Who? Whaa?

 Hey, guys! Just woke up from the food coma. Did I miss anything?

(mumble, mumble)

...wait. Hold up. 

THAT guy was President?! Have I been in a real coma?

(grumble, mumble)

Oh. Really? 

(grumble)

10 years?! The hell you been doing while I’ve been gone? And whose gray hair is this?

Oh. Mine. Got it. Is cartoon entertainment still awful?

(mumble, grumble, mumble)

Who is Steven Universe? What do you mean normal people watch anime? Does this mean I get to be normal now?

(mumble)

Huh. Still not even—

(grumble)

Fine. I get it. I said fine! I just get to be that guy.

(mumble)

What do you mean there’s been 13 Scooby Doo series?! I thought Scrappy—

(GRUMBLE!)

Uh-huh. Told you he was awful. Did you listen? Nope, you did not. That’s on you, America. So, now that I’m back on the #1 blog in The World—

(mumblemumblemumblegrumblemumble)

...the actual hell is social media? Do you just go into public with a camera and...what, do stuff? Like, annoy others?

(mumble)

You’re kidding.

(mumble)

And people get PAID for this?

(mmmmm)

MILLIONS?!!!

(grumble)

Okay, kids. You’ll have to give me a little bit to process the fact that the past ten years have been made out of insanity.

(mm)

The hell is a meme?!

(mumblegrumblegrumblemumble)

Folks, gimme a couple days to process this. WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE SIMPSONS ARE STILL ON TV? I need a moment. See you in a little bit.

I Have Returned To Shatter Your Mind

Greetings, kids. You don't remember me, mainly because I have the worst posting schedule on the internet, but not to worry. I have returned to do what I do best. No, not slack off. I just got done doing that. Shut up. I've come across a veritable treasure chest of Hanna-Barbera cartoons and I'm going to make you feel my pain. It's like the cursed tape in The Ring. I have to pass it on to survive. But enough of the outdated pop-culture references! We go old-school in:

Dino Boy in the Lost Valley
Episode 1: Marooned!

Now, a word of warning first. If you have never seen the actual intro to this show (and it was a show for you smart mouths that have only seen it on Boomerang), then you will never know how a 9 year old boy ended up with a caveman and a dinosaur with animal shelter tags around its neck. But, hey, I'm an enabler, so I'll hook you up. First one's free, after that, you pay. And, oh how you'll pay...but I digress. Kid parachutes out of a crashing plane, lands on a godforsaken island, fights a sabertooth tiger with a machete, gets saved by a caveman named Ugg (yes, shut up) and a dinosaur named Brawny (I guess it says it on the name tag). And so begins the wacky, madcap adventures.

Okay, so we begin our episode with the boy (name withheld due to never catching his name) teaching Ugg and Brawny how to read. Education was important back then, and strangely enough, the boy felt it was more important that these two learned how to read 20th century English than it was for Ugg to teach the boy how to defend himself in a vast, forbidden proto-land where everything is trying to eat everything else. Yeah. Plants, too. As the child tries to become the teacher to these rough and tumble prehistoric anachronisms, they fall asleep. Like you do when a 9 year old is trying to teach you something. Suddenly! giant poison wasps come along, and like any Hanna-Barbera critter, they know only two things: 1) killin' 2) bein' killed. Ugg, the caveman of action, grabs his club and starts to swing wildly at the creatures, to largely little success. If you blacked out there, let me recap the villain. They are wasps. They are poisoned. And they are giant. And by giant, I should do them justice by saying that they are man-sized. Thinking back on it, the Hanna-Barbera folks are probably responsible for more nightmares and awful 80s horror movies than Mary Shelley.

Back to the action! Ugg, having learned his combat skills from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy, keeps swinging the club until he's off-screen. Once off-screen, Ugg turns into clobbering fool the likes of which you'll never see (mainly due to an animation budget equal to a cup of coffee), dispatching the giant! poison! wasps! with a mighty thud. But what's this? Ugg has been stung. Because you can't sting the 9 year old. Not even in the 60s. What's never discussed is how Ugg wasn't visibly impaled on a stinger the size of a baseball bat. What is discussed, however, is that there's no problem sending the young boy, fresh from the trauma of having everything he's ever known and loved crash into a mountain in a fiery ball of death, off to Mist Island to get a plant that can cure Ugg of the poison. Um...yeah.

So, Dino Boy goes off to the coast, fashions a raft out of magic and rainbows and an apparent engineering degree, and sets off to a mist-shrouded island in search of a plant that he can spot thanks to his apparent horticulture degree. While rafting, thanks to his maritime training while in the Navy, Dino Boy puts his paleontology degree to use to spot a sea-dwelling brontosaurus. However, Dino Boy must have been sick during alligator day when getting his animal husbandry degree because he thinks it's a great idea to keep a 14 foot gator at bay by smacking at it ineffectually with a 4 foot tree branch. What's that? No! He doesn't get eaten! I know! I was just as shocked as you. That's not to say that Dino Boy isn't punished for his hubris by having half his stick and half his raft ripped asunder. But half is all he needs to make it to the island. And we haven't even gotten to the insane part yet.

I should point out at this time that a 9 year old has the attention span of a cocker spaniel. Why would I mention this? Because in the time that it took Dino Boy to get a masters at the University of Life Sucks, he's kinda forgotten why he's out on this trip in the first place. That's why, when he sees two Moss Men about to ritualistically slaughter one of their own, he decides to stick his nose in their business. Does he ask if the Moss Man staked to the ground deserved him a killin'? Hell no! Cowboys don't have time for that kind of crap. But, thanks to his anthropology degree, he knows that he must create a god to frighten the others off so he can free the endangered. Using the skills he learned as a set designer and his aforementioned engineering degree, he crafts a 10 foot tall walking monument to death and proceeds to cause a monumental shift in the Moss Man polytheistic mythology that would be studied for decades to come. Long story short, Moss Men run off. Dino Boy cuts the captor free. Captor does whatever anyone in his position would; he commences a beatdown on the new god that's cut him free from his prison and takes off in a canoe. Yeah, Dino Boy should have really stolen one of those canoes.

By this point, any normal caveperson would be dead at this point. You forgot about him, didn't you? I did, too, and I just finished watching this thing. So, after reading over the script, Dino Boy remembers to get the plant needed to Save The Day, hops on his half-a-raft with his half-a-stick and makes it back in just enough time to apply a compress and salve, thanks to his nursing degree. And what better way to celebrate not dying than by...having to finish the grammar lesson. If I'd been that caveman, I'd have clubbed the kid first so I could have died in peace...

Dial M For Moron!

Tonight, I bring you a spine-snapping look into the horrors of war, the terror of time-travel, and the mesmerizing and hypnotic glasses of Dr. Millenium for the white-knuckled action of:

Birdman vs. The Time Machine of Dr. Millenium!

Now, before you get on my case about my inability to spell millennium, I should let you know that this is how they spelled things in Hanna-Barbera Land in 1970 whatever. So, just thought I'd throw that out there.

Anyway, there's evil afoot, and that evil is so damn evil that his skin is green! Green, I tell you! You don't get more evil than green skin. We're talking Ming the Merciless green. We're talking Mandarin from Iron Man green. We're talking Jolly Green Giant green. I know, I know. Pure evil. And, he spells his name wrong. And, and this part is the key, he has glasses the size of a Honda. Millenium has a time machine, but it's not a normal time machine. It's a time machine tht reanimates the bones of long-dead creatures, gives them flesh and blood, and then allows them to run amok on the international weapons community. So, Millenium animates a Cro-Magnon man and a wooly mammoth, gives them complicated instructions, and here's the wacky part, they actually execute them.

So, what's the complicated part, you ask? How complicated a task could you give to a mammoth? Let's see, I know I put a checklist in here somewhere...oh, yeah. Here it is.

1. Cro-Magnon Man: Go into a top-secret facility, bust down the door through a grip of armed guards, knock over a table and a two-star general, and steal the plans for a missile so dangerous and so guarded that there's only one copy of the plans. Wacky military.

2. Wooly Mammoth: Break down the fortified and electrified fence at the same installation, grab a missile(!), pick it up off the launch pad and smash it to the ground. Did I mention that the missile is not a dud, but actively has a warhead on it? I didn't? Well, yeah. It does. And, as a bonus task, Cro and Mammoth team up Tucker and Chan style to run off to the Museum of Crazy-Ass Scientists with Time Machines. Oh, and of course, they do this without a hitch. You can't even get this kind of organization on the Oscars.

Now, picture in your mind that all this happened in the span of two minutes. Yeah. The fact that it took you longer to read what happened in a summary than it did for me to watch and try to process the mess should let you know what I'm sacrificing so you don't have to. You're welcome.

Enter the Birdman. Harv--um, Birdman is sitting in his volcano lair, doing whatever a man and his blue-feathered eagle do while in a volcano with plentiful sunlight access. Suddenly, the Birdtron 1200 scrambles to life, and Falcon Seven--that's Phil Ken Sebben to you and me, Russ--comes on the screen to tell Birdman what's just transpired. Birdman declares that he'll take the case and flies off out of the volcano.

Birdman comes to the rescue, to find a giant mammoth with a Cro-Magnon man ridingon his back. Taking it all in stride, he proceeds to point the Solar Finger of Doom at the mammoth to get the big bastard to slow the hell down. After three or four shots, the mammoth goes down. Which is awesome. But not nearly as awesome as Cro sneaking up on Birdman and clocking him on the Bird-Crest with a 45,000 year old stone hammer. Modern weapons ain't got nuthin' on the Hammer of the Pre-Gods. After Birdman and the military bigwigs finally get together and start rubbing their brain cells until a thought squeezes out. Just wait until you find out what it is.

Back at the museum, we come to find out that the nefarious Dr. Millenium is altruistic in his evil. He is doing all this to end war on the planet. And to make himself the despotic overlord. So, you know, six of one, half a dozen of the other. You just can't please some people. He turns the mammoth back into the set of bones that it'd been for the last 80,000 years because even the craziest mad scientist knows that you just don't let the mammoth have full reign over the palace. That's Crazy-Ass Scientist Rule #5, right after putting a drawbridge over a moat full of aligators. Look it up. It's right there on page 32.

Millenium decides to gloat over his victory over the forces of the military-industrial complex and listens into the short band radio broadcast of the nearby fort to hear them cry and admit that they were beaten by a myopic green-skinned hunchback of a mad scientist when he hears them say that they have another missile! Did I mention that they only made one missile? Yeah, totally only made one missile. Because that makes as much sense as anything else that came out of Hanna-Barbera during the drug days of the '70s. Well, the existence of another missile makes Millenium just furious in his little boots. He reanimates a pterodactyl and sends it off to grab the new missile.

Flash over to the military base where Birdman, the general from the first two minutes of the show, and a missile(!!) all await whatever the hell it is that's coming their way this time. So, when a winged harbinger of the Cretacious Period brings down leathery death from above, everyone pretty much takes it in stride. What more could faze you when you're standing next to a man who derives super powers from the sun, has feathery wings, and shoots radiation out of his hands? Exactly. So, the pterodactyl grabs the missile, Birdman follows, and finds out that everything is coming from the museum. So, the pterodactyl heads toward the museum, Birdman shoots the flying lizard, and as the unconscious dinosaur falls toward the glass ceiling of the museum, Millenium turns it back into a skeleton. But because it's written in stone, something has to crash through a glass ceiling and Birdman drew the winning ticket.

I could try and make the end of this make more sense, but as it's pretty much impossible, I'll summarize. Millenium, a mummy and Cro all run into a crypt where Millenium turns on the time machine and sets it to self destruct and they all run in, leaving the plans to the missile(!!!) and a pile of dust. Let me rephrase this. They could have saved a lot of time and money by just spooking the crazy man into killing himself in minute three if they'd only known his intense fear of glass ceilings. Total run time of this adventure? 5 minutes. Sanity lost? 20%. The things I do for you guys...

Holy Crap! It's Been a Year!

You'd think that I'd update this damn thing more often, but seeing as I can never figure out how to hold onto a steady job for more than two years at a time, I had to rearrange real life and get a few things straight. Now that that's over with, I can go on with the important things in life...making fun of cartoons that I stay up too late to watch. Tonight, we have a doozy, too. It' s not a full-length run, but it's enough to get you smellin' what I'm cookin'. Just like The Rock, only fat. And white. And not talented.

Tonight, we jump right into The Origin of Birdboy!

It'd be awesome if I were going to dissect the episode of Harvey Birdman: Attorney-at-Law that deals with the origin of Peanut, the Birdboy. But you didn't come here for good cartoons, did you? Oh no, you came here for...well, I'm not sure what you came here for, but you're going to get it. Boy, are you gonna get it.

Tonight's adventure of Birdman (not Harvey) starts with Birdman thwarting an attempted robbery on a boat, wherein the boat is blown up, a villain runs away, and Birdman finds a kid passed out on driftwood. When the young lad wakes up, he has no recollection of what happened, except for what's shown him in a flashback. Birdman doesn't know his name, where he came from, what he's carrying, and if he likes guys dressed up as birds, but he offers him the opportunity to join him in his crime-fighting spree of justice!

Well, actually, he tells him that he's renaming him Birdboy, he'll help him track down his father, and re-thwart the villain what was already once thwarted, but needs yet more thwarting. Oh, and to top it all off, while Birdman was "saving" the boat which blew up, he irradiated Birdboy with his Sun Rays, giving him power from the sun, too. Birdboy does the responsible thing by destroying a vase in the room with 25,000 rads of cosmic doom. Just like a teenager, it goes off whether you want it to or not.

But how is Birdboy to help Birdman with the thwarting? It just so happens that Birdman had a costume with metallic wings just waiting for the day that he could "save" a young man from certain doom...even if he had to create that doom himself. It was never intimated if Birdman was a jack-off or not. But anyways, Birdman then instructs Birdboy to hold his hand so they can take off in flight.

Two things here. I've never before nor since seen a flying tandem where one person held onto another person by use of one hand. Two, how in the hell do you get your wrist that strong that you can hold a traditional arm-outstretched flying pose with proper leg placement? And before you answer with the crude answer I know you have waiting, you should know that I know you've been doing that for years, and I don't see you doing a one-armed Iron Cross on the gymnastic rings. Feel me now?

Back to the action! Birdman apparently forgets that his new ward has been in the flying business for about 15 seconds before he lets go of Birdboy's hand. Birdboy starts flapping the mechanical wings that he's had for less time than it takes you to pee, and proceeds to fly on his own.

Now, I wish I could tell you what happens next, but my brain completely shut down, and the next thing I remembered was the Snorks being on, and then there was another shutdown. If it hadn't been for the infusion of .5 liters of caffeinated goodness, I'm not sure I would have survived. If I do ever find out what happened, I'll let you know. But for now, I'm back. I'm not sure if I'll do this as often as Chris Sims does over at the Invincible Super-Blog, but then again, I don't think I have that kind of stamina. And he just dealt with Anita Blake...twice.

Damn, Where've I Been?

I seem to remember promising something of such monumental proportions that it could cause your skull to explode just from hearing about it secondhand from a friend who saw it on YouTube. Well, people, brace yourself. It's time.

It's time for Superfriends: Man-Beasts of Xra!

Yeah. You read that right. I'm about to grab you by the ears and completely rock your face in half. Okay, maybe not that much, but you get the general idea. And, as promised, this one is coming in parts as too much of it at one time could give you psoriasis. Or gangrene. Definitely jaundice at the very least.

Tonight's installment starts with a break-in at the New Orleans zoo, as using a zoo in a town that wasn't considered more dangerous than 1916 Germany just wouldn't make any sense. The Superfriends have received word that people, or even worse, mean people have been taking animals from the zoo and using them for...well, god knows what, really. It's the Superfriends. There's every possibility that they needed the animals to teach them the history of butter carving. So shut up, you're distracting me.

Batman and Robin are dispatched to the scene, where Robin runs around in tights while Batman dusts for prints. Batman suddenly cries out, stating that these fingerprints aren't human fingerprints! They must be coming from some sort of man-beast monstrosity. Mind you, the World's Greatest Detective is kinda forgetting that humans, apes, and monkeys are the only creatures that have fingers in the first place. So, how could he determine that they weren't of human origin? Why, the big-ass claw on the end of the fingerprint, silly! 'Cause, I don't know about you, but without that kind of deductive reasoning, I'd have had to wait until the inevitable surprise attack on the Dynamic Duo before I could figure out that the giant gouges in the iron freakin' bars weren't made by man hands. But thankfully for Robin and the 1970s TV-watching populace, a man with the head of a panther, the tail of a panther, and the black skin of a--wait, black skin? Oh, that's right. The animation budget wasn't going to allow for people to draw fur! And PETA definitely wasn't going to allow that sort of thing to happen. Not without throwing paint on the panther...

So, Batman and Boy Wondermous escape and run to tell the Superfriends what they found. I'd try and give you some of the dialogue, but every time I attempt to remember some of it, I wake up in a puddle of blood, and I can't be sure it's mine. Suffice to say that Superman decides that the Caped Crusader needs some watching or he's going to screw up a major plot hole and have the whole thing start to make sense. And we can't have that now, can we?

After breaking and entering into a lovely antebellum mansion in NOLA, Superman and Batman come across more man-beasts! attempting to do...well, something. They never really explain that. Probably ran out of blotter paper at that point. Superman draws the ire of a man-lion hybrid thingy and gives Batman enough time to pull out a freeze capsule off his utility belt that he uses to turn the man-lion blue, thereby informing the whole world that he's frozen solid. Robin, being the 12 year old mental giant that he is, walks up to the frozen entree and pounds on it with his fist, causing the hollow clang-clang sound of something that's frozen and made of metal, apparently.

This would be enough to make normal men run screaming from the room, but not I! I had a vested interest in seeing just how much dumber this could get without turning New Orleans into a city over a vast, subterranean network of caves and tunnels that would defy everything that's known about the Pearl of Louisiana and, well, physics. To my delight, I found that it couldn't get any dumber without turning New Orleans into a city over a vast, subterranean network of caves and tunnels that would defy everything that's known about the Pearl of Louisiana and, well, physics. That's why they turned it into a city over a...you know what? I'm sure you get the gist.

And then...it got dumber than that. As Superman and Batman, with Robin in tow, went into the caverns, they were faced with five animals in cages: a lion, a tiger, a panther, a something, and a something else. I can't remember the last two because my eye starts twitching and blood starts to spurt out of my nose. Superman backs away from the animals with the justification, "I don't wish to harm these creatures." Superman, the man who got so angry at a man that he punched him through a planet. Superman, the man who got so angry that he caused an entire dimension to cease to exist. Yes, this Superman, who apparently had to go to sensitivity training before they'd let him around Diana Troy, had to instead cause the animals to end up leaping back into their cages, whereupon Batman shut the cage doors and moved on. It should be noted that this is the same Batman who punched a man so hard it made his head explode. The same Batman who hurled, and connected with, a car battery to a mugger's torso in a junkyard. Pansies.

The three finally stumble, through no fault of the writers, into the lair of the evil Dr. Xra! The mad genius who masterminded the theft of so many animals from the zoo for demented experiments! The...woman with blue hair to show just how evil she could be. Score two for diversity right there, kids. Xra looks up and sees the Superfriends in her lair, and she has the nerve to act shocked and alarmed at the intrusion. Nevermind that you could have heard the three of them shouting at each other at the top of their lungs to be quiet throughout the vast, connecting caves and tunnels, even if you were deaf.

Xra jumps to the immediate conclusion that she must finish her plans, and that not even Superman would be allowed to stop her. I'll do you the favor of translating that line for you: Superman is going to end up stopping her plans, foiling her getaway and in a bold move, carrying her, her henchman, and her boat to the police station, where the police will presumably throw the evil overlords into jail and their evil speedboat into the impound. Damn you, impound. Damn you.

Tune in tomorrow...or whenever I get the chance to write it for the second in our Superfriends saga. It'll make you think you've got a shot with a hot woman in a see-through vehicle...

It's Coming...

Where've I been? Researching, son, researching. And what have I been researching? The most senses-shattering single episode of the Superfriends ever put on televsion, that's what. How much will your face explode from this? Let me give you an example: This one episode will encompass four, possibly even five, posts over the next several days, with each post capturing the pure essence of each segment of the episode. Dumbness has a new name. And it's name...is the Superfriends.

You've been warned.

Not for the Faint of Heart...or Brain

Once upon a time, when the world was more innocent, when the threat of nuclear annhiliation was prominent, when breakfast cereals were made of 98% sugar and 2% corn syrup, the Superfriends were always there to make sure that kids in the 80s stayed so confused that there was the possibility that their tiny little brains would blow up in their skulls. So, let's harken back to a time when polyester ruled, when afros were big, and Saturday morning cartoons made absolutely no freaking sense as we shatter your will to live with:

Superfriends: The Legendary Superpowers Show Presents: Island of the Dinasoids!

It makes my heart weep when I see the title of a show running longer than most novels nowadays.

Anyway, the episode starts with Batman's $40 million Batplane crashing down on an island without any outside interference because, as you well know, Alfred don't know jack about jet propulsion. In the Batplane with Batman is Professor Stein, the nerdy half of Firestorm. Just wait, it gets better. Carrying with him is a machine called the Omnicaster, a device that would allow anyone with, oh, I don't know, a death ray or a sonic disruptor or Pat Boone records to rain down fiery destruction to the entire planet through the use of Satellite Beams! This device was only made for good, mind you, which is why it's not going to be used like that today. Bats and Stein find a fortress (!) in the middle of the jungle (!!) where a Doctor is using a Genetto Beam (!!!) to turn animals into dinosaurs (wait, what?). The good Doctor Korwin, being not at all crazy as a bat-shit salad, shows them how the device works, eyeballs the Omincaster! and shows Batman and Professor Stein to two rooms that they can use. The crazy part of this hasn't even happened yet.

Meanwhile, Ronald Raymond, the beefcake portion of Firestorm, starts to wonder what in the hell is taking two people in a supersonic bat-shaped jet so damn long to get back to the Hall of Justice. He talks Wonder Woman, Robin and Apache Chief into helping him look for them. Remember, this is in the 80s, so this apparently wasn't a ploy to stay in close proximity to a 6' tall Amazon with blue eyes and perky...perkiness for several hours. Nope. Not at all. The quartet hop in the Invisible Jet (so named because nothing about four people in a sitting position traveling at Mach 2 would cause suspicion) to find out where Batman and Stein have run off to. They come across the island, land and are taken immediately into the fortress where they find out that Batty and Steiny are now dinosaur/human hybrids called Dinasoids. Turns out that wacky Dr. Korwin is a Dinasoid himself, having walked into the path of the Genetto Beam when it was in the process of turning a rhino into a triceratops. Because nothing says lab safety like walking in front of a glowing beam shooting out of a box toward a creature with the intent purpose of changing its molecular makeup to something that got killed by a meteor 65,000,000 years ago. Crazy science, I tell ya.

While all this is going on, Apache Chief has been wandering around outside to look for clues, in an apparent case of not realizing that he's not a detective, or, to put a finer point on it, none too bright. He finds the Doctor's former assistant, who relays the backstory of Korwin going old-school. Chief then decides that the rest of the gang are in trouble (mainly because he's not there, therefore they couldn't button their pants without help), grows to 40 feet tall and sets off to rescue a master detective, an Amazon warrior, two men who merge to create a being that can alter the basic building blocks of matter itself, and a kid in green speedos with a cape. Why? Because he can grow 40 feet tall, and they were all about the quota, son. All about the quota.

Anyway, back to the plot. Apache Chief busts in like a 40 foot tall Native American hellbent on busting into something, finds what's happened to everyone, and in a plothole so large that even a man screaming Inekchok couldn't wedge through, the Doctor's assistant finds a way to reverse the polarity of the Genetto Beam when it's about to be hooked up to the Omnicaster! to turn the entire world's population into a devolved race of dinosaur/human hybrids as dumb as the Superfriends. The assistant changes the Superfriends back into normal-ish human beings, changes the Doctor back into a stark-raving lunatic and evolves the dinosaur population back into more mundane instruments of death and destruction, otherwise known as nature. Korwin learns a lesson about messing with Darwin, the Superfriends learn a lesson about just leaving people where their expensive toys crash-land, and Batman learns that he needs a better flight crew if he's going to be taking the Batplane out for a joyride. Superman, it's rumored, refused to be in this episode because the writers owed him big-time for making him appear in The Planet of Oz, considered by my 3 year old son to be completely unwatchable. And if that doesn't tell you something about humanity, then nothing will...