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...