Cartoon Central

How did I survive in the days before things like the Guide to Springfield, an attempt to map the entire hometown of the Simpsons?

A couple of people have asked me what I think of the latest Doonesbury where Joanna wonders why young women aren’t calling themselves feminists as much anymore and has a conversation with her dead friend Lacey about whether or not we need the word. I’ll admit, at first I was a little stunned that Trudeau seemed to be saying that the feminist movement, while certainly not as urgent as it was in the past, isn’t still urgent. But I’m inclined to think he’s not really taking a side in the debate, because the cartoon struck me as mostly wistful. This panel in particular:

Yesterday, I went down to San Diego for Comic Con, the world’s biggest comic convention yadda yadda. I’ve got nothing against comics—in fact, I rather like the web and manga variety—but as far as U.S. comics go I’m pretty clueless. So, I spent a lot of time randomly wandering around, collecting free things and watching geeks.

I used a fair amount of internet projects with my students this past one. I set up a website celebrating the last project with my 7th graders, where some students set up websites, recorded and posted a podcast, did some animations and PowerPoint presentations.

Mi superhéroe es un tanto peculiar, ya que se trata de Buzz Light Year, uno de los protagonistas de Toy Story. Aunque ya había hecho algo con este personaje, quiero hacer una versión más madura en cuanto a texturas, iluminación y rig, así que lo he empezado de nuevo para obtener un resultado mejor. Además mi superéroe desentona un poco, ya que los demás van a hacer héroes como Lobezno, Hulk, Batman y similares. Como siempre, dando el cante.

This video is a giant pile of 1980s video effects, from the rotoscoped glowing colors to the Take On Me-like scribblings. But it’s the computer animation that made it so cutting-edge: blocky characters, a blocky dog, and blocky appliances cavorting about a blocky world. To be fair, Pixar’s stuff was just then getting started. This was the first video played on MTV in Britain, making it the overseas equivalent to Video Killed the Radio Star.

I am presently reading Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel. It contains some Dilbert strips, some commentary, and letters from the trenches to illustrate his points. One of the letters says:

There need to be more cool ass cartoons on the air like this - so go vote, because the Sci Fi channel apparently is retarded.

Mad props go out to Saturday Night Live and writer Robert Smigel for creating the TV Funhouse series of cartoons.

I’m not a big fan of theme parks. I mean, they are amazing to look at. It’s the crowds that get me. Wasting hours of my life in lines. The commercialism. The exhorbitant cost. The next-to-no educational value. But I know the kids dig ‘em. So I try to make room for them in my life here and again. Even then, I try to avoid the ones that just suck the life right outta ya. Yesterday we visited Bonfante Gardens. And we were in for a treat. It’s an agriculture themed park, no Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse to harangue you into a costly photo. No TV personalities. Replaced instead by kiddie rides shaped like artichokes and apple cores. Beautiful gardens full of rarities. Learning stations. Circus Trees- hand grafted and shaped into enormous works of art. Monarch butterflies flitting all around you while you peruse. Waterfalls all throughout the park. And thanks to a mid-week visit- no lines!!! Wooo! I could dig it.

Well, not really, but the South Park Scientology episode is off the banned list

We open with our hero, Lightning McQueen (what was his mother smoking?), racing for the Piston Cup. Conveniently, the race is a three way tie so, a tie-breaker is held in California. On his way there, however, McQueen gets arrested in the small town of Radiator Springs. What happens from here is typical Pixar fare: Hero learns to be a better person and make friends. What is more interesting here, is the story, within the story. It’s what’s implied throughout the movie; the surprisingly deep story about how society has become too fast paced. It’s about taking things slow and stopping to smell the roses. That is the great triumph of Cars’ screenplay; the surface story serves only as a Trojan horse.

While I’ve been reading Time, the only improvement to the magazine was adding a political cartoons page.

I've always been a big fan of Veggietales. Yeah, I know, I'm too old for that stuff right? But how many of you haven't seen The Incredibles, Toy Story, and Monsters, Inc.? Somehow computer animation has managed to grab the attention span of the young and old together, and VeggieTales was not an exception - at least the last time I saw one perhaps two years ago.

Cars tiene todas las características de un entretenido éxito de Pixar donde predomina una excelente animación, voces a la medida y un claro mensaje de amistad, pero a parte del “efecto Disney” ya mencionado, la película no logra crear un mundo con más alma donde por un momento nos olvidemos de la animación y se llegue a sentir como algo más real tal como pasó con “Finding Nemo” o “The Incredibles”.

In this Sunday's Doonesbury strip, Garry Trudeau neatly -- and hilariously -- poses the most pressing problem of being a Creationist: if you don't believe in evolution, do you want to be treated with modern antibiotics, or old fashioned ones that treated yesterday's pre-evolved bugs? Link (Thanks, Alex!)

But it is off to bed but I leave you with this nugget. All I have to say is thank you to Cartoon Network.

Passage from a letter excerpted in Ernest Jone’s The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (3:392):

If I had my life to live over again, I should devote myself to telepathy rather than to psychoanalysis.

To which I can only say this:

Has it ever seemed to you that there couldn’t possibly be enough girls in the world ages 11-15 as there are on Satanspace? Nearly every cursed page on that website is devoted to seizure-inducing ‘Hello Kitty’-esque flashing animations or ‘Disney pop’* music videos of adolescent girls with fake knockers and fake voices.

In college, I remember writing about the change in the tenor of political cartoons between WWII and the Vietnam War (a contrast demonstrated most notably by the jingoistic, downright racist WWII-era drawings of Theodore "Dr. Seuss" Geisel. Yeah, that Dr. Seuss). The cartoonists at the New Yorker were at the forefront of this shift away from uncritical war bond hawking, and for a while, they seemed to be alone.

I mean, stop for a minute and think of your favourite breakfast foods. There’s probably some eggs, bacon, of course, pancakes, waffles, toast… Now who wants to get up and cook that for their family each and every morning? My Grandmother used to, but only because she had to, and just recently she admitted to me that she, the woman who inspired my love of food, hates cooking with every fibre of her being – mostly because of having to get up every single day for 50 years to cook breakfast! If my Grandmother, with her pancakes shaped like Mickey Mouse isn’t up to cooking breakfast, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

Today’s Doonesbury is f’ing brilliant. I do think it’s a repeat, though.

Family Guy is an American animated sitcom created by Seth MacFarlane for FOX in 1999. The show was cancelled in 2002, but positive response to the show's release on DVD and reruns on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim led FOX to resume production of the show in 2005. To date it is one of only a handful of shows in television history to be cancelled and later revived by the power of their fan bases, and one of the few shows to be brought back to air by the same network that cancelled it.

Don’t forget tomorrow the new season of Clone Wars (that leads into Revenge of the Sith) starts airing tomorrow on Cartoon Network.