Archive for category Television
CHILDHOOD REVISITED – SWAT KATS
Posted by kjohnson1585 in Animation, Childhood Revisited, Television, Uncategorized, Writing on January 7, 2013
Swat Kats really, really strove to be different.
In the wake of the huge popularity of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, studios and networks scrambled to create the next “badass talking animal superhero” group. Street Sharks, Dinosaucers, Biker Mice from Mars (which they tried TWICE), Wild West Cowboys of Moo Mesa, and Bucky O’ Hare. Large, broad-shouldered, fine specimens of male machismo with animal attributes spout cheesy one-liners as they beat the crap out of embarrassingly incompetent villains within stories of questionable coherency and consistency. None of these really succeeded, and on the occasion I do look back on them, it’s easy to see why.
Swat Kats, however, really tried to be different. Utilizing an anime-inspired character design, darker and muted colors, variable body-types, and slightly-meatier plots, Swat Kats sought, at some point in its development, to change the game around, to bring a more tense and legitimately exciting experience to young kids. And, in all fairness, it worked. It was the highest rated kids show in 1994 and plans were laid for more episodes and other commercial products.
But suddenly, it was cancelled.
Why? They were in the midst of three new episodes when it was unceremoniously shelved. It was shoved into part of some Hanna-Barabara animated block of TV, then dropped of the schedule, before a half-assed DVD set came out in 2010, some four or five years later. Why did one of the highest rated kids show ever get canned so quickly?
After watching the two aired seasons, I can hazard a guess: Swat Kats must have been a FUCKING ordeal behind the scenes.
Swat Kats: The Radical Squadron – (1993)
Director: Robert Alvarez
Starring: Charlie Adler, Barry Gordon, Gary Owens
Screenplay(s) by: Glenn Leopold, Lance Falk, Christian Tremblay
I can only describe Swat Kats as a well-oiled, wonderfully organized mess. And I mean this as a positive. The titular show, in which Chance “T-Bone” Furlong and Jake “Razor” Clawson, disgraced Enforcers (kinda like a police/military government unit), team up in a totally not-gay way as masked do-gooders with masterful technology developed from a junkyard, seems egregiously stuck among the fantasy-tale-trappings of 70s animation, the ultra-male-heroism of the 80s, and the “EXTREME/RADICAL” facade of the 90s. It liberally bounces between time-travel, magic amulets, giant monsters, out-of-control robots, mutated vicious flora, invading aliens, violent underground creatures, doppelgangers, mad scientists, zombie mummies, ghosts and possessions, curses, parallel worlds, and threats of nuclear fallout. The sheer variety of adventures isn’t necessarily the problem; it’s that Swat Kats swiftly rips through them in such a short time period (23 episodes) that it’s impossible to get a sense of what kind of world the actually Swat Kats live in (especially since most of the characters hardly seem particularly phased by these events).
Swat Kats is best thought of as a comic-book-as-animated-series, each episode being a different issue within a different set of circumstances. Some episodes are just paced better, while others seem so forced and calculating and radical that I suspect there was a quite a bit of tension between the creative staff and the executive heads. Christian Tremblay, Glenn Leopold and Robert Alvarez wanted to make a straight-forward, decently action show with a bit of depth and nuance. The studio wanted to shoehorn in previously established popular tropes, like medieval fantasy stories (which aren’t too far outside the realm of the show, but should not have been the THIRD episode), a ridiculously bombastic KISS-esque soundtrack (which was thankfully toned down in the second season), and miles upon miles of exposition.
Oh. God. The exposition.
I’ve seen many, many cartoons, both old and new, but Swat Kats takes the cake in exposition. They explain what they have to do, explain what they’re doing, explain what they’ve done, whether it worked or not, and if not, what will happen if the threat is not neutralized. They do this over and over again. Repeatedly. Other characters will lend their voices to YET AGAIN explain events that are obvious. Not even the worst Hanna-Barbara or Saturday morning cartoons went to the lengths this show did. No writer or director worth their salt would think this is a good thing; I can only suspect that some overzealous executive felt kids wouldn’t be able follow what was going on.
And yet, despite Swat Kats’s frantic, bi-polar, over-explanatory nature… it’s easy to like. Not necessarily enjoy, but there’s stuff along the surface to really engage in. The aerial battles and fight sequences are really well done, and the hand-to-hand, ground-level action sequences are quite exciting. People are flat-out killed on the show; there is no mandated “red shirts jumping out of helicopters with parachutes” creed when they’re destroyed. It has a fairly dark tinge – perhaps not as dark as nostalgia might believe, but I have had moments where I exclaimed, “Oh shit!” in seeing a feline citizen killed under toppled barrels, and a mutated scientist blown-up into goo.
When the cast does anything other than explain the plot, we get some pretty fun characters, although they’re a bit one-note. T-Bone and Razor have a decent “more than just bromance” interplay between each other, although their casual, just-hanging-out conversations work much better than their attempts at one-upmanship. Mayor Manx is the comic relief, a literal scaredy-cat that laughably raises taxes due to the sheer amount of destruction that occurs in their city. Deputy Mayor Calico Briggs is the female “love interest” who keeps the Mayor in check and can contact the Swat Kats at any time. She’s feisty but kinda pointless, although she has her moments. Second season newcomer Felina Feral is more useful as an Enforcer without getting too stereotypically butch, but there’s nothing beyond that. And her uncle, Commander Ulyssus Feral… well, he’s just frustrating. He and his Enforcers are so ineffectual, constantly being destroyed by the threat of the week, yet he always tries to solve every problem by throwing more Enforcers at it. But when the Swat Kats save the day, he gets mad at them for destroying city property, even though the Enforcers cause half of it themselves. Yeah, sure, you can say it masks a seething jealousy, but it doesn’t exactly come through on the screen.
As mentioned above, Swat Kats’s core issue is that it shoots for the stars, piling on conflicts that grow more and more fantastical. It fails to ease viewers into its world; instead, it assumes kids for the most part will just accept every event thrown its way. If you can manage that, then under that surface are some pretty interesting ideas, such as “Razor’s Edge,” where Razor loses his nerve after he believes he maimed an innocent couple. In “The Dark Side of the Swat Kats,” Swat Kats calls attention to the non-lethal weaponry used by the team by warping them to a parallel world, in which the Swat Kat doppelgangers utilizes lethal and deadly force (probably the best piece of brilliant subtlety in a show that isn’t really known for it). And kudos to the show for its willingness to show origin stories, for heroes and villains alike. Although lacking in clarity, we even learn why T-Bone and Razor left the Enforcers:
I spoke with Christian Tremblay via email, who also graciously participated in this reddit Q&A, who said the show was cancelled due to the toy line coming out too late (full interview will be forthcoming). While I can’t argue with one of the show’s creators, a part of me can’t shake the feeling that there’s something else here. A late toy line is one thing, but the show’s popularity should have been able to withstand that. More likely it was a combination of that, with parental complaints and executive concerns, that led to the sudden cancellation. Whatever the case may be, there does seem to be a bit of hope of the show returning, according to Mr. Temblay himself.
Swat Kats: The Radical Squadron threw excitement at you like it was going out of style, but had a love for its premise and characters that can’t be denied, even if that love didn’t know when to be quiet once in a while. Still, it’s a fun show, and after swallowing up some of the groaner gags, it’s almost impossible to hate; any other reaction would be less than radical.
(Side note: The show changed visual styles within the second season, making the character designs more angular and sharper, and producing a much cooler, stylistic opening credit. While working solely with the animation studio Mook, Inc. in the second season was a great decision, I personally believe Mook worked better with the first season’s slightly toonier designs. This is much more apparent with the female characters; Callie and Felina’s flat faces are disappointing to say the least.)
CHILDHOOD REVISITED – DOG CITY
Posted by kjohnson1585 in Animation, Childhood Revisited, Television, Uncategorized on November 27, 2012
Finding simplicity in complexity was Jim Henson’s Dog City’s surprising gift. Here’s an example of how other studios handled meta-commentary in their animated format.
I began watching Jim Henson’s Dog City as a joke. I remember the program being really goofy; and as such, the idea was to watch this silly-little Dog City show, then the ultra-semi serious Swat Kats, and compare the two in some elaborate “dog vs. cats” anthropomorphic utilization in early 90s animation, like some over-wrought college dissertation.
My mistake, of course, was discounting the name Jim Henson, someone who would rarely put his name on something that wasn’t good quality. The craftsman more or less behind The Muppets, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, and a host of other pieces of entertainment had a knack for delivering entertainment that went well above and beyond the basic and simplistic necessities required for young viewers. He brought heart and a love for the characters in his creations, qualities that were increasingly rare and discounted in children’s entertainment.
Dog City, the show, was derived in part from an all-puppet, 39-minute movie of the same name, which was part of the The Jim Henson Hour. It was a comically gritty vision containing murderous, kidnapping canine thugs, and dog puns. Whether or not this holds up I cannot say – but what I can say is that the puppets were re-purposed for the live-action segments for the half-live, half-animated 31-episode run on FOX. It tells the story of Eliot Shag, an animator who uses the various influences in his life to tell the animated story of Ace Hart, a private-eye who solves crimes in the canine world of Dog City (“Curb Yourself!”).
Self-awareness and meta-jokes were becoming a big thing in 90s animation. Tiny Toons, Sam & Max, and especially Animaniacs were representative of a knowing, winking, comic take on the very medium that viewers were watching. This was all well and good, especially for older viewers, but younger viewers weren’t often given a strong incentive to engage in the world that was created – mainly because the world really wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. Peter Sauder and J.D. Smith, the show’s story editors, seemed completely wrong for the direction Dog City would take . Sauder primarily wrote for Rupert, Babar, and Care Bears; Smith wrote mostly for Babar and Care Bears specifically. (Smith opened up his body of work after Dog City, with credits on Beetlejuice and Tintin. He would eventually go to do Sam and Max as well.)
In other words, could the blend of their ultra-young sensibilities mesh well the goofier, crazier, self-aware humor? Could the idea of an fake, animated dog world in the 1940s that exists in a puppet-based dog world in the 1990s work without confusing its audience? Surprisingly, yes.
Dog City – (1993)
Director: John van Bruggen
Starring: Ron White, Elizabeth Hanna, Kevin Clash
Screenplay(s) by: Pater Sauder, J.D. Smith, David Finley
To its credit, at least for the first two seasons, Dog City is relatively sincere with its premise, despite the groaner canine gags from the animated segments and the suspension of disbelief required from the puppet segments. Ace Hart is a private eye, hired by various citizens of Dog City for various jobs, but he’s a good, gruff-voiced guy that works in tandem with chief of police Rosie O’Gravy (Rosie, I’d argue, is really one of the best designed characters of 90s animation) and more or less tolerates paperboy/youthful sidekick Eddie. At the same time, Eliot clashes with his building supervisor and his boss while he tries to animate the Dog City show on time – which, well, you kinda have to swallow; the idea of one animator working on an entire show by himself is rather ludicrous, even by kids TV standards.
Still, the show does a great job balancing the two sides, having a lot of fun using the events and characters from the real world and pulling them into the animated one. Paralleling Eddie and Artie, Bugsy and Bruno, and Rosie and Colleen/Terri works quite well, and even in the first season, the show hits hard at its meta trappings – the constant talks between Eliot and Ace; pulling Eliot into the animated world during a surreal dream sequence; creating a violent character that “Eliot can’t control”. It works to be both entertaining and somewhat critical of the animation field at the time, and what’s particularly clever about this is that instead of excessively breaking the fourth wall like its WB counterparts, Dog City critiqued the field through the secondary world of canine puppetry.
I also have to give props to some excellent dialogue and voice work. Ron White as the voice of Ace has an appropriate monotone sound, Humphrey Bogart-esque in his narration and regular speaking voice; yet can bring the energy when doing crazier scenes without loosing the character. Rosie is also perfectly voiced by Elizabeth Hanna; strong and quick with the tongue. The first season in fact is filled with quite wonderful back-and-forth dialogue between Rosie and Ace, and lines like “That was my collar, fleas and all” are read well enough to sound authentic.
The stories are silly but coherent, balancing the puppet-world developments with the animated-world ones. A lot of the exposition is done through the banter between Eliot and Ace which helps to avoid the shoe-horned exposition that often plague kids shows. It works better than expected, with Ace acting as Eliot’s muse (of sorts), gleefully keeping Eliot’s sanity in tact. The show enjoys playing around with how nearly unhinged Eliot is, with characters commenting on the behavior in comical fashion, or when Eliot’s desperation filters into the cartoons he creates. In “You Gotta Have Hart,” Eliot is fired and is forced to insert Ace into fake commercials to make ends meet. Despite the oddness behind using Ace in EVERYTHING, he goes over the top towards the end as things get more and more desperate. It’s amusing, clever, and sad, all at the same time.
Each season can be delineated by specific themes. The first season was more surreal and meta, playing around with different tropes relating to detective-story tropes, pulp entertainment, dreams and inspiration, cartoon logic, the animation industry, pandering to demographics, violence, and the effect of violence on impressionable minds. Season Two is much more character focused, developing the puppets (Eliot, Terri, Bruno, Artie, Bowser) and the animated characters (Ace, Eddie, Rosie, Bugsy, Bruno). The first season is slightly stronger, mainly because it seems like the second season had trouble focusing on how best to develop everyone. “Farewell, My Rosie” is a great episode that develops Rosie’s backstory…. without actually INVOLVING Rosie in the action. “Of Mutts and Mayors” leave Rosie and Ace on the run from the law, but there’s little there to strengthen the already awesome interplay between them, which is particularly disappointing, since S2’s Rosie is a tougher, more hard-nosed detective than she is in S1. Still, seeing them try and improve the characters is always a nice touch, and every so often they succeed, like in “Old Dogs, New Tricks,” which has Ace and Eliot going up against their respective mentors.
Season Three is… well, different. It seems like the network heads forced Dog City into an animated-variety show format. Artie now has “his own animated show” staring his squeaky toy, Rosie is given a niece named Dot in random one-offs, Bugsy tells odd stories while in prison, and there’s a subpar-Tex Avery cartoon called “Yves ‘N Steven.” The episodes are less noir and everything is a bit wackier and unhinged. While tonally off from the first two seasons, the writers somehow prevent it from completely off the rails, even managing to mind some funny moments through the chaos. And it even ends with a sweet moment in the finale, “Dog Days of Summer Vacation,” where Eliot is reassured by his “real” and animated friends that they’ll always be there for him – if not for us, as the show never did come back from cancellation.
Dog City struggled to balance a mix among elements of straight-forward narrative, absurd comedy, parody, meta-commentary, and, later, variety. While not everything worked, it still managed to be quite entertaining. Woe be it from me to ever doubt Henson again, god rest his soul; Dog City managed to pack more bite than its bark.
What That Replacement Refs Debacle Says about Sports Today
Posted by kjohnson1585 in Television, Uncategorized on October 9, 2012
Two weeks into the return of the official referees of the National Football League, we find ourselves relatively back to normal, after a delightfully blown call in the Packers/Saints game. No one’s perfect. It’s more a win in unionized labor than whatever the “integrity” of the game is.
But what that three-week experiment showed me was surprising, to say the least. Five things I learned from referee lockout and the aftermath of the whole debacle:
1) Football commentary is terrible because it’s geared around attracting new fans, not keeping old one.
I’m reminded of an episode of King of the Hill, in which Hank catches his son, Bobby, watching football on a display TV in a department store. Hank and his buddies, stunned that his boy is vaguely expressing interest in the “manly” sport that he never did up until this point, go through hell-and-high-water to make the game as interesting as possible so Bobby doesn’t lose his budding fascination. The actions Hank and company perform are silly, outrageous, over-the-top, and stupid. But, they work.
Football (and sports, in general) commentary are essentially Hank and his crew. Sports commentary seems terrible and stupid because the people who write/complain about it are already fans of the sport in question. They aren’t going anywhere. Modern commentary and their over-reliance on gimmicks, graphics, exposition, and repetition is for the newbie, the semi-casual fan who perks up at Mike Ditka’s “Stop It!” segment or smirk ironically at Fox’s robot, Cletus, or grin at whatever Chris Berman does. These are people who never really seen these cliches before, so they’re new, fresh, and enticing. Once you learn about the sport, however, it’s mind-numbing.
I would bet that the networks put pressure on the NFL to solve the dispute. The Packers/Seattle game, in which the replacement refs blew a call in the final play, had fans screaming out “BULLSHIT!” for essentially the entire fourth quarter. Unable to censor live-TV, this must have sent NBC into a tailspin, with CBS and ABC and Disney-owned ESPN very concerned about parents and their curious children peeking in to watch this “football” thing. Sports fans are passionate; that could quickly have escalated into more egregious curse words and, worst of all, visual acts of violence, Europe-soccer style. The NFL knew this all too well. It’s a perpetual fan-generating machine, and it can’t afford to lose that potential fanbase so easily.
2) “Jocks” are more internet savvy and internet vocal than ever before.
The internet was, is, and always will be, a geek’s medium. And I mean that lovingly. But the fallout of the replacement refs had consequences that went beyond the kind of response that the player/owner lockouts have had in the past. At worst, there are just no games. But in this case, football fans took to Facebook, Twitter, Gawker – and even 4Chan to express their discontent. Memes and Youtube parodies sprang up all over the place. Even people who never expressed interest in football came out and said, “Yeah, you guys fucked up.” It was surprising to see that kind of internet response that’s usually reserved for geek-related bombshells within the realms of comics, movies, video games, or TV.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, though, since former Arizona Cardinal’s Coach Dennis Green’s rant and Allen Iverson’s “Practice” screed, both have high view numbers on Youtube. Still, to actually distill it into the more geekier aspects of the web is worth noting. Both of the above points lead to my next observation:
3) More people understand (and care about) the nuances of sports than we thought.
Sports tend to get a certain amount of cynicism, even from its most enthusiastic fans. Football is nothing but a bunch of people in tights hitting each other. Baseball is boring. Soccer is really boring. Basketball is too “hip-hop.” And so on. But even in the midst of those criticisms (which I’ll admit, to a point, are correct), people still care about the sport and that the rules, explicit or implicit, are followed. I suppose that is what was meant with the phrase “integrity of the sport,” but it’s a bit more than that. People may not like these rules but they defend them to the death, especially if refs uphold them in one game, but ignore them in another. I spent a bit of time reading causal fans explain the difference between a “catch” and “possession.” I learned about what the refs could have and should have done to overturn the call. Commentary, which was mostly ignored up until this point, became the thing on everyone’s mind. ESPN got huge ratings in the post-Simultaneous Misreception (aka, the “Fail Mary,” a perfectly-suited internet nomenclature), where all they DID was talk about the missed catch. It was fascinating to watch the trainwreck take a life of its own. Oh, and speaking of which:
4) Trainwrecks are universally entertaining.
Well, the core of this statement is obvious. But given enough understanding and explanation, all trainwrecks can be understood and enjoyed by all. Gabe Newell’s inability to count to 3 may not make sense until you realize that he seems incapable of making the third game of his Half-Life series. Likewise, the internet response helped people who knew little about football come to a fascinating understanding of what occurred. This Google Image search of “replacement refs meme” showcases some of the most hilarious image macros around, and people who have little interest in football would have to laugh. I’m particularly fond of the word “Stop” spelled “Staup”. But disasters are always great to see take off online, and the congregation of information makes it possible to enjoy the disaster in all of its internet-based exaggerations.
5) Labor unions are still important to protecting a skilled trade.
This may seem like a stretch here, since we’re talking about a sport and a random play at the end of a random game, but it shows that organized labor really isn’t just a bunch of people clinging to each other demanding random concessions. These are people who are highly skilled and are very important, a fact that spreads across the organized labor spectrum – car workers, teachers, writers/actors, and so on. Not every industry or corporation needs a union sect, but it’s important to remember that it is very, very easy for employers, who are beholdened to stockholders, owners, managers, executives (AKA, non-employees), to manipulate things in favor towards those above them, not below. The majority of the issues behind the referee lockout was over pensions; in a billion-dollar business, it seems ridiculous that this was the case. But that’s exactly the point; in a billion-dollar business, it “shouldn’t” have been the case.