Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I remember reading a few passing mentions of a block of upcoming programming on Cartoon Network, something called ADULT SWIM. I read a story about the line-up, registered that there was a SPACE GHOST spin-off, was pleased to see they'd be showing COWBOY BEBOP, and didn't really retain anything about the other shows mentioned.
Then I got a couple of e-mails last week from a writer on one of the shows, and I wrote him back, and he called the Labs, and we chatted a bit, and he put me in touch with one of the guys from publicity, and then an envelope appeared on Friday, and inside was a tape, episodes of each of the shows except COWBOY BEBOP, and I've got those on DVD, so I have a pretty good idea what to expect.
When I finally got around to watching the tape, it was the middle of the night, 2:30 in the morning. First up is HOME MOVIES, a show that's already had one shot at your time and attention when it was played on UPN. It's produced by Soup2Nuts, the company that used to be Tom Snyder Productions. They had a pretty healthy run with DR. KATZ, their original animated show for Comedy Central, and HOME MOVIES definitely bears some resemblance to KATZ in terms of sensibilities. Like KATZ, this show is animated in a squiggle-vision style. There is a specific voice at work here. Loren Bouchard and Brendon Small are the creators of the show, and it's obvious where the inspiration came from: the lead character is an eight-year-old boy named Brendon Small. He wants to be a filmmaker, and is constantly shooting video films with his friends.
There's a great deal of charm to the show, and you'll hear familiar voices, performers from DR. KATZ as well as Paula Poundstone, who plays Brendon's divorced mom. Much of the dialogue sounds improvised, or at the very least augmented with ad-libbing. It's the sort of show you genuinely have to listen to, since there's subtle voice work, an almost captured quality to the way the characters talk. Aardman Animation did such a great job with stuff like this in CREATURE COMFORTS as well as other shorts of theirs. There's an off-the-cuff quality to the humor, droll and feather-light. This show isn't out to be the wackiest thing on the air, or to dazzle you with pace. It's a gentle joke, and I enjoyed what I saw. Didn't really demand that I get to the TV by 10:00, which is when ADULT SWIM begins, but if I’m watching the entire block, HOME MOVIES is certainly worth a look.
Next up is THE BRAK SHOW, and here’s where the real sensibilities of ADULT SWIM start to assert themselves. Me, I’m a fan of absurdist humor, and there is something deeply, deeply strange about most of the programming you’ll see here. Take THE BRAK SHOW, for example. Brak started off as one of the recurring characters on the wonderful SPACE GHOST COAST-TO-COAST, and I always thought of him as a little less interesting than Zorak, Space Ghost’s giant insect bandleader, or Moltar, the henchman running the show from a tech room. Brak was just this demented space pirate who would show up and ramble incoherently or, worse, sing from time to time. He’s not really my first choice to anchor a show of his own, and yet... it works.
It helps that Zorak is also featured on this show, since Zorak is one of the funniest characters on television. It also helps that Jim Fortier and Pete Smith, the writer/producers of the show, have fleshed out Brak’s world with some memorably bizarre characters. His parents are a crack-up. Mom looks just like Brak, but dressed like June Cleaver, and Dad is a tiny little Hispanic man who is obsessed with why the local bishop has rejected his deviled eggs. “The bishop is a fool,” he mumbles darkly. They live right down the street from Thundercleese, a mighty robot warrior with a steady stream of assassins trying to kill him, many of whom end up in the kitchen of Brak’s house by mistake.
The episode I saw involved Zorak coughing up a pink lump of tissue named Carmine, who turned out to be the source of Zorak’s familiar voice. Once Carmine was set free, Zorak turned out to have, as Brak put it, “a beautiful man voice,” one which Carmine exploits by making a singing star out of Zorak. The lyrics to Zorak’s songs are classic anti-social malice with a smile on, and had me laughing very hard. Like SPACE GHOST, THE BRAK SHOW episodes are 15 minutes long, and I’m a big fan of that length. There’s no room for padding. A comic idea can be tweaked and twisted and fairly well-explored, but there’s no time for things to linger and wear out their welcome. Every joke counts.
According to the TV schedule I’m looking at, THE BRAK SHOW is on twice tonight, airing at 10:30 and 10:45.
At 11:00, HARVEY BIRDMAN: ATTORNEY AT LAW is up, and it’s well worth tuning in for. This is going to be one of the shows people talk about from this line-up, one of the two that has potential to be a real buzz hit. The premise is simple: Harvey Birdman tries cartoon world cases. In tonight’s episode, he agrees to represent Dr. Quest in a custody case when he is sued by Race Bannon, his longtime “traveling companion,” who feels like he has been the primary caregiver to Johnny Quest and Hadji. Bannon is represented in court by Vulturo, one of Birdman’s adversaries. It is a gloriously silly show, and genuinely adult. This is great example of taking the freedom of ADULT SWIM and running with it. THE BRAK SHOW could air anytime on Cartoon Network, but HARVEY BIRDMAN couldn’t. The show is both subtle and blatant at time, and the animation is handled by the same JJ Seidelmeyer who has created so many of the memorable TV FUNHOUSE cartoons on SNL in the last few years, like THE AMBIGUOUSLY GAY DUO and GEORGE CLOONEY, a pitch-perfect parody of SPEED RACER. One of the kicks of HARVEY BIRDMAN is seeing all of these characters occupying the same world. This show delves into the secret lives of these cartoons, the ones we always knew they were leading when we weren’t watching them. It’s funny stuff, smart and memorable.
SEALAB 2021 is on at 11:15 tonight, and this is the show that is written by Christopher Ward, among others. He’s the writer who contacted me last week, and we spoke on Thursday morning about his background with the Upright Citizen’s Brigade and how excited he is to be working on SEALAB, his first television writing job. Here’s an example of recycling at work: there was an old Hanna Barbera show called SEALAB 2020, an underwater action show designed by Alex Toth. SEALAB 2021 is repurposed animation, cut and pasted with new connective material used to fill in gaps. The result is a bent little show about a bunch of lunatics living in an underwater research facility. “Stormy” Waters, Marco Rodrigo Dias de Vivar Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Debbie, “the black Debbie,” Captain Hank, and Dr. Quentin Quinn are all completely insane. Debbie’s biological clock goes off in this first episode, and she decides to pick a worthy husband from among the men of the Sealab. This show is downright dirty at times, and you’ll find yourself gasping at a few of the jokes. The real key here is to see how far these guys are willing to go with these superfreaks they’ve created. I’ll definitely stay tuned in.
11:30 to midnight belongs to SPACE GHOST: COAST TO COAST, and that’s fine with me. I’ve loved this show for a long time, and still find the dynamics between Space Ghost, Zorak, Moltar, and the guests to be endless fascinating. I laugh every time I think of Charlton Heston’s appearance, and the over-eager familiarity Space Ghost addressed him with. “Can I call you... Chuck?”
A wary Heston replied, “Yes, I suppose that’s okay...”
”How about Cheston? Can I call you Cheston?!”
”No.”
”Oh, come on, Cheston...”
”I said no.”
After a long pause for Space Ghost to reorganize his thoughts, he starts, “As we were saying, Cheston, you were in...”
”No, Space Ghost. No.”
Of course, every time I see him now, the first thing I think is there’s Cheston. SPACE GHOST does that to you. It burrows these little jokes into your brain, little time bombs that go off for days after you see a good episode. I love the show, and I’m glad they’re still producing original episodes, that it’s still a priority for the network.
Tonight’s presentation of ADULT SWIM is capped by two half-hour episodes of COWBOY BEBOP. I’m not an anime fan by and large. To me, it’s always about individual shows or films. If I like something, great. I like it because it’s a great story or it’s particularly well told. I don’t just have a blanket love for the genre. With COWBOY BEBOP, I am more than impressed. This is a science fiction show with some great hard science (watch the details of the space travel in the show... someone did their homework) and some daring stylistic choices. The action is great, the worlds the show visits are interesting. My first exposure to the series was when a friend brought over a DVD and threw it on for me. I didn’t know what I was getting into, and it was one of those pleasant surprises that you can’t get out of your head afterwards. I own several of the collections of episodes, but I’ll watch them on Cartoon Network anyway. There’s something very cool about this show finding a network home, and in talking to Jim Babcock, one of the public relations guys from Cartoon Network, I’ve been told they are doing their best to have an invisible editorial hand on the show. Based on some of the content in the other shows in this line-up, we aren’t going to have to worry about COWBOY BEBOP getting sliced and diced. After all, this isn’t all tentacle rape and exploding heads. This is more of a rough and tumble adventure show. It’s not like there’s much to object to on display.
I do have one objection, though. Where the hell is AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE tonight? You’re showing THE BRAK SHOW twice, and you aren’t showing AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE even once? Now I feel like I’ve got a secret I can’t quite explain to anyone. Please, you have to show AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE. Immediately.
And what is AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE, you ask? Written and produced by David R. Willis and Matt Maiellaro, this is one of the most original comedy programs I’ve seen since the original John K. run of REN & STIMPY. It’s either going to be huge, or disappear after two episodes. For something this daft, there’s no middle ground.
It’s the story of Master Shake, who is indeed a large milkshake with a short temper and a shorter attention span, Frylock, a super-powered box of large french fries, and Meatwad, a tiny ball of shape-shifting meat who loves to get out his jam box and dance. The three of them solve mysteries. Badly. Very, very badly.
This is the sort of show that will either make you laugh so hard you miss jokes or miss you completely. I was with the show from the moment I saw Dr. Weird in his lab, wearing a W-shaped muumuu, unleashing his giant rabbit shaped Rab-bot. The Rab-bot goes on a rampage, smashing the car of Carl, who happens to live next door to the Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Carl is a dumpy guy with thick tufts of body hair poured into ratty sweatpants, and as soon as he showed up, I was helpless. The show just gets funnier and funnier and funnier as Master Shake solves the crime repeatedly between dips in Carl’s pool.
For the first time since I started at AICN, I find myself at a loss to properly convey why I love something, but I do. I just had an immediate reaction to the lunacy of this show. Hell, even Christopher Ward admitted that AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE was his favorite of all the ADULT SWIM shows. It’s the sort of thing that is impossible to encapsulate, but which forces people to try because of how excited they get when they see it.
ADULT SWIM encores each week from 10:00 to 1:00 on Thursday nights. I highly recommend you sample some or all of the programs that are on tonight, and keep your eyes peeled for the first airing of AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE. Let’s hear it for another bold move by Cartoon Network hot on the heels of SAMURAI JACK and just prior to JLA, which I’ll be digging into further in the weeks ahead. Looks like I’ll be watching a lot of cartoons this year... and loving every minute of it.
"Moriarty" out.
