Popeye Tattoos

I love this guy but clearly not as much as these fellas...


Amazing transformation!!


It's a bit hazy but I'm pretty sure this is Popeye getting his boink on with Olive.


Lo-fi Po-peye

Big belly thanks to...

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lagacy of anthropomorphic nonsense

Ah, the Turtles. Those guys were such a massive deal back in the 80s/90s. Turtle-mania was pretty unavoidable at the time and I was at the right age to get totally swept along with it. The day my parents got me and my brother the 4 turtle figures I think we totally flipped out. They had everything, the cartoon, comics, some great videogames, really good action figures, movies of declining quality and their faces on pretty much anything else you could buy. Why were they so popular? Well on looking back the cartoons don't hold up that well as they are pretty goofy, but it was perfect after school/Saturday morning TV and there were so many odd characters to latch on to. Plus they were totally on trend with 80s/90s 'dude culture', what with the likes of Bill and Ted and Waynes World in the cinemas, and they were advocates of pizza and skateboards... it was almost law to be into it.



So what comes after these crime fighting animal-men hit the big time? Well all these guys were looking for a chunk of the change...

Battle Toads

These three toads were created by the video game company Rare to try and rival the Turtles games and are regarded as being pretty decent beat-em up's. They were successful enough that a pilot cartoon was made to bring the toads to TV... it didn't go down as well as the games. The animation is pretty darn awful and the ripping off of turtles 'dude speak' is blatant; the fat kid sounds exactly like Mikey from the Turtles. The plot set up as so flimsy, even for a videogame spin off that is pretty amazing... some aliens of the run go to Earth and offer the power to become super strong toads to the very first three people they see. I'd have thought you'd put more thought into these things but there you go, I'm not a giant space-bird-guy. Then there is the last nail in the coffin to stop
Battletoads becoming a big time show: 'LET'S GET WARTY!' was never gonna compete with 'Turtle Power' or 'Cowabunga' as a catchphrase. Can you imagine being in a playground and some kid saying "Hey, wanna play Battletoads? I'll be Zit and you be Rash LET'S GAT WARTY!" That kid would have no friends.



Biker Mice From Mars

Well, they did they're homework...
- Overly long and silly title - check
- Bad ass image - check... not so much dude speak but a hell of a lot of leather jackets, shades and piercings.
- Girl who helps out and isn't freaked out by giant animal-men - check
- Aliens trying to take over that no one else knows about - check
- Series re-launch in the 2000s - check
- Kick ass theme song - FAIL!!

It's rocking but saying the name of the show every now and then isn't a song. Sorry dudes.

Bucky O'Hare

This one is a bit of a wild card. It's choc full on animal people fighting each other but it's set in space and so doesn't fit in exactly with the conventions of a lot of these other shows. Also, Bucky O'Hare was originally created in the late 70s, pre-dating the Turtles by a good stretch. Although by the time it got published the Turtles were already rockin' the world. The cartoon came out in the early 90s and I never got home from school in time to catch much of it so I can't say if it's any good. I think most people remember it for the song:

That is how to write a cartoon intro song!

Street Sharks
From the company that brought you the Battle Toads cartoon comes the Street Sharks. If Biker Mice are the Turltes poor second cousin then these guys are the inbred relatives that no one in the family speaks of. Seriously, these things are ugly. I mean what seems more appealing, this:

or these:

No thanks.
It's pretty much the same formula as these other shows but I think by this point the Turtles wave had broken and no one was really digging this formula as much as they used to.


Extreme Dinosaurs
The bottom of the barrel I guess. After Street Sharks this came out and then after that there was the ultimate ugly as hell team up series 'Street Sharks and Dinovengers Unite'. Damn that's a lot of teeth!




So in summary... Turtles or bust. What else did you expect?

Sesame Celebrity Highlight #1

No, they may not be cartoons, but I'm letting puppets in on this blog because a) they fit under my umbrella of curiosity and nostalgia and b) Sesame Street has had some pretty unbelievable guest stars. So here's my first 'Sesame Celebrity Highlight': JOHNNY 'Freaking' CASH! That's right, a former amphetamine addict who records albums in prisons about people killing their wives while loaded on cocaine is singing with puppets on an early morning, educational kids show.
It's exactly as sweet as it sounds!

Ren & Stimpy go adult and it sucks

So if you grew up around the same time as me you may well have watched Ren & Stimpy and thought it was bad ass stuff. Very twisted and random but still lots of funny stuff and intense and grotesque animation. Yeah? It was good right?
Now check this out:

That's a shock to the senses.
Is this a good idea?
No it's not.

In 2003, long after the original Nickelodeon series, the Ren & Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon series was made for Spike TV in America, with a strong adult male centric slant. Ren & Stimpy was always a pretty adult show due to it's edgy nature but it walked the line of being acceptable enough to go on the air on a kids channel before the watershed. That's what made it cool. Ren & Stimpy doing having thinly veiled gay sex, grabbing boobs on the beach, eating spit and vomit and secretly getting girls to touch their junk in a washroom are just not funny or fun to watch. By stepping over the line into out and out adult cartoon land it loses all the impact of the original cartoons. Tellingly, Billy West, the original voice actor for Stimpy didn't sign on for this series because he thought it sucked and would harm his career. BAM!

If you want proof of the badness this episode has a lot of gross eating of bodily fluids (really gross!), bad gay jokes and has someone tell the two to 'fuck off':


This episode is called Naked Beach Frenzy... guess what happens. This video seems to be very badly chopped up and seems to be missing a lot of stuff but I think you get the idea. There's also an intro by creator John Kricfalusi... he seems like a douche:


This episode is the only on the feature Billy West's voice as it was made for the original Ren & Stimpy series but was left out for being too violent. The violence is pretty full on but it's head and shoulders better then everything else I've seen of this adult series... probably because there are no cock jocks.

Simple pleasures

This has just gotta cheer you up right?

Everything you ever wanted to know about Mormons but were too affraid to ask

Must be watched... it contains:

- Talk of endless celestial sex by gods on made up planets.
- A shockingly racist explanation of why we have different races.
- The Mormon god having sex with the virgin Mary so Jesus can have a body on earth.
- Mormon Jesus having 3 wives and loads of kids.
- Jesus teleporting to America to preach to Native Americans... who then seem to have a war with centurions or something.

It's bat-shit crazy!

Tiny Toons get freakin' wasted man

Banned 'toon number 2

This is a pretty odd one; an episode from Tiny Toons (basically Warned Bros kidz) that was supposedly banned because the characters drink a beer, get wasted, chase tail, steal a cop car and die! Heavy stuff. It also shows that cartoons that try to be educational or have a message really do lack in the jokes department as a result of the ham fisted preaching. They even point it out themselves with the final punchline in the show.

Give it a watch... even though I think it was banned I still get a bit of deja vu watching it. Either because I saw this when it first aired or because this is EXACTLY what it's like when I go drinking.

Drinkings not cool kids.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYMYv1zsAxE
(you can't embed this video which is annoying... check the link)