Saturday Morning Isn't What It Used To Be

I used to get up really early on Saturday mornings. Back in the '90s, I'd get up as early as 5:30 for the sole purpose of turning on the TV so I could watch whatever piece of escapist entertainment was on at that time. Depending on channel and timeslot, I found quite a few different things, ranging from Dragonball Z to the Iron Man cartoon. (Not a huge DBZ fan, although I've read a few chapters of the manga, but that show's popularity is pretty impressive.)

I loved the Iron Man cartoon, mostly the second season. (I would embed some YouTube, but the %#$*ed site's embed code isn't cut-and-pasting like it should. Just look here for a dose of magic shapeshifting superarmor instead.) It's the main reason I was looking forward to the Iron Man movie even before everyone said it would be awesome-Iron Man is one of my personal favorite superheroes. (I don't care how lousy his comics may or may not be.)

Following Iron Man (and its slotmate, the Fantastic Four cartoon, from which comes my love of Doctor Doom and his faint, indefinable accent), there was no end of good stuff in the '90s. And if whatever was currently on didn't suit one's tastes, *click* aha there's something better on. Not only that, but the '90s had some amazingly longrunning ones that were quite consistent.

Now, though, there's maybe three channels with anything on, and only one has anything I want to watch for most of the morning. Here's a local channel's lineup starting sometime before seven, subject to change every other week.

The current earliest show on Saturday morning is a program called "Shop the World for Beauty" or some stupid name like that precedes the network lineup (KidsWB now 4KidsCW). It's all about traveling the world to find local beauty tips. As a redblooded straight male, I can't watch more than a few minutes of stuff like this without feeling nausea. That's really only part of what got on my nerves-the other part was all the gay guys that they had as consultants. I don't usually make judgment calls on people's sexuality, but man these guys sounded "gay."

Then there was the first cartoon of the morning, a musical called Will & Dewitt. (I hate musicals.) I'm not going to post any links, video, or anything of the kind, and if you value your sanity* you will not attempt to find any such. It might not have been quite so bad if it hadn't actually had two songs per episode not counting the introduction throughout the course of the two episodes per block. It literally drove me from the room.

It was followed by a show called Magi Nation, which had a lot of bad catch phrases ("I Magine" is a prime example) but was actually watchable... not watchable enough to keep me in the room though.

There's also a show called Skunk Fu, which is about as full of fart jokes as you'd expect, and an hour of Tom & Jerry Tales, a rehash of Tom & Jerry, the classic cartoon characters with a government-level monopoly on violence. I've seen both before today, and neither held much entertainment value. (Okay, I'll be frank: I HATE T&J Tales. The violence is pointless, stupid, and pointlessly stupid. Tom and Jerry are just about the most cliched of the classic cartoon characters. Take away cartoon banter, which is occasionally quite witty, and you get Tom and Jerry.)

Then, there's the new Spectacular Spider-Man, a show that was previewed for well over six months before it finally came out. It's pretty decent, and was worth the wait, but they showed freakin' "sneak peaks" for AGES, until they took all the fun out of it. (Okay, I lied. The stuff they showed was fun in the show itself despite all their efforts.) I rather liked the '90s 'toon, but this series has less baggage and more vomit-inducing chase scenes. One thing that bugs me about it-hardly anyone is slowed down by the webbing. Man, they've toned down the webbing. Maybe the writers just don't know what to do with it, or maybe they decided it's too much of a Deus Ex Machina. Another minor problem is that a lot of the interplay and such will probably be lost on someone not familiar with the comics. One good example of this: When my sister mentioned Gwen Stacy, a character who is playing a major part in the series, to Mom, Mom says "Who's Gwen Stacy?" Believe it or not, comic fans, not many people know much about Gwen Stacy, and Spider-Man 3 (which I haven't seen) probably only confused people.
Which isn't to say I dislike the show. It's a very fun ride, and the banter is excellent.

The "find" of the current lineup for me is World of Quest, a series which was adapted from a graphic novel (you can find a sample of the creator's work here, and yes that's free, no registration required, and boy oh boy does it have a Calvin and Hobbes vibe). This series is blessed by an annoyingly chirpy happy theme song (yes I mean that in a good way) which is punctuated by the series' two main characters taking verbal jabs at each other. Look here for the intro. The intro is really made by Quest's growly Patrick Warburtony "I hate theme songs" at the end. (I thought the voice actor was Patrick Warburton, but apparently it's someone named Ron Pardo.) I enjoy this series for several reasons, but the main one was the unexpectedness and bizarreness of it. This show can be really creepy. There was one episode where the character they were in the process of introducing, Anna Maht, a bumbling sorceress whose primary talent is bringing apparently inanimate objects to speaking, annoying-as-heck life (I say apparently inanimate because she's always zapping trees and fruit and stuff), tried to provide the group with some food. Of course, she bungles it, and the fruit start talking. But Quest eats the fruit anyway, as the fruit screams its protest. Eeek. There's also a litany of repetitive jokes, some of which, I admit, are very bad, but the primary appeal is the setup:

• Quest hates everything and everyone.
• Especially Prince Nestor, Heir to the Throne of Odyssia. (The character actually introduces himself that way.)
• A magic spell has bound him to Prince Nestor and forces him to (mostly) obey everything Prince Nestor demands.

What this basically means is that it's ten minutes or so (two episodes per half-hour slot) of Nestor being a jerk and yanking around Quest's chain with the Allegiance Spell, and Quest responding by finding the nastiest possible way to follow the order. (Nestor: QUEST! Clean me off! *pause as Quest prepares to punt him into a pond* WITHOUT throwing me into a pond! *pause as Quest prepares to punt him somewhere else* Or-) The real point is that the series drives itself, a rare trait in Saturday morning schlock. Usually, the drive of a gag-based Saturday morning show is some kind of "I'm doing whatever I say so I'm going to seem like a total jerk now!" kind of stuff; the reason these characters do stuff is often because they are total jerks. (I think I like the medical drama House for the same reason. That, and the obvious parallel between House and Sherlock Holmes.)

There's also Johnny Que-er, Test, a madcap show which has the aforementioned I'm-a-jerk-without-warning effect practically every episode. It was funny the first season, but it's been around for three or four, and it's well past its watch-by date. Not worth talking more about.

Then there's Eon Kid, shockingly one of the few dubbed series (I'm not sure about Magi Nation, but none of the rest are foreign) in this lineup. (That'll change soon, no doubt, with the network's change to CW whatever. 4KidsTV, the other lineup managed by company 4Kids, is merging with this one, and it has a much higher proportion of dubbed stuff.) Eon Kid's early episodes had some of the smartest yakking I've ever seen in a cartoon about the subject of hand to hand combat (granted, I watch Power Rangers, so it's not like I've seen a lot of good ones). After the early episodes' setup for it, there are tons of really awesome and insane fight scenes, including ones deemed inappropriate for Saturday morning. (Click here for some unrestrained, undubbed Korean awesome, in which a robot that looks like a futuristic samurai fights a robot that dresses like a 1930s mobster. It makes what I've seen of the Matrix's similar action scenes look tame.)

This brings me to the oddest thing about the lineup-it starts at 7:00 instead of 8:00 for no reason. (Granted, it's best that Search the World for Beauty be sent as far from noon as possible; I just wish it was in the other direction.) Two of these shows are given an hour. (T&J Tales and Spectacular, if you're wondering.) WHY? WHY?

Okay, it's also best that Will & Dewitt be on early, all things considered. Doggoneit.

I guess I'm just really cantankerous when it comes to cartoons. Anyone reading this will probably, at some point, sigh when they read "back in the '90s" during a cartoon rant, because I'm going to say it a lot. I can tell. (Back in the '90s, cartoons weren't restricted to Saturday mornings and cable! Rotten kids and their rotten...)

*This show has songs so bad my six year old brother thought they were stupid. He basically, after being barraged by the doggoned intro, said "Okay. That was stupid." And while he's been saying that more often than he used to, he's rarely said it with such feeling.