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No lifeguard. Dive at your own risk. |
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Before I get into the shows that make up my favorite TV time, I must congratulate whoever directed the artistic concept for Adult Swim. The music, the interludes at the pool, the logo, the voiceover ... everything comes together to keep a hip, sardonic flavor flowing between episodes (which, in almost every case, are only 15 minutes long). The mood is right for this -- what is it? this segment? this moment? this conglomerate of shows? this time slot? -- whatever it is, the mood is set perfectly. Right away, you understand that the following will be a series of cartoons aimed at ex-suburbanite ex-teenagers who enjoy long walks on the beach, a good sight gag, non sequitor, and cheese glorious cheese.
And now I'm going to click 'Save' on that first paragraph, so I can watch my little Brak icon do the Macarena. Hee hee hee. I love themes. Go Brak go!
Home Movies
Oh, the torment of mixed feelings. Well, there's no doubt in my mind that this 'toon has provided some of the funniest Adult Swim moments ever. The writing is brilliant, and the voice characterizations are perfectly suited to each character. But the animation....
"Home Movies" is animated by the same studio that produced Comedy Central's "Dr. Katz" a few years ago, and this series revisits that shaky-line technique. I've never been a fan, but the shakes seemed more fluid on "Dr. Katz," more like a thinly-grounded reality than a cartoon with Parkinson's. I'm starting to come around, just a little bit, to the actual shapes of the so-called humans in this series, but I don't think I'll ever enjoy looking at them. I've caught myself actually closing my eyes and just listening to episodes. In fact, if a market still existed for good radio entertainment, "Home Movies" would make a magnificent radio sit-com.
The plot concerns a young boy named Brendon who likes to make movies. He has two friends -- Jason and Melissa -- who help him in his filming endeavors, and a single mom named Paula, who has a cool cartoon haircut. For subplotting purposes, there's also Coach McGuirk, a soccer coach and all-around foil to anything handy. The stories follow a "Seinfeld" or "Dr. Katz" line -- nothing much happens, but the reasons to watch are the vignettes, the moments of comedy in between which sparkle due to perfect pitch and timing.
But that shaky line crap. It drives me to distraction, to seizure. Who decided this was cool? Or that it looked good? It doesn't look good. It looks like something I drew after waking up from a three-day wine binge. The quivering is more than annoying, it's a debilitating disease. It makes my brain rattle like a monkey cage containing an enraged chimpanzee who doesn't want to test any more cosmetics today, thank you very much. Why must you put the lipstick on me? You don't let me have sex with the other monkeys; I don't need lipstick. Keep the lipstick away from me! Leave me alone! Give me a banana! And above all stop making me watch the shaky lines! Eeee! Eeee! Oooo! Ooo - ooo - ooo - ahhhhhhhh!
Heeeeeeeey Macarena! Alright! Hee hee hee.
Oh, hello. Yes, "The Brak Show" is my favorite. In fact, Brak is my favoritist person in the whole universe except for my mom and that one guy on the bus who gave me a penny. Shiny penny. Still got it. Yep.
Brak lives at home with his mom, who's a Brak type species chick (but she enjoys dressing like Donna Reed), and dad, who's extremely small and handsome and human. Yes, you can be extremely human. His best friend is Zorak, but as usual, Zorak is a big mean green bug who only makes life miserable for Brak and everybody else. That's okay, they're still friends. Brak has a song about it.
Brak sings songs about many things. This is not because Brak is a singer, or even a musician of any sort really, but because Brak is emotionally moved by the world around him, in touch with a deeper softer side of the universe and its beauties than the rest of us mere mortals. Yes, Brak's wisdom leads to many insightful lyrics like, "Friendship is an ointment." 'Tis poignant. 'Tis true. 'Tis.
Brak's next door neighbor is Thundercleese, a gigantic warrior robot who could destroy the world, or at least the neighborhood, but prefers to keep a tidy home and focus on community government. There's also Sisto, Brak's brother. We don't talk about Sisto. We don't even sing about him.
If you ever want to laugh, see the episode in which Zorak inherits a beautiful Backstreet Boy voice.
Aqua Teen Hunger Force
I've come up with some pretty strange ideas in my lifetime. But nothing has come out of my brain quite as sick and twisted as a superhero team of fast food products. Aqua Teen Hunger Force consists of Master Shake (a large milkshake with the IQ of a medium milkshake and little teeny gloved hands), Frylock (a floating Biggie fries with psychic powers and soul, baby), and Meatwad (a wad of meat). Together, they fight crime. Well, they don't fight it so much as go near the crime and distract it.
This is one of those shows that keeps you laughing just by being too ridiculous for words. I mean, a talking shape-shifting wad of meat ... I repeat, a talking shape-shifting wad of meat. There's also a fat guy in a wife beater who's their landlord, or something. It's not very clear and it doesn't need to be. The whole show is a series of ridiculous gags that make just enough sense to be funny, no more or less. The humor reminds me of early Steve Martin stand-up -- if you step back and look at it after multiple viewings, there's a perfect logic buried underneath all the silliness. But who cares? The silliness is what counts. This - is - comedy.
Sealab 2021
This is a parody of pretty much any cheap Star Trek knock-off. It happens to take place underwater in a futuristic, er, sea lab. The cast of characters has been carefully crafted to send up every stereotype. Want a roll call? I know you do. Here goes:
Captain Hazel "Hank" Murphy: The venerable old gray hair who helms the ship's activities and probably downs more Prozac than Melanie Griffith. He reminds me of Barry Bostwick's mayor on "Spin City," only even sillier.
Marco Marquez: The Erik Estrada guy. He's got a lot of testosterone, and no clear duty on the ship.
Stormy Waters: The pretty boy, who's hair's glued perfectly into place while his mind remains resolutely unhinged. He's one of those guys who skates through life on his good looks, which makes one wonder why he's on a scientific mission and not the set of a Gap commercial.
Debbie DuPree: Well, you gotta have a blonde. She's a marine biologist. Remember when everyone and their sister wanted to go into marine biology? Whatever happened to that trend?
Jodene Sparks: A guy, despite his name, and the radar technician.
Quentin Q. Quinn: The black guy who just happens to have multiple doctorate degrees, the only modicum of talent on the whole ship, and still manages to be a token black guy. It's a talent, really.
The writing on Sealab 2021 is very similar to that of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and The Brak Show (all three are done by the Williams Street studio that produced the original Space Ghost Coast To Coast), so there's really very little to say about the humor. It's funny, okay? Though not as funny as the others, and I'm hard pressed to put my finger on why. The humor tends to be more sexual and mild-curse-word based than on the other shows, and thus doesn't achieve the heights of wackiness as often. Still, anyone who finds Aquaman to be a patently stupid superhero will enjoy the exploits of the Sealab crew.
Cowboy Bebop
This one, as a more serious offering, always catches me off-guard. It's a superb anime thriller about a group of space traveling bounty hunters. The soundtrack features some sweet '60s mod spy jams, and the rhythm of the action is the best I've seen in any non-fantasy Japanimation. The real treat is the dialogue and voice characterizations, which aren't hampered by the translation. In fact, the characters are fluent -- in both language and attitude -- making them refreshingly accessible for Western ears.
But it's not a funny show. Sure, there are plenty of humorous moments, and in any other lineup it would probably be labeled as 'the comedy,' but surrounded by the wackiness of the Williams Street offerings, its pace seems stately and oddly serious. I'm glad Cartoon Network found a venue to air this admittedly fine program, but placing it in the Adult Swim realm puts a burden on the writing that the show doesn't deserve.
As with any anime serial, the host of characters is too long, and each life is too complex to describe here. I will point out my favorite character: Faye Valentine, the hard-nosed female bounty hunter with a propensity to risk everything and a deep desire to keep the past tucked away in the past. She's easily the most flushed out and noble character I've ever seen in an anime serial, especially considering this is a genre that uses women for cheap sex appeal in the best cases, and exploits them as objects in the worst.
Space Ghost Coast To Coast
Last but not least is the granddaddy of Adult Swim, everybody's favorite 15 minute late night talk show, starring the one and only, Spaaaaaaaaaace Ghooooooooost. I still contend that Craig Kilborn's entire CBS show is just a rip off of SG:CTC. The only difference being, of course, that Craig Kilborn doesn't have a giant praying mantis for a band leader. And he can't turn invisible. This show has enough notoriety and history that any analysis here would just be redundant. All I will say is that Cartoon Network should be producing new episodes to anchor Adult Swim instead of just running the old ones, as classic as they are. Every once in a while an episode will come on that features a dated guest -- Hanson comes to mind -- and you're only reminded of how painfully long it's been since the last fresh offering of the Ghost who's the Host with the Most.
OTHER STUFF
Jacko-lantern: I got an e-mail from one Miss Rori after the "You Rock My World" review went up, asking if I'd seen the Michael Jackson Halloween Special that aired on MTV during the height of Jacko's press bonanza. I told her I'd only caught enough to be shocked at the subtext, and she helpfully provided a detailed review.
The setup involves Jacko living in a big mansion and being an all-around scary guy. Several irate townspeople (and a requisite group of delightful young cherubs) storm the castle to demand he leave. Instead, he engages in some Beetlejuice-type freakery, making silly and scary faces, etc. I suspect this gem will be hard to come by (you'll see why) and won't air until at least next Halloween, so enjoy. And thanks to Miss Rori for doing my job for me here:
He didn't release it in the U.S. until now. Actually, it played overseas, and was sort of test-marketed in the U.S. at a few L.A. theatres in 1996. It played before Thinner; Stephen King had helped Michael develop the concept, you see. But that concept was developed circa 1993, before everything happened. I remember reading about it at the time, it sounded like a nice light piece a la "Thriller" -- same concept addressing the "freak" matter, but not too heavy. How light? Actually it was intended for the film Addams Family Values. (That's why there's the gag in that film about his "Heal The World" organization.) But what ultimately emerged from that old concept was, as you noted, a lot less light. I actually taped this video -- it's 38 minutes! -- and here's the gist of its remainder: The faces start as funny, but then take a turn for the worse. The crowd is now pretty spooked, but they can't leave. Michael then brings out (with heavy special effects) a chorus of ghosts -- musty figures that look like 18th century French rich dishes, pre-revolution. This slowly leads into the first song, "2 Bad," which is basically a rant against the people hounding him. (Actually, the other two songs I'll mention later are pretty much the same thing. His music was *very* bitter at this time, and though the beats are good, the lyrics are rather uncomfortable.) After this, there's an extended dance break for the ghosts, romping around, scaring the adults but delighting the kids, though everybody's really impressed when they all walk up the walls and dance on the ceiling.
But the mayor is still pretty pissed, so Michael brings them down and proceeds to throw off his clothes and skin, and now we've got a dancing skeleton (and the second song, "Is It Scary"). The skeleton Michael then makes all the ghosts turn into decaying ghouls to further try to frighten the mayor, although this turns into another dance break. That doesn't unsettle the mayor enough, so skeleton-Michael becomes ghoul-Michael and proceeds to possess the mayor. So for the last song, "Ghosts," we've got the mayor doing all the traditional Michael-moves. (Truth is, Michael was playing the mayor for this whole video, under very heavy makeup. No wonder he had Stan Winston direct it, too.) The mayor has enough and cries out for this to stop, and the ghosts/ghouls leave. But he is still possessed and now becomes a ghoul himself, forced to confront his reflection in a mirror, taunting himself ("Who's scary now? Who's the freak now? Freaky boy! Freak circus freak" etc.). He can't bear this, and with that Michael leaves his body. Michael asks if they still want him to go. The kids don't, but the mayor does, and Michael says he'll go -- and smashes his fists, face and knees into the ground, breaking apart as if he were plaster. Eventually it all turns to dust and blows away.
Everyone is sad except the mayor, who is leading them out, but the doors open onto a giant ghoul-Michael face. This scares the mayor enough that he flees, smashing through a window. "Normal" Michael appears once more and asks if everyone had fun. They say so. Two of the little kids also manage to scare him with the skull-mask we saw early on. As a sort of punch line, the other kid apparently does something really scary that freaks everyone out, but we don't see what it is.
This is a fascinatingly odd piece. At first it looks like it might be a sheer goof on his eccentricities and what happened to him, sort of like Andy Kaufman's 1983 special "Soundstage," where along with his traditional art/comic hijinks there's a lot of self-parody about what had become of his career. But the tone is too dour for that -- there's not a lot of humor on display. There *is* a lot of self-pitying, as you probably gathered from that synopsis. He also tries very hard to guide the audience reactions to the stuff going on: the camera keeps cutting to the crowd looking on things with Spielberg-style magical delight or exaggerated mock fear. Going back to the Kaufman comparison this short probably has as many, if not more, crowd reaction shots than the entire two hours of Man on the Moon! It comes across as very forced; it's not as if the antics of Michael and the ghosts are really all that impressive (aside from the dancing) or scary. Maybe had it been a 3-D show at Disney World it would have been, but it isn't. Obviously Michael was going for a Tim Burton-esque answer to "Thriller," particularly drawing on Edward Scissorhands for inspiration. But the heavy borrowing of that film's elements don't really work here -- it tends to remind me of the honest emotion that film elicited. This feels terribly phony and self-indulgent.
It's sad, because Michael once had a very amusing sense of surreal humor in some of his videos. The film Moonwalker especially has a lot of goofiness in it. But he seemed to lose it as he started fashioning the "King of Pop" concept in the late '80s; now he's above self-parody ... at least consciously.
Beg Your Pardon: I was a little irate over the claim of Tom Arnold's Fox Sports Net show that it's the "Best Damn Sports Show" ... in fact, that's what it calls itself. Well, my anger has been appeased, thanks to the marvelous new ESPN show "Pardon The Interruption" (or PTI, since everything in sports needs an abbreviation). Co-anchored by Washington Post columnists Tony Kornheiser and Mike Wibon, the show is a knock-down drag out fight on the sports issues of the day, each issue given a time limit, which simulates the thrill of a beat-the-clock sports play. The set-up of the show is nothing less than brilliant, easily capturing the short attention span of a sports nut for the full half hour, but the real strength of the show is the hosts. Tony and Mike have a perfect argumentative chemistry, the likes of which I haven't seen on television since Siskel and Ebert were in their prime. Unlike Siskel and Ebert, the show doesn't attempt to give sports commentary a mass appeal, but there's plenty for the already enthused sports fan to chew on, and that's what makes PTI truly the best damn sports show, period. --Chris J. Magyar Date: 12/5/01 Copyright © 2001 by Chris J. Magyar |
