Bubsy: The Animated Series Pilot

I apologize deeply for this post. In fact, I feel bad about myself and my life choices for even mentioning this cartoon's existence.

He perfected the Dreamworks face before Dreamworks even started making CGI films.

It's been a while since I talked about an animated adaptation of a video game. There's just something charming about watching a company try to translate my experiences with my various game consoles (minus the swearing, controller-throwing, the unfair deaths, and the uncontrollable sobbing) into something I can watch after I'm done playing said game. One of the reasons I like to talk about Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog so much is because, at one point in my childhood, I was living a life where I was playing Sonic games and playing with Sonic toys and then watching Sonic cartoons and chewing Sonic bubble gum and later reading Sonic comics. Pity me, fair readers, for I was the little marionette gleefully pulled by the strings by SEGA's skilled puppetmaster hands. They had me by the ovaries and they would not rest until they squeezed every penny out of my parents' wallets in order to keep their little girl's hedgehog fix satiated. 

And ironically, now I'm on Team Mario as far as mascot platformer games are concerned and honestly don't give a crap whenever a Sonic game comes out now. Suck on that, 16-bit console wars!

But let's suppose, for a second, that instead of talking about a video game that everybody with a Genesis loved and cherished as a kid (Sonic the Hedgehog) or a video game that, while isn't very well-known, is at least extremely imaginative in its design and offers games that remain very solid examples of the platformer genre (Rayman), I'm going to talk about the only video game that both managed to both appear on the Wiki page innocently titled "List of video games notable for negative reception" and managed to get his own pilot. Bubsy the Bobcat.

Unpopular opinion time. I actually like this game.

Bubsy the Bobcat is not really a bobcat at all. Instead, he's a copycat; a shameless attempt by a company to drink some of the sweet milk leaking from the swollen teats of Sonic the Hedgehog's cash cow. The platformer genre of the 16-bit era, especially for the Sega Genesis, were just infested with creatures like Bubsy, eager to gain a piece of that scrumptious mascot pie. Games like Awesome Possum, Plok!, Ristar, Green Dog, Chuck Rock, Dynamite Headdy...the list is as long and as vast as the mighty oceans that coat our beloved planet. Some were good, some were bad, but many of them contained 'tude. Lots and lots of 'tude.

And yet out of all of those games, some much more deserving of a cartoon than Bubsy (I would personally watch the hell out of a Dynamite Headdy cartoon), Bubsy was the one that got the deal. The only reason people are even aware that this cartoon actually existed is, like me, they were bored one day, searched "Bubsy the Bobcat" on Wikipedia and YouTube, and this lonely pilot turned up. Yes, my mind was blown when I saw that Bubsy had at one point been animated by poor employees just looking for a paycheck. Therefore, I had to talk about it.

Now, even if you're a poor naive fool like me and honestly enjoyed Bubsy's games and start thinking that, hey, since the games were cartoony, this is going to lend itself to some good animation, there is one thing that assures me that this is going to be a pile of crap right off the bat. The cartoon is animated by none other than Calico Creations, the sick assholes responsible for Widget the World Watcher.

Pictured: Failure.

With that being said, I can't delay this any further. It's best to grab this turd with my bare hands and try to shape it into something more palpable than this metaphor. Bubsy the Bobcat!

Bubsy: The Animated Series Pilot

Dumb and Dumber - To Bee Or Not To Bee

Since I've talked about The Mask: The Animated Series and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, I figured I'm going to have to talk about this cartoon sooner or later.

Every so often, the universe rolls a 1 when it comes to animated adaptations.

Now, remember like six months ago when I first set up this blog and said that this cartoon existed? Turns out I didn't just go into Photoshop and make the stupidest cartoon premise ever before lying to the Internet about it. This seriously existed. Some executives at Hannah-Barbera seriously watched Dumb and Dumber and thought "Hey, we should totally market this towards kids!" right before they snorted coke up their noses and gave each other total frontal lobotomies.

Luckily, it totally bombed in the ratings and those same executives were quickly fired (and later executed for crimes against humanity), or else we would've gotten The Cable Guy: The Animated Series or The Truman Show Show. And god only knows we don't need help making America's suicide rates any higher.

As you can tell from my barely concealed hatred for this show, out of the three Jim Carrey toons that exist, this one is the least liked and the least remembered. Unlike The Mask and Ace Ventura, which both had pretty sizable cartoon lifespans, Dumb and Dumber only lasted one 13 episode season. And thank whatever benevolent force you believe in for this small miracle, because rest assured, there is a pretty good reason why this cartoon has practically no fans.

I think it's probably because, unlike The Mask and Ace Ventura, which clearly can be made into animated series if you watch their films (and made very successful animated series premises), this one...is really a stretch as far as a cartoon outline goes. It's basically two guys in a silly-looking van driving around America and getting into wacky hijinks around the way with their inexplicable pet beaver.

I have to say, it was hard picking which episode to do first because, unlike other shows where there's some sort of rhyme or reason to the way episodes are structured, this show is all over the place when it comes to episode length. Some episodes run at the traditional one 22 segment, some are divided into three parts, some are divided into two parts where one half is 13 minutes while the other is 6 minutes, some are divided into even 11 minute segments...needless to say, it's a mess.

So I went with my gut and, instead of doing the first episode (like it's seriously going to explain anything), I picked the episode that has the same title as one of my favorite episodes of The Mask: The Animated Series. Because to hell with it, if this cartoon is going to insult my intelligence, I might as well pick the episode that reminds me the most of a Jim Carrey cartoon that I actually liked.

Spoiler alert: This is the superior cartoon in every way.

So, you might be asking yourself. How dumb is Dumb and Dumber: The Animated Series? Surely it's not as bad as this blog writer is saying and surely it has just as much merit as Film Roman's creation, right? Well, sate your dangerously reckless curiosity by diving into...

To Bee Or Not To Bee

Widget the World Watcher - Widget's Walkabout

Okay, we all have an opinion on environmentalist cartoons. They're preachy, they're rarely entertaining, they have villains that are one-dimensional and seem to only exist to make the Earth cry, they're hypocritical considering 2D animation is one of the most paper-consuming mediums of all time, and they feature annoying children that, all things considered, make us want to burn a rainforest rather than suffer through their annoying mugs for twenty minutes.

By this paragraph alone, you might think that I'm talking about Captain Planet. Sadly, no. If there's one thing I learned about bad ideas in cartoons, it's that they never appear in just one cartoon.

"My head is ridiculously huge!"

Here's a sad thought that not many people like to think about when talking about environmentalist cartoons. Captain Planet is not the only cartoon that's about saving the planet from ecological harm. There were multiple cartoons and specials about this. It's just that the flying blue man is most popular and the most well-remembered, while the others fell by the wayside. This bears repeating. Out of a genre of cartoons that exists, Captain Planet is the best one. There's a group of cartoons where Captain Planet beats them. Captain Planet.

...excuse me. I think I need to go lay down now.

Wait, I should probably talk about Widget the World Watcher here. There's not much to be expressed about a cartoon where the honest to god mediocre videogame adaptations are more well-remembered than the actual show itself. Other than pity. Lots and lots of pity. Seriously, the only other time I can think of a videogame outshining the actual cartoon when the videogame itself isn't very good is Izzy's Quest for the Olympic Gold. It's a sad fate to befall any show.

In fairness to this game, it at least looks funner than Izzy's Quest for the Olympic Gold.

Unfortunately, I think I might've seen a couple episodes of this show when it was actually on the air. I say "I think" instead of being too sure because, unlike Darkwing Duck or Animaniacs or even Street Sharks, the show never left a positive or even a negative impact on me. I mean, I hate practically everything about Captain Planet, but the fact that I hate that show proves that it did something to me and that I have a reaction to it. Widget just exists; and the only reason I can guess that I saw it is that the purple alien looks kind of familiar and, since it had shapeshifting, I was all over that as a kid.

Another notable thing about this show. Like all really dumb shows of the 90's that not many people remember, it's incredibly rare. Out of a 65 episode show, only a handful of episodes are available online, and they're all pulled from VHS videos that, on eBay, run to be about 40 dollars.

That being said, you like kangaroos? Dingos? Bad Australian accents? Then boy, do I have an episode for you!

Widget's Walkabout

Street Sharks - Sharkbite

Part 1 - Sharkbait

Since my last post of this show kind of sort of ended on a cliffhanger, I have to continue talking about this show or else the ghosts of cartoon sharks will haunt me in my sleep and suck on my bone marrow. God help me.

Oh, and very, very recently, this show became available for instant streaming from Netflix. Jawsome!

Although there's a very bitter voice inside of me going "Street Sharks is on Netflix but not
The Mask: The Animated Series? I hate everything." when I hear of this news.

This probably won't bode well if I say right off the bat that, out of all the posts I did in 2010, this show was one of the hardest to sit through. (the other being Captain Planet, but that goes without saying) At the risk of being totally insulting to a show that was a big portion of my childhood, I can safely say that Street Sharks was nowhere near as awesome as I thought I was when I was a kid and there's a pretty good reason why DiC is pretending they didn't make this when they freaking acknowledge Captain N. Some perspective here. Captain N is on DVD. This show isn't. Kind of makes you wonder.

But does that mean it's still not fun to watch? Hell no! I personally enjoy every stupid minute of this stupid lazy ripoff of a stupid show. After all, we live in a world where guilty pleasures exist and it's pretty cathartic to rip into things that bugged me even as a child. So to take another spin on the extreme, merchandise-driven, turtle-copying vehicle that is Street Sharks for a second time is just too much to pass up. I mean, for crying out loud, I'm talking about a show where one of the main characters mutates into a shark because the main villain tampered with a bag of popcorn. You can't hate this show because it's simply too dumb to hate.

But since this show does go in chronological order, follows a very coherent storyline from start to finish, and, again, I left the last post on a cliffhanger, if I want to talk about the time someone turns into a shark after eating popcorn (disclaimer: this totally happened in this show.), I'm gonna have to talk about this episode first.

So suspend all forms of disbelief when we dive into...

Sharkbite

Sonic Christmas Blast

Yes, I realize I've taken two "breaks" within the last couple of months. In my defense, Christmas means family and finals, and family and finals means "go from staying up all night working on group projects to having to clean up the house and getting ready for a party that includes at least twenty other people". Which means less updates. I feel kind of bad for leaving this site to its own devices, so to speak, and not giving any new content, so to make up for it, I'm doing one more Christmas special.

And it's one that's very special to me, because it involves one of my childhood heroes, Sonic the Hedgehog.

And it's every bit as awesome as it sounds.

But first, some backstory. After the end of both Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog and the other show, Sonic the Hedgehog (aka SatAM), DiC Entertainment decided that they wanted to try their hand at making a Christmas special and decided to combine elements of both shows and create a special that will hopefully unite the fans of both shows and join them in the holy war.

...unfortunately, since this special is basically Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog with some minor SatAM elements, it largely didn't work. Oh well, they tried at least. Barely.

What also didn't work was the original title. Sonic Christmas Blast was originally called An X-Tremely Sonic Christmas in order to promote Sonic X-Treme (aka one of the most infamous cancelled videogames of all time) but Sega was having some problems with that game and therefore, they changed the name to promote the game that actually did come out, Sonic 3D Blast. Somehow, that just envelopes this entire special with a subtle blanket of sadness. I know that while I'm watching this, I'm going to imagine the dying hopes of hapless X-Treme programmers from Christmas Past.

I will say this though, hopefully to lighten the mood. While doing some light Internet research on this special, I found the best out-of-context line I have ever discovered in a fan wiki page. While taking a sip out of my lukewarm eggnog, I came across this: "This was the final episode of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. Therefore in that universe, Sonic is now permanently Santa Claus." If that doesn't put you in a holiday mood, then you are beyond help. By the way, spoilers.


Now with that out of the way...

Sonic Christmas Blast

Darkwing Duck - It's a Wonderful Leaf

Since it's incredibly easy to talk about this show, the next Christmas special will be about ducks in capes.

Like any good Disney show, Darkwing Duck happens to have a Christmas special, and what a Christmas special it is. You know how Frosty the Snowman never let up on the whimsy and the cutesy-wutesy? This episode, on the other hand, proves that it can have an ending that ends on a warm, fuzzy note while at the same time depicting one of the more horrifying ways to apprehend a villain in this series. Darkwing Duck continues to kick ass and chew bubblegum even when he's supposed to be filled with the holiday spirit, so don't think that just because Santa's in this cartoon that Darkwing's going to let up on the cartoon violence.

Which is good, because after the schmultz that Frosty and his underaged minions forcefed me, I can use some good old-fashioned 90's-grade violence.

And before someone points this out, yes, this is yet another Bushroot episode, effectively making three out of the four Darkwing Duck posts I've done so far Bushroot episodes and placing him in a giant majority on my blog. Well, what can I say? The mutant vegetable finds himself in quite a few episodes that are themed around holidays, and he happens to be one of the show's main regulars. I promise you, I will do a non-Bushroot episode next. Mostly because there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and in Bushroot's case, his whiny Tino Insana voice will grate on your nerves after too long.

So deck the halls with whiny plants with low self-esteem and install really complicated security systems on your trees, for you're about to be bombarded by lame, Disney-style puns in...

It's a Wonderful Leaf

The Mask: The Animated Series - Mask Au Gratin

Sorry this is so late, but in the long run, my finals and visiting my family are probably more important than my blog. Plus I needed the small break. After consistently posting really huge posts every three to five days, a small vacation was imminent.

But judging by both the poll and the pageviews, quite a few people like it when I talk about this show.

Now, when I watched Convention of Evil, this prompted a couple people to ask about the actual episodes in the clip show. And thus, it'd be a smart choice to talk about them.

Course, choosing an episode was hard. My first choice was, of course, The Stinger's episode, but due to language barriers (as of this writing, an English copy still hasn't been located) and the fact that I'll look like a dumbass by trying to talk about a cartoon while muting it, so that was a no go. I'm still waiting for the day that episode crops up online in English, if only because that'll be the day where I can talk about a giant bee man for hours and hours and not be judged by my fellow Americans.

But anyways, I figure I'll go with the second best choice, one that was brought up by friends and e-mails alike, while hanging my head in sadness and wishing this was that glorious, honey-flavored episode. In other words, this is the episode where some Mesopotamian cheese witch attacks a city and turns things into processed food with her laser eyes. Not as cool as some mutant honeybee that forces people to toil in his homemade nectar factory, but you have to admit it's original.

Without further ado...

Mask Au Gratin

Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog - Road Hog

This show won third place in that poll I posted in the first half of October, so I figure why not? Making fun of Sonic is one of my favorite pastimes, next to crossword puzzles and judging other people for their choice in music.

The last time I talked about this show, I covered an episode where Scratch (the chicken robot who chases Sonic, for those not completely caught up to the Sonic lore) bumped his head and thought he was a character on TV, emulating a cheesy sitcom for a day. But before I talked about his strange love affair with poultry, I mentioned that I wanted to cover all the episodes that were on the VHSes first.

Well, here's another one!

That's some motorcycle design, artist!

This episode happens to be on the rarest VHS out of the classic AoStH movie lot (and I base this statement purely off of something I made up), Road Hog. I owned a couple of VHSes of this show (I owned the Grounder the Genius and the Sonic's Song VHSes, for the people in the audience who must know every aspect of my life), but literally the only copy I knew existed of this bastion of insanity was at the local Blockbuster. Oh, I rented it a couple times, because a blue hedgehog riding a motorcycle and then fighting a morbidly obese man on a blimp never stops being entertaining, but I could swear I've never seen this VHS sold anywhere. It was like an endangered species of animal; there was evidence of its existence in certain institutions, but I was having too hard of a time spotting one in the wild, ready to be purchased by my allowance money.

Anyways, I'm going to talk about this episode because this always stuck out to me as a kid as just unbelievably bizarre and unpleasant for a Sonic cartoon. Yes, this is weird for an Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon, a show that practically invented the word. That's just sad that there is an episode that's weird even by this show's standards, since this is the show where tanks have articulate butts, a chicken can fall in love with a turkey, and you can somehow make a robot by cracking an egg into a strange, cauldron-shaped machine.

So let's see Sonic deal with hypnotic flowers, speed limits, a giant blimp, and a group of pigs riding motorcycles in...

Road Hog

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective - Witch's Brew

With Halloween month drifting to a close like a thin wisp-like fog that fades away with the morning sun, I've decided I'm going to talk Jim Carrey, since I always found the actual actor scary as hell. I talked about The Mask: The Animated Series and I've let everyone know that Dumb and Dumber: The Animated Series actually exists (I wish it didn't), so I might as well bring myself to talk about Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

Ace Ventura was released around the same time as The Mask: The Animated Series, but was handled by a completely different animation studio. While the glorious green-faced mask-wearing crimefighter was being animated by the geniuses at Film Roman, this idea was passed off to Nelvana. Therefore, save for the one time where the shows had a crossover (called "Have Mask, Will Travel"), these shows really don't have much in common other than the fact that Jim Carrey starred in both movies. The humor is written a lot differently, the animation is done a lot differently, and basically we're dealing with two different products here. Hell, considering the animation company, Ace Ventura's show has way more in common with the Beetlejuice cartoon than anything.

I'll be quick to sum this whole thing up. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective takes off right where the movies left off, and involve Jim Carrey's character, Ace Ventura, solving animal-themed cases with his pet monkey Mr. Watson. It's a really straightforward premise that was incredibly easy to adapt into an animated adaptation, because if there's one thing animators can draw, it's cuddly animals. I actually really like the Ace Ventura movies so that might be a plus. Hey, don't give me that look; I can like crude humor too!

While not as well-remembered or loved as The Mask: The Animated Series (opinions of this show fluctuate more wildly than it's better animated brother), Ace Ventura earns itself the distinction of being the only one out of the trio of Jim Carry cartoons to be revived by another network. After the show ended its first run in 1997, Nickelodeon actually brought it back for a third season that lasted from 1999 to the year 2000. But, like most zombies, it quickly decomposed and fell apart, and couldn't gain any audience after rising up from its grave. I personally blame the fact that Nick never bothered to advertise the damn thing. I clearly remember watching Nickelodeon during that time period and not once did Ace Ventura premieres become any sort of priority with that station.

But let's ignore that. And what's the first episode I'll be dealing with?

Well, since it's Halloween and Buttons and Rusty had completely failed me in their Halloween special, I'm going with another episode dealing with witches. I was going to go with the weremoose episode because the concept was too tempting to pass up, but then I saw Which Witch was Which and now I'm irrationally angry that I didn't get to see some real witchcraft. Hopefully Ace Ventura isn't as big of a liar as Ranger Jones.

I will warn everybody. Copies of this show are hard to find, there's no DVD out of this show, I'm Internet-retarded in that I can't figure out torrents and never will, and the one copy I did find...has a very annoying watermark where the uploader was kind enough to write his name in big fat letters on the actual movie. Incredibly annoying, and I apologize in advance for it, but I can't fault him for trying to advertise the fact that he's the go-to guy for Ace Ventura episodes. This probably won't be the last time this happens, so just letting everybody know before people send me e-mails.

That being said, let's boil up some...

Witch's Brew

The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: Scared Silly - Part 2 (Final Part)

Part 1

Time to talk about The Joker's wealthy businessman brother again. I hate leaving fast food meals unfinished, because I know that if I don't polish it off now, this movie will end up getting shoved in the back of my refrigerator where it will stay until I pull it out five months later and find that literally nothing in the meal has rotted and, if left untouched, a McDonalds Big Mac could probably outlive me if it wanted to.

For those of you who read the first part and wondering just what was so scary about just camping in the woods, hold on tight. Because you haven't seen nothing yet. The worst has yet to come, and readers beware, because you're in for a scare.

The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: Scared Silly - Part 2

Darkwing Duck - Night of the Living Spud

Halloween month continues and it's time to revisit an old friend of mine, one that helped me form this blog in the first place. Time for the terror that flaps in the night!

He's a very happy, child-friendly terror, but still a terror.

This is one of those shows where you can pick practically any episode and have loads to talk about, but you have no idea how excited I am to talk about this episode in particular. This is one of those episodes I just have to cover because it's just so insane, so unbelievably out there that I'm getting giddy just talking about it.

For you see, this episode is a Bushroot episode, which instantly makes it one of my favorite episodes on account Bushroot is as awesome as he is whiny and pantless, and it involves giant vampire potatoes that turn people into zombies. That idea alone, the fact that there are blood-sucking spuds that spread some weird plant-like infection around like a Left 4 Dead/Plants Vs. Zombies crossover instantly brightens up any Halloween. In fact, ever since I bought my DVD box set, I've made it my life's mission to never go through an October without watching this episode at least once, it's that magical.

That is why I went with this episode as opposed to say, any of Morgana's episodes. Sorry Morgana. I know you're supernatural and more traditionally Halloween-y than a hideous abomination that makes roots sprout out of people's brains, but I had to go with my gut and choose the episode that has used the "Night of the Living Dead" pun that every single 90's entity has to make at least once.

Also, some people will be quick to note that this episode, "Night of the Living Spud", comes right after "Getting Antsy", effectively making my three Darkwing Duck reviews in show run order and therefore making me look like a huge Darkwing Duck geek. I assure you, I didn't intend for that to happen. So don't expect the next Darkwing Duck post to be about "Apes of Wrath" because it's not. Probably because I intend my next episode of this show to cover one of the OTHER main villains lest this blog looks like it has a Bushroot bias.

...it does, but I'd rather not have it appear that I do.

Anyways, remove your pants and imitate your favorite duck as we dive into the spectacle of horrors that is...

Night of the Living Spud

The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: Scared Silly - Part 1

Okay, chances are if you're aware of the concept of "fast food" (and if you're not aware, congratulations for crawling out from your rock long enough to read my blog!), then you know about McDonald's. McDonald's is like the undisputed Lord and Master above all other forms of fast food, the crowning father of fatty hamburgers and cheap plastic toys shoved into mini meals to coerce children to start clogging their arteries early. Whether you love them, hate them, find them a world-destroying scourge or a delight that you visit every other week, you are aware of their existence and their ability to be absolutely anywhere. Starbucks wishes they were like McDonald's multibillion empire. Sadly, in this universe, scary clowns will always beat sirens in hand-to-hand combat.

But I'm not here to talk about cheeseburgers. I'm here to talk about cartoons. And one day in the 90's, McDonald's came up with this great idea. Oh sure, their mascots are portrayed well enough in the commercials, but what if they were in a cartoon? Kids love cartoons, and if Ronald was a cartoon star, that meant even more Happy Meals will be devoured on a daily basis! It's a win-win situation. Unfortunately, McDonald's didn't go the whole gambit and greenlight a 13 episode TV series; instead they chose to make a series of short films.

So they teamed up with Klasky-Csupo (aka the people behind Rugrats) and made a direct-to-video movie about Ronald McDonald and his hideously deformed food friends frolicking through the strange, cholesterol-filled lands of McDonaldland.

And it was a hit.

Man, remember when you actually had to rewind your movies?

It's hard to say just how popular these things were if you didn't live through it first-hand, but I remember when these VHSes first came out in McDonald's. For just a couple bucks more on your combo meal, you could get an exclusive Ronald McDonald cartoon where he pals around with his equally soulless partners designed purely to hypnotize the young'uns into buying more McDonald's food. This sounds stupid, the thought of bringing a cartoon clown and his giant rotten chicken nugget pal (what the hell is Grimace anyways?) into your home, but I remember McDonald's places all over the tri-county area selling out of these things. And, when they sold out, people would hop in their minivans and drive 45 minutes into another city in hopes that maybe one of their McDonald's has one.

What's really sad is that I'm not surprised people would sink this low. After all, I lived through the Beanie Baby craze and remembered when McDonald's places would have these huge lines of people getting their hands on shapeless cows or shapeless inch worms stuffed with beans.

Now, my family actually owned a copy of one of these things. My mom was lucky enough to buy the film before the popularity rush snatched them all up, and my family and I would actually sit down and watch this thing more than once, and mostly when it was October and getting close to Halloween. Because this movie was one of our "Halloween movies". Like Buttons and Rusty in Which Witch was Which, it was one of those odd VHSes that we didn't really acknowledge its existence until the right holiday came up. We'd watch it, not because we were compelled to, but because it was in season.

That being said, does this still hold up? Is there something to be redeemed in this fantasy world where a man can dress up his dog in clown makeup and get away with it, or is this movie as bad as a movie about freaking' McDonaldland characters could possibly be? Grab some McNuggets, mourn the loss of the triple cheeseburger and the Supersize combo option, take some anti-heart attack pills, and inhale this delicious portion of...

The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: Scared Silly - Part 1

The Mask: The Animated Series - Shadow of a Skillit

I was going to continue Halloween special month with another Disney cartoon, but then I noticed that three out of the four previous posts were Disney-related, so the episode I was going to do (a Darkwing Duck ep, and I'm not saying which one) got postponed.

But that doesn't mean I don't have another show in mind when I think "creepy Halloween episode from an awesome 90's cartoon in the superhero genre". And today, I am going to revisit a green-faced old friend of mine. The Mask! Because I found out that not enough sites talk about this show (even 90's nostalgia fans seem oblivious to this show, meaning they're not doing their jobs) and I can't abide it going unnoticed.

Masks are Halloween related, right? This counts!

First, I have a small confession to make. This is NOT the series' Halloween special. The episode I should be reviewing is the one helpfully titled "All Hallow's Eve", which has everything to Halloween parties to trick-or-treating to actual zombies.

The reason I chose this episode instead is because of several different reasons. The first reason is that All Hallow's Eve is a sequel to this episode, and the second reason is that, in my mind, this fits the mood and tone of Halloween better than the sequel ever did. The Mask's Halloween special is the side of Halloween that everybody loves, the one filled with costumes and candy. This episode deals with the more sinister side of Halloween, the fact that there are creatures lurking in the shadows, boogeymen that won't think twice about stealing your soul just for a cheap thrill.

Now, if you remember my last post about this show (which dealt with "Convention of Evil", the first episode I myself ever watched of this show), the villains were pretty amicable fellows who loved to hang out and swap stories about The Mask while drinking cups of coffee and talking about how nice the weather was. Even Satan and the horrifying bug mutant were friendly. A lot of them felt like, if they weren't criminally insane and found total city domination to be a great career move, they'd be your bestest pals.

Skillit? He's not friendly. He's the opposite of friendly. Skillit's the kind of villain that the other villains stay away from, just because he's the guy in every group that finds human suffering to be gutroaringly hilarious. He's seen civilizations fall, wars kill countless numbers of people, and horrible atrocities wreaked upon mankind, and he enjoyed every minute of it. I'd like to imagine if, say, The Stinger or Kablamus had caller ID and saw Skillit's name pop up on their cellphone, they'd chuck the phone in the fireplace and hide under the couch for several weeks.

But I'm hyping this up a bit too much, especially when I know a good number of you probably scroll right past my intros. I should probably stop flapping my gums and dive right into the scary, mentally-scarring horrorfest that is charmingly named...

Shadow of a Skillit

Rayman: The Animated Series - Lac-Mac Napping

This might just be the unluckiest series I ever have to do. Reading about what had happened in the production of this show is really sad. This is the kind of show that other shows use as an example, a horror story of shows, but first, let's talk about the videogame this animated series was based off of, Rayman.

Aw yeah, this game rocked.

Rayman is a platformer game series that debuted in 1995 on the Playstation and PC (well, okay, also the Atari Jaguar and the Sega Saturn, but who the hell owned one of those?) and starred a really strange thing named Rayman that was vaguely humanoid and had a bunch of disembodied floating limbs rotating around a purple ball. It was a delightful sugar-coated happy romp full of bright colors, whimsical characters, and ball-crushing difficulty spikes. I've interviewed everyone in the world and I've found out that most people saw the maze full of sharp musical notes in Bongo Hills (or the maze of sharp tacks in Picture City), said "To hell with this", and returned this game and exchanged it with Spyro the Dragon.

The game was good enough to get a sequel, Rayman 2: The Great Escape aka "one of the best platformer games ever" (my main source being my own personal opinion of course). No seriously, play this game because it's fun. Rayman 2 was more manageable in difficulty, but it traded the sugar coating and the bright colors with a darker and edgier atmosphere filled with giant spiders, poisonous swamps, killer robots from outer space, and zombie chickens.

I'm going to stress the zombie chicken part.

The writer of this blog still can't play the Tomb of the Ancients level without breaking down and sobbing.

And the sequel spawned a TV series. A very ill-fated TV series that lasted...wait for it....

FOUR EPISODES.

Fun fact: Creepy Crawlers the Animated Series is also French. French shows have the worst luck.

Yes, this show lasted four episodes. The entire show is four episodes long. I've seen series pilots that were longer than Rayman's show. I've encountered farts that lasted longer than this. It never even got broadcast in the United States and literally the only evidence of this show in the United States (besides the Internet) was Nintendo Power hinting towards its existence and a VHS that's rarer than the Creepy Crawlers action figures.

It was planned to be a 13 episode season, but lack of funds and presumably poor writing (although that didn't stop Captain Planet) made the producers pull the plug early. Since Rayman isn't exactly the most popular videogame star in most parts of the world (he's popular in French-speaking countries since he's a French creation, but that's about it) and the relative obscurity of the episodes, this show is pretty much unknown.

But I'm going to talk about this show because what the hell, I might as well. I personally love the Rayman games (at least until they decided that they were going to fill the series with minigame collections instead of releasing a goddamn Rayman 4 like we wanted them to), and it'd at least be fun to see how they interpreted it for the small screen.

That being said, boy, am I in for a ride, because this show happened to follow the Sonic Underground line of thinking in that as long as they stick Rayman in an unrelated setting full of unrelated characters that have nothing to do with the original games, it's still a Rayman cartoon. So thus, let's talk about the first episode of this series. Let's find out what happens when you call a show "Rayman" but really make it about this unrelated blue guy in...

Lac-Mac Napping

Creepy Crawlers - Attack Of the Fifty Foot Googengrime

Episode 1-Night of the Creepy Crawlers
------------------

I had to pull out this show again for several reasons, but the main reason was that I noticed that since there's only like four episodes online in a language I can understand (because hell no, I'm not watching something off of Rutube and then try to make any coherent sense out of it), this would be the easiest series to write about all of the available goop-filled, creepy crawly, nonsensical episodes.

I sometimes entertain the notion that I'll have this blog ten years from now and will one day review and overanalyze, say, every single available episode of Darkwing Duck or The Mask: The Animated Series, but another part of me knows that will never ever happen because I'm just one person and my interest in ducks or strange green-faced shapeshifters can only go so far.

But come on, only four existing episodes of a cracktastic series? That'd be cake.

Part of me still has trouble believing this actually exists.

I went with this episode first as opposed to, say, one closer in order (which involves giant zombie bees and important character introductions) because, to be frank, this begged to be written. I built my entire blog just so I can write about craziness like this. It's got a little bit of everything, but mostly, I have to point at the title and tell you that this seriously exists, that the writers seriously thought that this was a good idea and they had people draw storyboards for this.

In short, the 90's! Because if you want to see a jade green skeleton dance around while wearing a monocle, bugs imitate Beavis and Butthead, and a five story wizard with the chin the size of Kuwait yell about Goopmandos and little dips, then there's going to be a cartoon to accommodate for your strange, strange needs.

But really, nothing more needs to be said other than the title at this point. No, really. I can't even warn you for the unbridled insanity that cold, heartless merchandising inflicted on small children in the early 90's other than mentioning that this is...

Attack Of the Fifty Foot Googengrime

The Mask: The Animated Series - Convention of Evil

You know, animated adaptations of big hit Hollywood movies get a really bad rap these days. What was once a big staple of the 90's (ironic considering how often nostalgia fans praise the 90's for being the most original) is now seen as unoriginal, banal pieces of crap that ride upon the coattails of a successful movie franchise and are almost never good. The words "the animated series" are like the brightly colored skin of a poison dart arrow frog, warning off potential viewers of the show's toxicity.

Usually, this is correct (because oh man can I name some animated adaptations that suck all that is wholesome and good out of the animation medium), but first I'm going to show off an animated adaptation that, in my opinion, works better than the movie it spawned from. Say hello to The Mask, and let me answer your first question: yes, there was an actual The Mask cartoon.

There are a ton of things are wrong about this show, making its 3 season, 52 episode success almost baffling. It's better to just go about them in list form, and really, it ends up sounding like a recipe list for making the perfect disaster.

1. It's a superhero cartoon about a movie that was nothing about superheroes.
2. Key elements are discarded. The mask can now work during the day and Stanley's girlfriend (who was Cameron Diaz in her very first star role, by the way) is completely missing. And Peggy, who was considered a villain and was even killed in a deleted scene, becomes The Mask's friend in the series.
3. 80% of the cast was completely fabricated from scratch and would so not fit in with the movie's cast. Okay, ask yourself. When you watched that Jim Carrey film, did you ever stop and think "You know what this needs? A mutant honeybee monster, a half-balloon man, a talking fish, a Mesopotamian woman who controls cheese, and Satan!" to yourself? If you answered "yes", then you were one of the character designers on this show.
4. This was created during the peak of a Jim Carrey craze and two other Jim Carrey films were being adapted into cartoons as well.
5. They turned two iconic lines in the movie into catchphrases. "Sssssmokin'!" and "Somebody stop me!" were used ad nausem in this show's run.

and worst of all...

6. It's a watered-down animated adaptation of a movie that's a watered-down adaptation of a very violent comic book. Fans of the Mirage TMNT comic books should instantly know this feeling all too well.

I'm willing to bet that a large amount of people will respond to this with "There was a comic!?"

So okay, what's the punchline, you might be thinking. This couldn't possibly have ended well.

Well, it did. Partly because Film Roman knew just what the hell they were doing and allowed the show to have an actual budget. I don't want to risk gushing too much about how inexplicably awesome this show is, but let's just say it's way more well-remembered than the two other Jim Carrey shows, Dumb and Dumber and Ace Ventura, for a very good reason. Plus it helps that I like this cartoon when I don't particularly care for the movie (I can't enjoy Jim Carrey unless if he's in small doses), so it does its job well.

Anyways, I'm done talking about the show. Now for the actual episode I'm going to dive right into. For the first episode I'm covering from this show, I'm going to cover...the first episode I ever personally watched, thanks to a friend linking me and telling me "this is better than it sounds, trust me". Not the first episode of the show; the one that first exposed me to the show. Which doesn't make much sense, but hey. My blog; my rules.

I will warn you, since this show currently doesn't have a DVD release, that means the copies I find on the Internet all contain network bugs. That being said, let's watch a cyborg, a hideous bee mutant, Satan, a woman with a cheese obsession, a half-shark mobster, Ickis from Aaahhh! Real Monsters, and a nerd in skintight underwear sit around at a table and discuss their mental issues with Ben Stein in...

Convention of Evil

Captain Planet and the Planeteers - Tree of Life

Since I've decided recently that I hate both my eyes and the people following this, I'm going to watch another episode of Captain Planet.

Well okay, the real reason is that I realize that the last episode I did just lacked that Captain Planet spirit to it. Oh, sure, it had deforestation (Ted Turner's favorite thing to cry about) and some jerkoff who loves the dying coughs of all the animals he runs over with his giant bulldozer of evil, but mostly it was about Skumm and his sick little rat fetish than anything pollution-themed.

I think the main problem was that it had Verminous Skumm. Sir Skumm always got the short end of the stick when it came to episodes. It's like the writers knew that crime and disease are in that grey area of "Is it really an environmental issue?" so he ended up getting weird episodes like an episode where he steals an artifact from a museum (because the theft of archaeological finds is exactly what I picture when I think Captain Planet) or that really embarrassing AIDS episode where Skumm is kind of a dick to this one HIV-positive kid for no reason.

So just to be fair, I'm covering a Captain Planet that's more in your face with its environmentalism. For starters, this episode has Dr. Blight in it, and man does she love the smell and feel of freshly cut wood from a rare, endangered forest. She's also voiced by Meg Ryan, which means that there are gentlemen (and the occasional lady, I won't discriminate) who watched this episode and now have the deep, penetrating shame that is being turned on by a Captain Planet cartoon.

Should you decide to stick around, this is the episode that James Cameron watched and decided "Hey, you know what this needs? Cat people from outer space!". This is...

Tree of Life

Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog - Blank-Headed Eagle

Okay, like the 3D Sonic titles, this show is just way too fun to make fun of. Today I'm going to put on my IGN hat and once again make fun of Sonic the Hedgehog!

I'm going to do yet another episode of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. When talking about this show in particular, I personally want to get the episodes that I would watch on VHSs back when I was a kid out of the way, just because I've seen those dang episodes on there so many times that I swear the people at the local Blockbuster were pretty close to just giving me the stupid tapes just so the creepy child would leave them alone.

So yes, this means that later on down the road, I will cover "Sonic's Song", "Grounder the Genius", "Best Hedgehog", "Sloooow Going", "Robotnik Express", "Tails's New Home", "Over the Hill Hero", "Sonic Breakout", and the one episode where Sonic gets hypnotized.

...oh crap, what am I getting myself into watching all of that Sonic...

I went with this episode first for a couple reasons, but the main reason is because this is a Scratch-themed episode. Yes, that's right, occasionally the animators would toss the robot-loving people in the audience a bone and give us episodes where Scratch and Grounder were the bigger stars. There was even a VHS tape that had a Grounder-themed episode (Grounder the Genius) followed by this exact Scratch-themed episode, as if the creators realized that they made Sonic an unlikeable, invincible prick and it was the robots everyone was actually rooting for.

By the way, here's the VHS in question:

Man, remember when it was a big thing to have a VHS with TWO whole episodes on it?
Those giant DVD box sets have spoiled us all.

And this glorious piece of cinematic gold wrapped in a scrumptious hedgehog-shaped burrito has tons of Scratch. He flies an aircraft, he becomes a hero, and he actually falls in love in this episode. This is Scratch's "shining pinnacle of greatness" episode.

Oh, and I guess Sonic also does some stuff too, because he has to deal with the...

Blank-Headed Eagle

Street Sharks- Sharkbait

There are some shows that just immediately open themselves up to mockery, immediately date themselves, and remain as testaments of bad ideas, of creative depravity, and just an overall willingness to piggyback off the success of others.

As you can probably guess from the fact that I'm opening this blog post with that kind of description, this show is one of them. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce one of the many TMNT knockoffs of the 90's, Street Sharks.

Produced by DIC Entertainment (who I noticed is appearing A LOT in this blog), it basically answered the question no person asked; "Hey, what if the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles weren't ninjas and they were sharks?". It even had a toyline in an attempt to compete with the TMNT toyline. Problem is, the fact that it was trying to compete with TMNT, a show that, at the peak of its popularity, had more merchandise and more fans than Pokemon (I'm dead serious, the TMNT craze was HUGE), Street Sharks was the equivalent of bringing a knife to an atomic bomb and planet-sized space station fight. It had 40 episodes but you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who cared about this show.

Needless to say, it's now a show the TMNT fans point and laugh at, because frankly it deserves the laughter. To call it stupid would be an insult to other stupid shows like Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. See, that Sonic show was fun stupid. This is just stupid stupid.

I went with this show because, in some bizarre twist of fate, I actually watched this show and somehow didn't watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the show it was ripping off from. It wasn't until I was in college that I watched the 1987 version of TMNT and realized that wow, I was missing out on one of the most cracktastic awesome shows of all time and a part of my childhood was wasted watching pale knockoffs.

Yeah, they didn't even hide the fact that they're were stealing ideas from TMNT.

Okay, it'd be unfair to write this show completely as a knock-off. It did some things differently. For example, instead of the main villain having two dim-witted half-animal minions trying to capture or kill the main heroes, the main villain has three dim-witted half-animal minions. And instead of having an Archie series that lasted for a pretty long time, the Archie comic tie-in lasted like 6 issues. And the covers made this show look waaaaaay more badass than it really was.

In the actual show, the guy with the exosuit is a joke.

I figure the best way to cover this show would be to look at the first episode, which is, as always, the origin episode of the show. So grab a pizza burger, shout "Cowabunga!" "Jawsome!", and cheer for your favorite turtle shark, because this is...

Sharkbait

Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog - Super Special Sonic Search & Smash Squad

Well, I learned that the title at the top of each blog can actually stretch. Thank you, Sonic, for teaching me a valuable lesson. But we'll get to that later.

Okay, let's talk about hedgehogs for a moment now. Back in the 90's, there were not one, not two, but THREE different Sonic cartoons produced by DIC Entertainment (aka the cartoon studio that will probably make the most appearances in this blog just because of the insanity they've wrecked on an unsuspecting public). If you ask anyone, they'll usually say that out of the three Sonic cartoons, there was one good one, one that was actually worth watching.

Was this the Sonic cartoon that would be considered the good Sonic cartoon? Ahahahaha hell no, that would be Sonic the Hedgehog (aka SatAM). People's opinions of this show tend to fluctuate between "Get this crap away from me" to "It's so bad that I can garner some enjoyment out of it".

Nice TM hiding in the title there, guys.

Course, I'd be lying if I said that I hate this cartoon. Back when I had a Sega Genesis, I used to rent the four AoStH VHSs over and over and over again from the local Blockbuster. I had also rented the SatAM one once, but at the time, I really didn't like how grim and dark Sonic's universe was and preferred the kiddy, bright one on account it more closely resembled the games I would play. To hell with you, gritty storylines and fleshed out characters, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog actually had Casino Night Zone!

But now that I'm over twenty and now realize that the grimmer, darker Sonic cartoon was also the better made one, will looking back at this cause irreversible damage to my retinas or will I still find something salvageable? Let's see what the pilot of this has to say about that.

So let's take a look at this cartoon's attempt at telling us, the viewers, just what the hell is going on in this strange universe, all while showing us the many ways a robot shaped like a chicken can get demolished by Urkel. This is...

Super Special Sonic Search & Smash Squad