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

Wacky Races - See-Saw to Arkansas

According to the polls, everyone wanted something new, so of course, that means I'm going to cover a cartoon that almost 50 years old. Irony!

I have sort of a love/hate relationship with Hannah-Barbera, the creators of this ancient work of art. I mean, sure, they've single-handedly defined an entire decade (or decades, depending on how nice you want to be) of animation, but at the same time, they're pretty renowned for basically cranking show after show after show and being one of the harbingers of the animation dark ages. They have great characters, but for every Huckleberry Hound and Tom and Jerry, you have pale knockoffs like Goober and the Ghost Chasers (hint: Goober is a dog) or just plain failtastic ideas like The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang. 

That being said, I can't bring myself to hate Wacky Races. This was truly one of Hannah-Barbera's better ideas and I like it more than I like Scooby-Doo. Sorry Scooby, but your antics just can't top Pat Pending's Convert-a-Car no matter how hard you try.

For those of you who don't know about Wacky Races (which would make me sad if you didn't, because it's one of the landmark shows of the 60's and 70's), it was a 17 episode racing show produced in the late 60's that was wacky, pretty much. One of the things that made it unique was that, unlike a lot of Hannah-Barbera's other shows, it had a pretty big cast. It had eleven vehicles and twenty three characters spread among these cars, so if you got bored with one guy, there was always at least twenty other racers to watch instead. It was formulaic, but then again, racing as a whole has a formula to it so you end up not minding too much. Probably because you're watching a cartoon that has mobsters, scientists, cavemen, vampires, and freaking Dick Dastardly. A little formula isn't going to deter you too much from watching someone in a biplane shoot a gun at some hillbilly on the road.

And, like Scooby-Doo, the reason I'm so familiar with this show is because, before the Cartoon Cartoons were created, Cartoon Network used to air reruns of this show all the freakin' time in the early 90's, when the channel was first created. So much that I'm surprised this show only had 17 full episodes.

Pictured: The inspiration for Mario Kart. Don't deny it.

That, and the fact that this show didn't get the overexposure that Scooby later suffered from. There were only two spinoffs to the show (one with Dick Dastardly and one with Penelope Pitstop and the Anthill Mob) and the Wacky Races legacy was able to retire with quiet dignity before a Flim-Flam racer and a Scrappy-Doo racer could show up.

That being said, the easiest way to cover a show is to look at its first episode, (or in this case, the first half of the first episode, since each episode contains two 11 minute segments) so let's see how our loveable racers deal with their most insidious obstacle yet, for they're going to dive into the dark, clammy, largely unexplored evil that is...Arkansas.

Let's look at an episode that literally has nothing to do with actual Seesaws and just made up a pun on the fly, See-Saw to Arkansas.

See-Saw to Arkansas

The Scooby-Doo Show - The Headless Horseman of Halloween

Time to conclude Halloween special month with the most famous "spooky" cartoon in the history of spooky cartoons. Scooby Doo. Or rather, Scooby-Doo, because according to the title cards, his name actually has a hyphen. I just learned today that I've been spelling a cartoon dog's name wrong all my life.

See? Hyphen.

I really don't think there's a person alive who would seek out a cartoon blog such as this one and just doesn't know who the hell Scooby-Doo is, but in case you didn't know, it's a talking great dane that goes on mysteries with his stoner friends and they end up running into jerkwads who feel that dressing up like ghosts or monsters will scare people off of property or give them an edge in the diamond theft industry. That's really it. I'm not going to explain something that has been such a huge part of our animation culture for so very long, if only because anyone and everyone has cracked at least one Scooby-Doo joke.

As for me, I grew up in a period of time where 50% of Cartoon Network's programming was constant Scooby-Doo reruns, so of course, I'm very familiar with Scooby-Doo. It was a sad, barren period before the Cartoon Cartoons were born, but hey, at least it gave me the knowledge of which Scooby-Doo show is which. Maybe if I ever make it onto Jeopardy, that can help me win the bonus question.

And this Scooby-Doo show I'm covering happens to be the third incantation of that ever-famous canine, following the original Scooby-Doo show and The New Scooby-Doo Movies which were almost an hour long and included guest stars. Arguably, this could be considered when Scooby-Doo hit his prime. He had already gained an audience with his original show and worked out his formula, the second run was a brief experiment that showed that the formula could still work, and now he was back doing what he did best. And best of all, this was before Scrappy-Doo was added. Truly this dog was at the top of his game in this show.

...except for Scooby-Dum. Why the hell does this character exist. Why did this show introduce this character.

It's a testament to how bad Scrappy-Doo is when THIS guy is considered more bearable.

Buuuut I'm getting ahead of myself. Time to dig into one of the most famous cartoons of all time and conclude my Halloween month with possibly the most fitting topic ever, Scooby-Doo tackling a ghost on Halloween! So kick back, fondly remember the times when Cartoon Network would air 12 hour marathons of the Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby-Doo to celebrate Halloween, and let's see how a talking great dane and his grey, mentally challenged cousin take on...

The Headless Horseman of Halloween