A Fuzzy Memory

I really love classic cartoons. Even though I'm only 31, I grew up watching a lot of older stuff, especially Looney Toons and Scooby Doo. But one thing in particular I love, that somehow isn't super well known despite being written by Chuck Jones and starring Judy Garland & Robert Goulet, is a tiny minimalistic animated feature from 1962 titled "Gay Purr-ee". It occasionally played on Cartoon Networks Cartoon Theatre (which, now that I've mentioned it, I should do a post on at some point I suppose) but I know I saw it long before that, I just can't really remember where or when . But hey, that's why the blog is called what it's called, right? Seriously though, some of these things - specifically the ones where I can't pinpoint its introduction into my life - almost seem like they've been a part of my life since I was born and given how old this movie is that could theoretically be the case for once. Either way, it's an absolutely beauti...

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 ...

Despite being a beloved corporate overlord of the entertainment industry, every now and then there's just a Disney project that just sort of becomes...lost to time. Perhaps it's due to timing, perhaps it's due to lack of availability, but whatever the reason, some things Disney makes are just lost in the shuffle, never to be seen or heard from again. Until I come along and remind you all they exist, via this blog. This weeks post is one of those times. When I was a little girl, I caught a movie on TV. To be fair, I didn't even know it was a Disney movie for the longest time, and also, I was never really an enormous Disney fan to begin with, so. Either way, I caught a movie on TV, and that movie was called Susie Q. What makes Susie Q extremely interesting to me is not actually how lost it is, though that's interesting too, but more so that it's a Disney movie. Well, to be fair, it wasn't actually a Disney movie proper, they were simply the distributors of it ...

When I was a child, there was only one journalist I trusted, and that was Stick Stickly. We return now to the domain of the weird ass early years of Nickelodeon, back when the network was apparently in film school and obsessed with student art flicks, willing to try anything, no matter how bizarre it might seem in hindsight. Stick was the host of Nick In The Afternoon, a programming block on the network that ran summers 94-98 every weekday afternoon. While likely the most uncreative fictional character ever made, he holds a special place in my heart, and apparently many others as well. Some claim him to be boring and uninspired in design, but I think he's brilliant. I mean, who else besides children used popsicle sticks for entertainment? This is why he succeeded, because he was a visual medium they understood. I don't really remember much about Stick Stickly, I just remember Stick Stickly himself. I remember that he existed, and that he really made me happy. Much like Face, he...

    Nostalgia can make you love even the most baffling things. Nostalgia is the best liar that we have, quite honestly. Something truly terrible you might adore, simply because it came to you in a part of your life when you needed it, or when you enjoyed it for what it was, instead of seeing it for what it truly is. This is why people still like certain shows they grew up with, despite a good handful of them being just trash. When I was growing up, I really only had a select few things to watch, because for a good while when I was little, we didn't have cable. Because of this, I wound up renting movies a lot, and a lot of those are, admittedly, still movies I love today. Some of which have since then become all time classics. Stuff like Nightmare Before Christmas, Hocus Pocus, or Beetlejuice. But some of them, even I'll admit despite my fondness remaining, are pretty terrible, honestly. And none is a better example than what the spotlight will be shone on today; The New Advent...

In the 90s, puppets essentially became the overlords of educational television. Sure, Jim Henson really solidified this back with the creation of Sesame Street, but it wasn't, in my opinion, until the 90s that it really took hold. Suddenly, there was an influx of edutainment that was bursting at the brim with puppets. Whether it was something like Mr. Rogers, where the puppets were more of side characters, or something like Lambchop, who was the star, puppets teaching kids became as normal as 80 year old women with bad hairdos teaching kids. But none stick out in my mind as such a fever dream as Timmy The Tooth. I can't remember who it was who originally gave me the Timmy The Tooth VHS I had, it may have been my mother, it may have been my grandmother, that knowledge is forever lost to me, but I can say that whoever was responsible for it shouldn't have been involved in childcare, because Timmy The Tooth is simultaneously completely fine and absolutely horrific. Looking bac...

I have an interesting history with the horror genre as a whole. I can remember being very little and being somewhat put off by the concept of horror movies, but never really being scared by them either. But, as I got a little older, I definitely became much more interested in horror and began seeking it out in whatever medium I could find. I played a lot of Silent Hill games as a kid, and really liked stuff like Courage the Cowardly Dog on Cartoon Network. That all being said, and while I think I turned out fairly okay as an adult, it's highly likely that I did see certain things before I was probably supposed to, and one of those things was horror movies. I watched the original IT adaptation on the Scifi channel eons before I even knew what IT or Stephen King was, and I wound up somehow convincing my parents, likely because I was extremely mature for my age, to let me rent horror movies that I probably shouldn't have been allowed to rent. Nothing insidiously gruesome, mind you...

    For as long as I've been alive, everyone around me has scrambled to mute the television as soon as an ad comes on. In fact, it isn't even just on television. Ads on Spotify, Youtube, advertising in general is considered a nuisance of the highest degree. So why do I have such a particularly fond feeling for it? I suppose a part of it could be nostalgia, certainly, because a lot of the ads that I recall happily are ads from when I was younger and that takes me back to a...well, I won't say a better time, but, you know what I mean. Either way, advertising to me has always been a source of comfort in one way or another. Hell, sometimes, late at night, I'll even channel surf until I discover a paid programming block and just let my television relay that back at me for the next few hours uninterrupted. There's just something safe inside of the advertising world. Something familiar in a world so teeming with blatant lies and corporatism. I just don't know what that...

    When I was a little girl, before my mother remarried, I spent a lot of time at my grandparents house while my mother was at work. During this time, when I wasn't helping my grandmother deshell walnuts or gardening with my grandfather in the backyard, they plopped me in front of the television and turned on Nickelodeon. This was the early/mid nineties, to give you a vague context of time. Anyway, sitting there watching, quite frankly, a few things that will show up on this blog later on, myself and any other viewers were constantly bombarded with interstitial shorts between shows featuring FACE. And, yeah, he's pretty much what you'd come to expect. He's a colored face taking up the entire screen, whose color changes constantly, who laughs with you and talks to you and tells you what's coming up next. These days, there's entire collections of Face videos on Youtube, and people have made their own even. Face is by no means completely forgotten, but I do think ...