A Fuzzy Memory

Back in the early 2000s, Cartoon Network went through an extremely strange time period airing very artsy almost surreal cartoons long before stuff the likes of Adventure Time made it normalized. Among these shows was one such cartoon titled "Whatever Happened To Robot Jones?", whose title became thusly - and I feel somewhat intentionally - prophetic, because now people often ask it themselves. I always took the title to be a sort of joke on the question people ask long after they've graduated school and think back to their youthful days, saying, "Gee, I wonder whatever happened to Caleb Browning?" But as it turns out - and as I said I think the creator did this rather, brilliantly, intentionally so the show would become even funnier with age based purely off the title alone - now it has a somewhat entirely different meaning. I loved this weird artsy quirky period of Cartoon Network which aired a lot of shows I'll likely be covering on this blog because nobod...

Everyone loves The Muppets, it's just a fact. There's a few things in this world in the realm of entertainment that everyone just adores. Dr. Seuss, Peanuts and The Muppets are among those. But I'm willing to bet, even if you call yourself a fairly big Muppets fan, that even you don't know about this one. Released in 1972 as a 50 minute television special, it's an adaptation of the classic story of the Town Musicians of Bremen. If you don't know the story, allow me to sort of clue you in here, through this adaptation. There's 4 animals, Leroy the Donkey, TR the Rooster, Catgut the Cat and Rover Joe the Bloodhound. Each lives in a horrible environment, often abused by their owners, and each, for some reason that's never really explained in any way, seems to be extremely well versed in an instrument. Eventually, Leroy runs away and meets the others, one by one, and they form a group for play music together until finally facing down their former "owner...

There's a lot of series that go unnoticed, under the radar, simply because of poor promotion or maybe general lack of interest. They're rather niche. But this happens, I've found, even more often in the realm of British television. A lot of factors go into this; often times it's because of an overwhelming amount of content is produced and thusly nobody can see everything that makes it to air, or sometimes a show is just too strange or weird to really be appreciated, or sometimes it's because they only make a certain number of episodes (something the American model of television finally seemed to adapt, for better or worse, in the last five years) and so there isn't as much to consume so people don't become really as attached because there's simply not enough content to spend enough time with to begin to care about. Thankfully, I grew up (well, depends on context; in some cases I was lucky, as my parents were fairly democratic, open minded and into cultur...

Back when I was really young, I was - and still am - a huge fan of the series "Home Movies" that aired on, originally UPN, but later Adult Swim for the remainder of its run. The animation style, the barely scripted dialogue, the concept itself and the tone overall just really sunk its teeth into me, and when Home Movies was over, I needed something else to fill that void. Thankfully, that something was O'Grady. Not thankfully, O'Grady didn't last nearly long enough. O'Grady, which aired on Nickelodeons sister station Noggin, later renamed simply The N to bring in a more diverse teenage crowd, was primarily aimed at said targeted crowd. It featured four kids - Kevin, Abby, Beth and Harold - who live in a town called O'Grady and go to O'Grady High. Fairly typical premise for a tv show based on that age group, right? Except O'Grady had one hidden trick up its sleeve. The town itself was a magnet, sometimes literally, for something called The Weirdness...

What It's Like Being Alone was a stop motion comedy series that aired briefly in 2006. In hindsight, it's rather crude and often crass and sometimes even cringy with its humor, but hey, that's the mid 2000s for you, I suppose. Even still, the somewhat immature and outdated humor aside, the show was something that caught my eye for various reasons. Part of it, truth be told, was simply the visual aesthetic. I've always been a sucker for stop motion. As a little girl, my favorite movie was Nightmare Before Christmas (well before Hot Topic got its grubby little paws all over it) and I've always been an enormous fan of Wallace & Gromit, even rushing to the theater opening day for their long awaited feature film. I liked Gumby, I liked the stop motion in Pee Wee's Playhouse, and I loved the Prometheus & Bob segment from Nickelodeon's KABLAM which I'm sure I'll cover at some point. But the second part is, frankly, the concept itself, and how oddly ...

I generally don't like to focus on one company back to back, like I'm doing with Disney these past two weeks, but since it's October now, I'm going to forgo my own rules and discuss one of the first things that came to mind when I created this blog, and that is Disneys Halloween Treat.  The special is a 1982 Halloween themed episode of the television anthology series "Walt Disney" which originally aired on October 30th. It's a fairly simple thing, chock full of Disney's "spookiest" bits from old cartoons and movies, including Night on Bald Mountain from Fantasia and Ichabod Crane & the Headless Horseman, which, if you can find to watch, I highly suggest you do. It's a wonderful lost piece of classic animation.  There was also, in 1981, another special titled A Disney Halloween, a 90 minute Halloween special which originally aired as part of the Wonderful World of Disney on October 24th. For the sake of nostalgia, I'll be covering ...