverine just had me smiling. Before the Ironman's and Superman's, it was this Wolverine that was my favorite character ever, and that "do whatever I wanna do", "Go where ever I wanna go" attitude he had was the reason I loved that character so much (props to the v/a for such delivery). For a long time before anime this was my favorite cartoon, bar none and I don't think I will ever get another one like it (nowadays my standards are very high).

[Avaitor]

I decided to watch The Midnight Gospel. I have to admit, this isn't really my thing at all. I'm not a podcast person to begin with, but I figured that seeing some of Duncan Trussell's works being animated would make for at least a unique watch. While I do admire the art design and like how it meshes with the subject matter of the episode, but I'm just not very interested in the show's constant philosophical discussions. Still, if Pendleton Ward wants to spend the share of his post-AT career making oddball works like this, I'm all for it. I probably won't watch a second season, but I'm glad that it's a thing for those who dig it.

For as much money as Netflix is putting into animation, I've got around to watching very little of it. I still need to see Disenchantment and She-Ra, but I'll admit that I'm unsure about the latter due to my general indifference to Voltron.

[Avaitor]

Tex Avery Volume 2 confirmed!!!!

[Dr. Insomniac]

All the Animaniacs talk over the last few weeks convinced me to rewatch a little bit of Ruegger's catalog, and how many of them have aged well or not.

13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo: While the opening promises a very different Scooby from the previous shows, what I actually got wasn't much of an improvement from the usual Scooby formula. Over three decades a never dying franchise mean the "Scooby-Doo but this time the monsters are real!" premise loses its uniqueness, and the features of the show that haven't eroded are the annoying bits like Flim Flam and the two ghosts. Plus it's hard not to look at the overall plot and think Jackie Chan Adventures did it better. At least Vincent Price is still fun, and it was really disappointing the 13 Ghosts finale from last year had none of this show's flavor.

A Pup Named Scooby Doo: Just like 13 Ghosts, the meta-ness and parody nature that originally made this show stand out was absorbed into later Scooby-Doo media to better effect. The show still has charm, but it never escapes the problem that it creates a stricter episodic formula than even Where Are You? had. This and 13 Ghosts have their place in the franchise's history for trying to do something different, but they never hit the extra mile and end up as stepping stones to the more ambitious shifts like Zombie Island, Mystery Inc or the Gunn films.

Tiny Toons: Some of the episodes I rewatched were a riot like the self-control episode or K-ACME TV. This is the Ruegger show with the biggest place in my nostalgia, and even with some heavily dated pop culture jokes, it still gleams and shows off just why the start of so many other shows like Animaniacs and BTAS sprouted from TTA's staff. However, it sometimes doesn't do enough to differentiate the Tiny Toons cast from their predecessors. What separates Plucky and Daffy besides their color and a wifebeater?

Batman: I often forget that Ruegger co-created this show. Anyway, the Gray Ghost episode he wrote is great. My favorite one out of the bunch, and I fear the midlife crisis that awaits when a future Batman show remakes the episode but hires Affleck or Bale to play Simon Trent.

Animaniacs: All the strengths of TTA but with more of the problems. It's still a great show, but the pop culture references become the main subject in the later episodes I saw. With that and the jarring attempts at emotional earnestness like with the one Slappy episode, I can understand why Spielberg hired a FG writer to run the revival.

Freakazoid: I never watched this show when it first ran and mostly saw only clips after that, and I like I said with his Scooby Doo shows, all the absurdist superhero fiction I've read and watched turns Freakazoid into a quaint one among many. But it's fun for what it is. God, I miss Ricardo Montalban.

Pinky and the Brain: I said this in the other thread, P&TB work better as shorts than in long form. I just don't think the characters and their schemes are deep enough to warrant their own show, and even though retooling the show with Elmyra was significantly worse in every way possible, I can almost understand why Spielberg wanted to shake up the formula. Almost.

Road Rovers: Never saw any of this show before, and only watched one episode when writing this. The only notable thing is the opening is the exact same tune as Freakazoid's.

Histeria!: Fuck, I still vividly remember when the fat baby was all over Kids WB's promos, right before Pokemon happened. And I think that's what colors my view on this show. Because it feels like if someone took a bunch of 2-minute animated segments that were meant to run during commercial breaks, and instead taped together into 20-minute portions. Hence why there are over 10 main characters around but all of them serve as hosts for the historical figures who take up the room, and none of the episodes serve to deliver a greater single idea but a dozen trivia notes about China or WWII or whatever topic an episode vaguely focuses on. It just isn't good at being educational because you need an all-encompassing voice or at least room for the multiple voices, while Histeria! ends up with too many POVs fighting for a word to say in so little time that the show has less of an attention span than the children who watched this. So it's too wacky to be educational, but too educational to be wacky, resulting in nothing but generically zany characters exchanging trivia. It becomes the bland, moralizing children's media that Animaniacs and Tiny Toons often mocked.

It is kind of neat if you look at the show as a symbolic bookend to his WB era, such as how the leads in Tiny Toons were students learning the trade at Acme Looniversity, while the cast in Histeria! are basically teachers offering notes to a new generation. But that observation's bittersweet, since until the new TTA reboot comes out, the Tiny Toons cast have spent the years since their show's end hidden in the WB vault, not even allowed as background extras in any later Looney Tunes show or short. Whereas whatever lessons the Histeria! cast taught, they weren't listened to and the result was a quiet cancellation as Kids WB rebranded their image. Students waiting decades for a future and teachers with no jobs. Prescient, I guess.

Animalia/Sushi Pack: I watched an episode of both, and couldn't tell you what either of them were about.

The 7D: So who's idea was it to hire Kelly Osbourne? She's not family-friendly enough for Disney's interests, and she's the exact kind of person Animaniacs would have made fun of. I don't even dislike her, but what was the call there?

[Avaitor]

I have a soft spot for Ruegger's Scooby shows, but I can concede that they don't come close to hitting greatness, or even the quality of the original Where Are You? It's not even fair to totally blame it on 80's cartoon brain, as we'd see that Ruegger could achieve legitimate quality when he teamed up with Spielberg a few years later- I think these show's meeting at middling at best comes to a combination of Ruegger honing his craft, and Hanna-Barbera not being the place to nurture more daring content at the time. Maybe a bit after he started TTA, when Turner bought the company and Fred Seibert took control, 13 Ghosts or Pup could've turned out as more exciting shows, but even the series from that era hardly achieved greatness on the regular, either. And that's coming from someone who loves 2 Stupid Dogs a ridiculous amount.

I do agree with you on TTA, Animaniacs, and PATB. The latter is somewhat controversial, since plenty seem to prefer the duo on their own vs Animaniacs, but despite some highlights, their shtick did become tiresome rather quickly. Still, that Christmas episode is untouchable.

Ha, I remember liking Road Rovers a lot, because it reminded me of all those other shows, but I tried watching some of it ages ago, and was not impressed. I did think of giving it another chance when it popped up on VRV, but it left just before I could find time to get to it.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Probably means nothing to him since he doesn't get residuals and he never went back to the franchise, but for what it's worth, Ruegger's influence is still heavy in Scooby's DNA. Didn't watch the movie, but Scoob! had a flashback to when the Mystery Gang were kids who happened to solve mysteries. It's just with Mystery Inc and something as insane as the Scooby-Doo Meets KISS movie, his attempts to push the franchise into weirder directions now look like slight nudges.

And the problem with P&TB was also an underlying flaw in Animaniacs, that while most of the characters were funny, few of them were layered enough to deserve more than a few minutes of screentime per episode. Picture a Buttons and Mindy spinoff, for instance. At least Freakazoid has enough screen presence and some depth to carry a show on his own, while you can't say that for any of the TTA/Animaniacs cast without heavily retooling their needs, wants, and social circles and making them actual characters instead of walking jokes and punchlines. It's sort of why WB's had trouble over the 21st century on giving any of the Looney Tunes any long-lasting success. You have to effectively make characters like Bugs and Daffy play completely different roles to make them work in 20-minute episode formats or movies. Even when you successfully retool Daffy into somebody else like what they did with the Duck Dodgers show, it never lasts for more than a few seasons.

What I got out of Road Rovers was thinking "Jesus, how many TMNT-style animal superhero team cartoons came out around this time?" Besides Gargoyles, I can't think of any other show from that format that tried to break out of those confines. And Ruegger likely didn't turn Road Rovers into a parody or a comedic sendoff of the genre because TMNT, patient zero of the genre, was already a Daredevil parody.

[Mustang]

I've been watching snippets of some of these DCLA movies. Bits of Apokilips War, War, etc. Just wondering how far do these go back? Like, how many are connected, or rather which ones are connected leading to this war? Thinking about buying these.

The last time I saw this animation was Young Justice and this stuff still looks rather good and fluid. I like some of the designs as well.

[Markness]

Finally watched Harley Quinn yesterday and it is worthy of the praise it gets.

I also saw Wonder Woman: Bloodlines at Wal-Mart in their $5 DVD bin, bought it since the clip I saw of Wonder Woman fighting Cheetah ( )impressed me, and watched it last night. I am glad I got it and want to see more DC animated movies, particularly Justice League vs. Teen Titans and Teen Titans: The Judas Contract.

Mustang, I agree. The animation is really good and I wish I got into them years ago. The movies started in 2013 and from what I've read, they are connected. They remind me of the old Dragon Ball Z movie arcs in that regard.

[Markness]

Just binge-watched Pacific Rim The Black. I never saw Uprising because of the bad reviews and I've seen most people online say this is what Uprising should have been. Great animation, a gripping plot, and the characters were well-designed as well as had likable personalities. I was also impressed with the Kainu-Jaeger hybrid and the Kaiju Boy. I wasn't expecting to see those characters and they added a lot of spirit to the show.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Invincible just wrapped up its first season.

Spoiler

How are they going to redeem Omni-Man without it coming off as bullshit here? His beatdown on Mark's far more cruel here than in the comic. Comic Nolan turning good was already hard to swallow, but he never used Mark's head to kill an entire train of civilians while his son could do nothing but watch each corpse smear across his face.

[close]

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Spoiler

Seeing as how they have changed a number of things from the comics, I would think it best to not ever have Nolan accepted on Earth again. Even in the comics where he only indirectly killed a bunch of people in his fight with Mark, it still felt too much of a leap for him to be forgiven since he caused so much death including directly killing the original Guardians of the Globe. It would make more sense if they just stick with him getting on good terms with The Coalition and staying there permanently after his redemption. Granted, the work around in the comic was that his Earth Identity was still a secret, but it still made very little sense considering that Cecil and The Immortal, among others, know his identity and IMO should never be willing to forgive him no matter what.

[close]