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

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) - Cowabunga Shredhead

Lately I've been noticing that I've been sneaking a lot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles references into my other blog posts. So you know what? It's turtle time!

If you have no idea what this show is, then I feel nothing but immense pity for you.

I really can't really say much about this show as a whole that hasn't already been said by at least 500 other people. This show is one of those shows where, even if you haven't watched an episode of it, you know what it is. It remains one of the most popular animated television shows of all time. I personally don't think I've run into anyone over the age of 18 who hasn't heard of the turtles.

Also, well, there's a lot to cover about this show.
The average cartoon has 2 or 3 seasons, with around 26-50 episodes.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had 11 Seasons and 193 episodes.

To put this in perspective, think of all the merchandise Spongebob Squarepants has, and then double it. You still won't hit the amount of merchandise this show had. This show honest to god actually made pizza more popular. Dwell on that for a second. To say that this show was popular is an understatement and shames this cartoon. This thing was so humongogigantic in the early 80's that they haven't even invented a word as to how popular it was.

But it's not my job to be a ninja turtle historian. It's my job to digest one of their episodes and regurgitate it up in word form in a way that's at least slightly amusing.

The reason I went with this episode first as opposed to say, the first episode ever is that I've seen quite a few fans of this show, when they cover this show, conveniently only cover the major story arcs from Seasons 1 and 2 (and occasionally the Baxter Stockman arc that spans several seasons, but I'll hit on that later) and then just conveniently ignore the entire rest of the show like it's something that never happened. That apparently the show's best moments were when it was deep, thoughtful, serious, and all those other delightful metaphors usually applied to the 2003 TMNT series.

So because of this, instead of drama and intrigue, I'm going to show you an episode where a ninja covered in cheese graters is programmed by a laser beam to think that he's a giant mutant turtle with a verbal tic while other villains plan to kidnap the president with holograms. Behold how everyone in the 80's was on something in this glorious golden-plated trophy of an episode named...

Cowabunga Shredhead

Felix the Cat: The Movie - Part 4 (Final Part)

Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.

What a better way to issue in a brand new month than by closing up on this strange, delightful acid trip to my eyes that is this movie?

...I can probably think of a million better ways to celebrate the month of September than by sitting all by my lonesome in a quiet room and watching the hopes and dreams of Hungarian animators get silently crushed by horrible time schedules and weak budgets, but since I went for a specific theme for my blog, this is what I'll write about. Otherwise I'd be boring you all about anecdotes involving the colorful people that inhabit my dorms.

Anyways, Felix the Cat! I just recently learned this, but there are a couple Felix the Cat black and white shorts involving circuses. There aren't any women dancing in bubbles or overweight alligators with throat scars in them, but this proves that I was wrong about the filmmakers. They were making a really clever allusion to "Felix Wins Out" and "The Circus", very classic silent 1920's shorts.

...either that, or they were making this crap up as the film was being produced. It's hard to tell.  

NO IT ISN'T, FELIX.

Also, you know how I said that the animation is only going to get even worse as time goes on? Well, yeah, that was mainly to warn you ahead of time about the last portion of the film. Even fans of this movie can't excuse the last fifteen minutes of this film, it's that bad. Characters start to melt, eyeballs start to slide off faces, animation clips starts to be reused, and it's just a horrible thing to watch because you know they could do better because anyone could do better than this. It's a sliding scale of badness with this film, unfortunately, and it's really sad when the high point of any animated film is when the main character is being held captive by an overweight lizard mutant.

So be prepared for the final reckoning as we see this movie finally get out of the circus and reach its conclusion. And trust me, you will be disappointed once you see how this movie ends in...

Felix the Cat: The Movie Part 4!