Animotion and Car Tunes

[Thad]

So does this cross over with She-Ra in any way? Maybe it'll turn out to be an MMO they're all playing or something.

No, this is the direct sequel to the 1990 cartoon, with Kevin Smith at the helm.

Wait, you mean the 1983 cartoon, or are they counting New Adventures?

[Blossom]

So does this cross over with She-Ra in any way? Maybe it'll turn out to be an MMO they're all playing or something.

No, this is the direct sequel to the 1990 cartoon, with Kevin Smith at the helm.

Wait, you mean the 1983 cartoon, or are they counting New Adventures?

My understanding is that it's picking up the storyline of the iteration of the show that actually had a storyline, which I understood to be the 1990 one.

[Thad]

Yeah, the original didn't really have much of anything in the way of continuity until it spun off into She-Ra.

But while New Adventures had a continuity, that continuity kicked off with "launch He-Man, Skeletor, and the Sorceress into space and abandon Eternia and the rest of the cast." This really doesn't look like a continuation of that, though I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it get acknowledged somewhere.

"Hey Skeletor, remember that time we got sent to outer space and you became a pirate?"

*dissolve to flashback*

[mharr]

I'm just hoping this continues Skeletor's evolution into a forth wall breaker who knows he's a Saturday morning villain and just kinda fucks about for fun, snarking on the other bad guys for not getting it.

[Thad]

And speaking of Skeletor:



And I was just talking about Dee Baker not five minutes ago.

[Thad]

And speaking of Clerks:

Bear Is Still Driving: An Oral History of Clerks: The Animated Series

It's got that disjointed oral history thing going where it's clearly multiple interviews stitched together. I particularly like the moment where they put Kevin Smith's insistence that they weren't copying Jim Mahfood's artistic style right after Chris Bailey's acknowledgement that their main influence was Jim Mahfood.

Highlights:

* They originally got a 12-episode offer from UPN, and everybody making the show wanted to take the offer, but they wound up going with ABC because Harvey Weinstein pressured them into it.

* ABC's change of heart probably came down to the success of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? When ABC bought the show, the network was in third place in the ratings and the execs were interested in just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck, but by the time premier time rolled around, Millionaire had become a smash hit and ABC was happy milking that for all it was worth rather than take any risks with unknown quantities.

* The "let's make the second episode a clip show" idea was Paul Dini's.

* The Korean animation sequence was by Steve Loter. The "voice of the semi-racist Korean animator" is David Mandel and it's all ad-libbed.

* There's a bit at the end where it sounds like Kevin Smith is looking to seriously pitch the show for a revival at Hulu. Now's the time to do it, considering the increased demand for animation during lockdown. And while I haven't cared much for Smith's recent output, the cartoon's strength was in its writers' room, not just Smith himself but guys like Mandel and Dini. I think a revival could be pretty good.

It's also interesting how little details can remind you about where you were back when. Before the show was released on DVD, I had a VHS copy of one episode, the second. I'd forgotten why I didn't have the first (actually the fourth, but first-aired) episode on tape. In the interview, they recount that the premier was delayed by a basketball game. So that's why: I wasn't home, I set my VCR, and it taped basketball instead of Clerks.

ETA: Forgot to mention: the bit where Mandel talks about the "celebrity voices are impersonated" disclaimer at the beginning of Clerks as if it were unprecedented is weird; presumably it's because he comes from live action where they don't do that because you can tell when a celebrity is being impersonated. (I mean, not that anyone would have thought Gilbert Gottfried was actually Patrick Swayze, either.) But he talks about it like it's something ABC just made up for Clerks, but South Park was into its fourth season with a "celebrity voices are impersonated...poorly" disclaimer by the time Clerks premiered. The Critic used to have one too (presumably also mandated by ABC, the network where its first season aired), though it was spoken over the end credits of the show, not displayed before the beginning.

[Niku]

Finished watching the first two seasons of DuckTales 2017 available on Disney+; as I mentioned in the TV thread the episodes have finally been put into the correct order (I heard at D+'s launch that they were all kinds of screwy, and they had even been aired on TV in studio-preference rather than in the creator's intended order, which is now what's there on D+). Overall it's damn good, with the major complaint I've got being that it doesn't really live up to my favorite stuff that's been airing over the past several years. It doesn't have the same satisfying breadcrumb mystery or family dynamic of Gravity Falls, nor the emotional scope of Steven Universe. It's trying to serve a whole lot of masters, juggling comedy with nostalgia with season-spanning narratives, and it drops a lot of the balls along the way.

But "children's cartoon not as narratively airtight as adult man might like" is really pretty far from being able to sink the overall joys of the thing. I really loved the nostalgia baiting throughout, because they reimagine a ton of aspects of original DuckTales in often clever ways or going in completely unexpected directions. I get the impression from other places on the internet (such as AV Club) that a lot of people have problems with this show that I don't have at all; Webby as a Mabel totally works for me, Doofus Drake's specifically insane characterization as a creepy billionaire is incredible, and Flintheart Glomgold is just The Goddamn Best.



It also really does blast the nostalgia gun; the internet has no chill about freaking out over their favorite things coming back, so a lot of it ended up being known before I sat down to actually watch the show. But it still constantly surprised me with some of their choices and some of the deep cuts they made -- it spans the original series, the Disney Afternoon, the NES game, and the original duck comics (including things pulled from foreign duck comics that were never really a thing here). And the voice cast is maybe the best cast assembled for a cartoon that I can think of. The credits on the season two finale are really kind of insane when they bring a lot of them in for a cameo-fest. (Aside from all of the core characters, I think Jim Rash as Gyro Gearloose is both my favorite casting and my favorite character.



okay second favorite character.)

Definite thumbs up, just mind that the emotional and narrative throughput is pretty much all the heck over the place.

[beatbandito]

I'm going through season 2 now (originally caught up to Whatever Happened to Della Duck?) and this is probably my favorite gag of the series so far:

[beatbandito]

Close Enough is on HBO Max and by the Regular Show Dude(tte[s?]) and it's very good. I tried to grab a few clips but for some reason only one wasn't copyright claimed.

[Thad]

Usagi Yojimbo is coming to Netflix, kind of!

Netflix is teaming with Gaumont on a CGI animated series titled “Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles,” which is based on the 35-year-old comic book series by Stan Sakai.

Rather than centering around the comic books’ protagonist Miyamoto Usagi, the series will take place in the far future and follow the teenage Rabbit Samurai Yuichi, descendent of the aforementioned great warrior, on his epic quest to become a true samurai. Yuichi will lead a ragtag team of misfit heroes – including a roguish bounty hunter, a cunning ninja, an acrobatic pickpocket and a faithful pet lizard – as he battles depth-charging moles, metal-tipped winged bats, and monsters from another dimension, all in the pursuit to become the best samurai Usagi.

[Brantly B.]

Well there's something sort of new, an American Akira version of something that was already American.

[Thad]

Well there's something sort of new

Only because the last "Usagi Yojimbo, but in the future" cartoon didn't make it past the pilot.

[Brantly B.]

Did it not, or did they turn all the funny animals into humans and have the main character start calling himself Jack?

[Thad]

Thursday's Chat with the Groo Crew opens with Sakai discussing the Usagi cartoon series. He says Usagi will be in it (presumably in flashbacks) but won't be the main character, and also says it takes place after Senso (the Usagi/War of the Worlds mashup that takes place years after the main Usagi series). Sakai's been coy about whether or not Senso is the canonical ending of the Usagi story (as creators generally are with stories set in the future, so as not to lock themselves into developing the story in a particular direction), but it looks like it'll be canonical in the new cartoon, anyway.

[Niku]

The announced voice cast for the Invincible animated series is giving DuckTales 2017 a run for its money. JK Simmons as Omni-man, Walton Goggins as Cecil, and Seth Rogen as Allen all seem especially perfect. I just recently did a re-read and finish of the comic since it ended in 2018, and those first few arcs still really hold up (outside of some weak early 2000s humor that is #problematic sprinkled in here and there) so even if they just do a really solid season or two for this it has the potential to be satisfying.

[Thad]

Did it not, or did they turn all the funny animals into humans and have the main character start calling himself Jack?

I think Samurai Jack has more talking dogs.

[KingRoyal]

YouTuber Jose Argumedo has created an upscaled 4K version of the Fleischer Superman cartoons using machine learnings

The amount of detail and smoothness of the animation is kept in, I really like how these upscaled versions look.

[Mongrel]

This isn't the first instance of it that I've seen, but it's still blowing my fucking mind that "Computer, enhance" is actually becoming a real thing.

"Yellow... block. Yellow... block."

[Thad]

I think I've said this before, but while I'm right there with everybody mocking "zoom in and enhance" on cop shows, I always disagreed when people talked shit about Deckard being able to do it in Blade Runner. The AI complexity required to extrapolate addtional detail from an image is way below what it would take to create machines that can pass for human.

[mharr]

The ESPER works on chemical film photography rather than digital images, right? Plenty of room in those atoms for way more hidden information than the human eye can see.