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

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

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

Captain Planet and the Planeteers - Skumm Lord

So guys, it turns out they're making a live-action Captain Planet movie. My brain's still trying to decide if this is merely just a bad idea or if this is a so bad it's good kind of an idea. What's even sadder is that a small part of me, the horrid part of me that remembers watching this show as a kid, wants to actually see this train wreck unfold on screen at least once. Mostly because I want to see how modern CGI would render out Captain Planet's mullet.

So to celebrate bad ideas with big budgets, I'm going to do a Captain Planet episode. Pray for my soul, gentle readers because this will be painful.

The perfect test to see if someone lived in the 90's; if they flinch
when they see these faces, then they grew up in that era.

Choosing a Captain Planet episode is sort of like a grim game of Russian Roulette. Sometimes you'll pick an episode that has something you can laugh at, or sometimes you'll pick an episode that's just barbarous preaching and "save the planet!" for about 20 minutes. There are episodes that everyone can relate to, like the illegal dumping of garbage into the ocean, and there are episodes that skew a little too far into the far left to be comfortable, like the episode that says that people who have more than two kids are killing the environment. It's rather telling that I know a couple people in my college that couldn't see this show as a kid because their parents thought it was liberal propaganda, it's THAT bad.

Luckily there's one such episode that I can deprive some form of enjoyment out of because of a couple things. For one, the environmentalism takes a back seat in this episode (or at least as far as it could get to the backseat, seeing as this is Captain Planet) and becomes more like a science fiction horror mixed in with some sort of medical drama than anything. Another, it's got Jeff Goldblum as a giant rat. Yes, this is a Verminous Skumm episode and this was back when DIC Entertainment could afford Jeff Goldblum to voice for their cartoon. Maybe they should've saved some of that money for some of their other shows, especially considering how cheaply animated the Super Mario Bros. Super Show was.

My friends, I'm going to show you an episode of Captain Planet where everyone in Brazil turns into hideous rat creatures. I'm going to show you...

Skumm Lord

Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats - Iron Cats

I've been covering a lot of 90's stuff, so I figure now's a good time to cover something a little more ancient. The 80's! That's like ten years older than the 90's!

More importantly, Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats.

Heathcliff has a strange history. The comic came before the Garfield comic strip, but Heathcliff is usually passed off as the rip-off. The Heathcliff cartoon (or cartoons, a fact not many people even know about), came out before Garfield and Friends, but I've seen a disturbing amount of people say the Heathcliff cartoon ripped off Garfield. Heathcliff is like the Time Lord of ripping stuff off.

I went with this show for a couple reasons.

1. The Heathcliff: The Movie phenomenon, where they basically packaged a couple Heathcliff cartoons already made and put it in theaters. That's right, they actually put episodes that were rerunning on television and made parents charge for it. Wow. That level of just not giving a damn from a big name animation studio is pretty amazing and means I have to touch upon this show at least once.

2. The Catillac Cats, DIC creations, managed to outstage Heathcliff in his own show. I guess it was because there was more of them to bounce their personalities off of each other and therefore were more entertaining than the trickster motif Heathcliff's cartoons had, or I could address the elephant in the room and point out that Cleo, with her really humanoid body and curves, probably created her fair share of furries in the 1980's.

It's pretty easy to spot Cleo because she's the only cat with cleavage.

3. The intro was the best part of the series. Don't believe me? I guarantee that if you asked someone what they remembered from the Heathcliff show, they'll probably chime in with "Heathcliff Heathcliff, no one should, terrify the neighborhood!" or recite the part where the singers go "Oh a ohhhh a ooooohhhh oh ohhh a ohhhhh!!" It's one of those classic theme songs that will never leave your head the moment you hear it.

Since this show was split into unrelated 11 minute segments, I'll just cover an 11 minute segment and treat it like it's own episode. That means this blog will either be half the length of a traditional "holy crap that's long" blog post I normally do or nothing about the length changes.

So with that, let's watch Heathcliff! Or rather, a group of cats that has nothing to do with Heathcliff. That's right, Heathcliff won't even appear in this analysis. Not one bit.

Iron Cats