Mental Marathons, Bug Alzheimer's, and Increasing Self-Awareness: the TMNT Cartoon, Continued

Welp, I've done it. There was no way I was going to watch all the episodes, but I have now cherry-picked my way through seasons 1-7 of the Fred Wolf Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, the ones preceding the non-nostalgic "Red Sky" seasons, which I'm still not sure if I'll watch or not. I skipped episodes wantonly, sometimes not even finishing those I picked, meaning that I'm still not going to become a born-again TMNT fan, but I enjoyed what happened.

Despite how fast I went through the series, I still feel like I've run some kind of mental marathon. Even though I started out with plenty of ironic detachment, the series started getting more and more grating as I went past season 3. The dip in quality started to erode the nostalgic/ironic attachment, letting in more in the way of critical thoughts. I can only imagine how dire the experience would've been to those who were paying attention, and who watched everything, and kept watching everything.

Besides this, my actual opinions of the series and characters haven't changed that much. I did start to notice Raphael's sassiness more, and he was the source of the few non-ironic laughs I had, but somehow that didn't lead to me to picking him as my favourite Turtle, and I still don't have one. I actually think there's something to like in every Turtle, even Leonardo, but so far I'm only sticking with my two favourite vermin, Baxter and Splinter, a contemporary and nostalgic interest.

I wanted to like Mona Lisa, the salamander girl, if only on principle, because grotesque female characters are so rare and her design was cool. But again, she suffered from Generic Female Character syndrome, with no real personality besides just being heroic. And I know shippers like to go nuts over the episode, but the little thing she had with Raphael was handled in such a bland way that I couldn't pretend it was anything else but the writers making sure it was that bland.

I did start to become more disappointed with Splinter, who seemed to start taking on a more passive role, with less moments of action or plot significance to balance his traditional non-action role. Still, it's impossible for me to lose my childhood respect for Master Splinter, or even to ask if it's only nostalgia that makes me like him. I don't feel like my interest in the character has actually been renewed, only pleasantly revisited. It's still a satisfying, but there is still a distinction worth making between a nostalgic and a contemporary interest.

The main reason why I can't be a born-again Turtles fan is because it was really hard for me to treat the Fred Wolf cartoon as its own universe. Rather, I looked at it as a physical production more than I do its own story, always keeping in mind the constraints it laboured under, and the likely intentions of the writers. That's not to say I didn't have emotional reactions, but they we toned down, more detached, ironic, or cynical than other series.

For an example, let's talk about the Fred Wolf Baxter Stockman in more detail. I've wanted to do this since seeing all the Baxterfly episodes, but to make the rest of this piece more universal and useful, I'm going to use the character's story to talk about culpability, writers who give a shit, villain intelligence, and why modern stuff is better.

Apparently, the question of whether or not Fred Wolf Baxter is a sympathetic character is A Thing in the Turtles fandom. My take is that as an ordinary human he's pretty much innocent, but as a nutty villain and a fly monster he isn't, and so he's got to reap what he sows. In the particular case of Baxterfly, he's always running around with his death traps and insect mutations, so it's no surprise he keeps getting chucked in limbo and never gets what he wants. Villainous is as villainous does, you know?

There's also minor controversy over the fact that the Turtles didn't turn him human in his last appearance, "Revenge of the Fly", when a potential chance opened up, but I am totally not surprised that that happened. Come on, he'd just turned New York into bug monsters—what'd you expect the Turtles to do, let him get what he wanted afterwards?

Second, in that same episode he went straight for mutating people and then changed his mind and decided he wanted to be changed back. If he wanted it so dang badly, Baxterfly should've gone for a personal transformation first. I'm not sure in that case to blame the character's shortening attention span, or the writers not caring, but either way "Revenge of the Fly" is a perfectly ordinary Baxterfly episode and there probably would have been a million more had the series not been retooled. I can't think of it as a downer like a lot of others do.

But let's look at this another way. I don't think Baxterfly's situation would've ever been resolved, and that's because he's the product of a series with a complete lack of self-awareness. It's sort of a monkeys-on-typewriters thing: if you have a committee churning out quick scripts again and again, eventually you're going to end up with a plot point that seems cruel and heartless. But nobody intended it to be that way, it just happened, and nobody notices because you've got to get the next batch out. There's no room or perceived need to resolve the situation that's been created.

However, even knowing this, and not considering the character innocent, I'm still critical of what was produced, simply because I think even a goofy show should resolve the situations it creates, and be aware of what it is creating.

 But the TMNT cartoon does not do any of these things. All this bad stuff happens to Baxter Stockman, but you never get the sense it's done for any purpose. It's not an ironic, Wile E. Coyote sort of sad-sack craziness; instead, it's just some stuff that happened to fill time and market an action figure. I find the dark humour in it, and it's part of the reason I grew to like Baxter, but I don't assume his story was supposed to be darkly humorous at any point.

I mean, check this out: it's a little guy who wanted to make money with his inventions, and gave them to somebody—the Shredder looks like a bad guy, but we have to grade intelligence lower for characters in the TMNT cartoon, and the Shredder was the one who used the Mousers for a hero- and property-destroying purpose anyway.  Then Baxter's almost killed and subsequently clapped off into an asylum while the Turtles jack all his stuff to make their iconic vehicles (yes, really). Then he becomes evil for some reason, spends some time doing the "bumbling minion" routine, then becomes a fly monster with transformation angst, at some points seems to be losing his intelligence, gets a smarmy little computer friend, loses him, and also keeps getting chucked off into other dimensions, finally never getting out. Oh, and as a one-off joke, he apparently has a twin brother who knew he was a fly but hates him.

I find it really hilarious because it's so fucked up, but I don't think it was meant to be, because there is no way a series like this would create a character like this on purpose—it'd just be too dark. I also can't assume he was meant to be a sympathetic character because of the cartoon's hard-line morality and his villainous deeds. But that's okay: viewers react in ways not intended to the material we're provided, finding sympathies and fears never planned, and of course I still feel sorry for Fred Wolf Baxter even while laughing at his misfortunes, and I also find him much more delightful than, again, he was probably intended to be. My rational side was just completely unsurprised at not seeing this story resolved, for all those reasons above.

But while accepting the reasons why this went on, I can't shut off the part of my brain that demands a more critical evaluation, and asks what might be done if a series with more self-awareness and interest in a resolution handled a character like this. Fortunately, the answer to this question is easy to find.

I watched the episodes "A Better Mousetrap", "Attack of the Mousers" "Insane in the Membrane", and "Head of State" of the 4Kids Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series. "Insane in the Membrane" is an especially infamous banned episode in which the other version of Baxter, the one more true to the Mirage comics in race, mien, and story, has gradually become a cyborg that longs for an organic body. He manages to manufacture one for himself, but it begins to rot and he begins to go insane, hallucinating his childhood as he blames April for his condition and tries to kill her. It's pretty intense and gross shit, the first time a children's cartoon has actually given an older me the creeps.

However, there were surprisingly strong similarities between the set-up for Baxter in this version and the Fred Wolf one: a scientist who thought he was hot stuff, ended up working with the Shredder, getting constantly mistreated, and involved with involuntary transhumanism. I was very surprised, I can tell you. My assumption was the 4Kids series never took anything from the old cartoon at all, and maybe this was all coincidental, but….

The most important difference for the purposes of this post is that the 4Kids series seems much more self-aware: the writers understand the tragic and fucked-up undercurrents involved in such a story and write to bring them to the surface and deal with them. They develop the character through his problems and actually have something come out of what happens to him, instead of throwing out random events with no ending and no real consideration of the effect on the character. In "Head of State", it looks like Baxter's finally going to get closure.

Strangely enough, it might also help that the 2003 series made Baxter villainous from the get-go. Fred Wolf Baxter's personality change from nebbish scientist to nebbish/evil mad scientist was pretty random, and any theoretical explanation for that change falls under the "unintentional cruelty" banner (Made evil by a chance encounter? Awesome!). Beginning with a villainous character makes the story flow better, makes it seem guided, and it makes Baxter seem like a credible creation that someone put effort into.

Or compare it to Waspinator from Beast Wars, a character whose mannerisms Baxterfly reminds me of. Waspinator started off as a disposable minion, and went on to become the "Kenny" of Beast Wars, constantly getting blown up, and then commenting on that fact. You get a better sense that people, writers and viewers alike, recognized affection for a silly, pathetic villain, and ran with it, having a real sense of humour. As another concession to self-awareness, Waspinator also gets his "happy ending", no matter how absurd it is (hanging out on Earth with the protohumans while all Transformers are gone), because you should give a character a resolution. Even a morally absolute series like Beast Wars has learned its lesson from modern style.

I'm also against villains that are dumber than heroes, and of low-tier villains being especially stupid, cowardly, or simpering. Even with a comedy show, even with a kid's show, if you've got any moments of conflict or threat in your series, the antagonists have to be able to stand up to the heroes, otherwise it's pointless to pretend you're creating tension. Fred Wolf Baxter is all this to a T, while early 4Kids Baxter has the same low-man-on-the-totem-pole vibe, but he's not so much of a silly sycophant.

The issue of writing is not so much about a show being "serious" or not, but whether the creators care about what the heck they're doing, and if they look a bit more at the implications of what they produce, and create resolutions. Even comedic series should do the most to develop their plot and setting, especially if they have any serial aspects. The Real Ghostbusters, when it was good, was a much better example of how to do an action-comedy cartoon that appealed to children and isn't that stupid.

But despite all of this, I like Fred Wolf Baxter as he is. I find him to be really fucking hilarious, both because of his accidentally sucky life, and because he's so tiny (seriously, he looks almost super-deformed in proportions) and dorky and screechy. I've called a personal moratorium on the word "adorkable", but if I didn't, the term would probably apply, authorial intent be damned.

By the end I also have a slight preference for human Fred Wolf Baxter over Baxterfly, especially his shaggy-haired crazy version. His abrupt transition to evil doesn't bother me as much as Baxterfly's pathetic outcome, because he is just slightly less childish as a character.

Baxterfly, on the other hand, is dumb even by TMNT villain standards. In several later episodes, starting with "Son of Return of the Fly II",  it even seems like he's mentally degenerating. This tapped into primal childhood fears about the loss of intelligence, and the character became slightly less likable. I know it's not a rational impulse, since the character wasn't all that smart to begin with, but that's how the human mind works.

In the tradition of everything else, I'm sure this wasn't intended to be the reaction. More likely it's just that he's supposed to have the "brain of a bug", but a former scientist mistaking a circuit board for food or being unable to remember April's name for more than three seconds was just very slightly unnerving. I'm not about to make a big deal about it, but there you go.

That's not to say that I dislike Baxterfly. He's still nebbish and funny and an adorable little bug-Muppet thing (depictions of a scary and edgy Baxterfly look extremely odd to me, though I know they're going off other sources, including the Playmates toy). I liked the strange notion of his recurring computer friend, a Seth Brundle parody hanging out with a Hal 9000 parody. However, I felt like Z was played as smarmy and slightly creepy towards his "pal", though this time I'm not sure if that was the intention or not.

Fred Wolf Baxter Stockman is definitely the product of a bygone era, one that's good to be rid of, but I can make an exception just this once. Every other version of the character should be based on the Mirage comics, and I still hold to my general dislike of moronic villains, but, well, I like this one.

Despite all these cynical disclaimers, it's fun to find a contemporary interest in a character from a nostalgic series. I barely remembered Baxter Stockman existed, and certainly had no idea he hung around in human form for as long as he did, so this was an interest I didn't expect. On the other hand, Fred Wolf Baxter is a nerd with a crappy life, so it's not exactly a surprise. I just try not to absolve him of too much, and recognize that this is not what villains should be.

All in all, this is why Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a good experience. It doesn't lead to anything, and sometimes it's painfully stupid, but it helps me remember good things. It helped me remember a character I liked, and let me fuss over a "new" one, while being inspired to talk for a while about the nature of nostalgia and villainy. This means I made out like a bandit.

This is an Evangelion Pencil Board

I own a lot of Evangelion junk, but this pencil board is particularly special, because the image on it is something that was there in my fandom from the very beginning.

Every store with some imported anime goods always has this stock of bootleg mini-posters, copying promotional images from whatever anime was popular that season. A friend of mine once had a bootleg poster with the same image that's on this pencil board. I passed by it multiple times when I came to visit her, but neither of us knew where it was from. Then, in 2002, I got into Evangelion and realized it was a picture of Kaworu and Shinji. I used the poster as a gateway to tell her about the show. We both loved it, and it was a huge favourite of ours for years. We've since gone our separate ways, but one of the last things I gave her was my old Evangelion VHS collection, back when she had problems with her DVD player.

Looking back at this picture, it's also interesting how it covers almost everything I like about Evangelion, in a single image. EVA-01 and her slick mecha design isn't there, but it has Shinji and Kaworu, my two favourite characters, but in a pose that is not sexualized, and the questioning text in the background shows the psychological aspects of the show. Out of all the pieces of Evangelion art I've seen, it's the one that gets me right here, you know?

Turtles, Turtles, Ra, Ra, Ra

Because of Teletoon Retro, the internet, and general stress brought on by just existing, I discovered I was capable of nostalgia. It took me a long time to admit, because I thought nostalgia was for people who actually wanted to live in the past. I realize now we can just get a buzz from that stuff and help us keep on going.

My latest nostalgic experience is the re-running of the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon on Teletoon Retro. The first time I realized it was running on the channel, I was repelled by how silly it was, but slowly it pulled me back in, and now I watch the re-runs regularly.

That's no big surprise, because I now remember how huge that show was in my childhood, and my enjoyment is more intense than for any other purely nostalgic property. I still make a clear point to say this doesn't mean I think the show is any good, or that older cartoons are better than new ones. In fact, I feel like I'm watching myself watching the show, not totally able to understand why I enjoy it so much, when it's so incredibly stupid.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will not become one of those childhood things, like Freakazoid, or Beauty and the Beast, that I "rediscover" by finding a new interest, one that relates to the person I am now and satisfies my older sensibilities. No, the Turtles show I only enjoy because of what it used to be for me.

I grew up with the Fred Wolf Turtles, knowing of them at least by 1988. I moved away from the cartoon to the Archie comics series, 'til that ended, and then I lost my Turtles-love. I was too young for the original Mirage comics, though I have read a few issues over the years, and am familiar with all the changes in lore.

Now I'm thinking I want to read/watch ALL THE TURTLES. I don't know how long that urge'll last, and even if I followed through, this is a huge media franchise that I probably couldn't even end up covering, anyway.

I really would like to read the Mirage comic in full, though. I never realized until a short time ago, how damn enormous the entire comic oeuvre was, or that it was going on until very recently. It's one of the things left out whenever anybody talks about American comics being able to succeed beyond the Big Two, and I'd like to see how it does.

But when I was growing up, hell yeah did I love some Turtles. I might've liked the Turtles universe so much because it was a place where you could do fucking anything in it. Mutants, monsters, aliens, magic, and lasers were all on the table, and nobody would care. Before knowledge of furries tainted anthro animals for me, I thought those were pretty cool, too. Back when I read the Archie comics series (which is a huge world onto itself, with some pretty intense stuff), I liked any character who was based on an animal I liked.

So, Teletoon Retro is on the beginning of the third season, and I've watched most of the first and second season on YouTube, and am slowly skipping through any other episodes during the run which might interest me.

There are declines in quality throughout, but I only vaguely notice. While I can think some critical thoughts, my lower brain is the one in control. I just love watching it, and I laugh at almost everything, not because it's actually funny to a grown-up, but because it's just so ridiculous. I laugh like a madwoman, with frequent thoughts of, "Good lord!" or "What the fuck?", and many other such cheerful curses.

"Who's your favourite character?" is one of my most important nerdy questions, and when it comes to TMNT, the answer is always and forever gonna be Master Splinter. I'm otherwise not interested in the faux-Eastern mysticism or the wise old mentor character, but Splinter is an icon from my childhood. He's even possibly the source of my longtime interest in characters of the Rattus variety: The Secret of NIMH, Ratatouille, Rattrap (and much as I hate to say it, Verminous Skumm and a long search for a Ratar-O figure)—I was even born in the Year of the Rat, no lie.

I used to have a pack of Splinter toys that I carried around with me, including a naked original edition missing half an arm, and all three of the movie-based Splinter figures, as well as collector cards, a colouring book adaptation of "A Thing about Rats", a Random House adaptation of "Shredder and Splintered", and so on and so forth. Maybe I had that "substitute father figure" thing everyone thinks boys had for Optimus Prime, even though the apparent consensus is that in the toon Splinter was just the "Master" instead of the father figure he was in other versions—something I don't believe. He is totally a dad.

I like to try to understand how my childhood tastes in characters were the same as my tastes as an adult, and Splinter was probably my favourite because he was smart. Intelligence is one of the character traits I keep coming back to, and Splinter's got a lot of brains. Sometimes it seems like he's only character in the cartoon who's not an idiot, like when he and the Shredder switch bodies, and Splinter immediately pretends to act like the Shredder, and the Shredder just acts like himself. (Angry, bitchy Splinter is hilarious, by the way). He's got his stuff together, he does.

Sometimes Splinter is also the one to be rescued, or to stay behind while the Turtles go off and  do the actual plot. I remember a lot of this, but it didn't change things. And sometimes Splinter also kicks ass, which has me going all sports-fan, like I hadn't forgotten about this character for over a decade. It's super-neat.

I always wondered why he looked more like a dog than a rat, something that is especially weird when you see regular-looking rats in the series. Some other cartoons do that to distinguish rats from mice, but Splinter is the only rodent around. I'm used to it by now, and he's like this big stuffed animal, and also just one of my favourite character designs in general, maybe because of that distinct dog-rat weirdness. I know I'd kill for the new TMNT Classics toyline to continue and make a toon-style Splinter.

(Hamato Yoshi's character design looks really weird, though; almost uncanny valley. Also, why does Splinter's sushi start out looking like chocolate macarons?)

I also decided I now had a soft spot for Baxter Stockman, Shredder's little mad scientist sidekick turned Seth Brundle. Apparently, a few people think of him as the woobie-type, and while I wouldn't go that far, since he's such a mean little mugwump, I can see why it happens.

The writers' intention is obviously, "he deserves it because he's a bad guy" but if you take that out, his life fucking sucks, including the suggestion that he's a villain because his unwitting brush with evil drove him insane. He's endearingly pathetic in some way, evilly nebbish. Baxter is also an idiot, but that's fine; I like laughing at him, too.

I like both human and insect versions of him, and his bug form is also oddly adorable. That's not easy for a bug-hater like me to say. Come on, though, he's got a sweater-vest and a giant bowtie, how is that not hilarious? All the same, though, seeing that Baxterfly was losing his faculties and gradually becoming more infantile was a genuinely disturbing moment.

Baxter also threatened Splinter's life on two occasions, one time directly and with great enjoyment, but whatever. Four-year-old me probably wouldn't have been willing to compromise, but I guess even woman-children can change.

In terms of any other characters, I can't find any that I like or care about as much. It's weird to me, right now, to realize that I don't have a favourite Turtle. I'm sure it would have been Donatello, since I dressed as Donnie for a grade school Halloween parade, I tend to prefer nerdy characters and I also love purple, but nothing's going on there so far.

That's not surprising, though, because nobody likes the same kind of character every time. It's also never about which character is the smartest, the coolest, the most developed, or the best written: you just like what you like.

I've got nothing against any of the Turtles proper, though, and I can't say I don't notice them, either. They're part of the whole Turtle thing, creating this situation where the show is enjoyable as a whole piece, not just waiting for Splinter to do something. I'm sure that part of the longevity of TMNT is because it has four distinct main characters to extend the appeal to a wide range of viewers.

April O'Neil is the opposite of distinct, though. You've got her job, you've got her role as "human friend", but she's just your Generic Nice Female Person, and there's no real sense of her as an individual character, someone that would actually be interesting as themselves. She's a textbook example of "female character whose only trait is being female".

That kind of characterization is a hard thing to define unless you see it, but I sure have. It's when you've got a female character who does things that are considered commonly feminine, but there is no sense of a personality behind it, no sense that these are the actual traits of a character. Instead, it's just what the writers threw in.

Say what you will about how shallow or, um, "slow" the rest of the major cast can be, but they've got much more personality than April does. You could tell me not to expect anything from a girl character in an 80's boy's cartoon, but my dislike of blank-slate characters transcends nostalgia just by a hair. Because you've already got these bizarre characters, you should put effort into the lone female character, too.

And I know this sounds crazy, but I guess I assumed that if April had become this fanboy icon, it had to be because there was something about her personality as well as her looks. I have no idea now what I was thinking with that.

I vaguely remember liking April's friend Irma, probably because she was the awkward female character that was the closest such a series would get a girl nerd, but in the episodes I've seen so far, Irma bugs the hell out of me. She's not just awkward, her awkwardness is used for this  "going to grow up to be a crazy cat lady" vibe that I do not like. She's no Janine Melnitz, that's for sure.

Normally I do think that villains ought to be at least as competent as the heroes, but in the case of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I'm just not in the mood to give a shit. It's not because TMNT is a comedy, because the Turtles are also dumb, but the villains are dumber, and even a funny show should try to make things equal if there's a conflict. But it doesn't bother me for some reason. I know why I give Baxter a pass, but the rest I just stare at them.

I'm sure somebody out there thinks Shredder and Krang were badass in the original cartoon, but I don't see that. They are totally an old married couple, and Shredder is a huge brat right from day one. Fun to laugh at, but laugh at without liking them.

The theme song is a glorious, glorious earworm, but you already knew that, didn't you?

I did see Turtles Forever when it came out, and it was lots of fun. I gotta say, I was on the side that said the goofy portrayals of the 1980s characters was spot-on: I didn't have any recent experience with them in 2009, but the portrayal just felt right to me. It was also exciting to see something so meta-fictional on kids' TV. I didn't get a big nostalgia buzz off of the special, but it was fun to watch. I might've gotten more out if it if I'd been nostalgic at the time, but it wasn't a bad catch, either.

The "Turtles are aliens in this new movie" fiasco was something I wasn't in the mode to have an opinion about. The thing was, I couldn't imagine any way that the Turtles being aliens would impact the attachment I had to them. I had no doubt in my mind that anything Michael Bay-related would be cringeworthy, though, and am glad it seems to have died.

Actually, I think of myself as pretty chill about any differences between Turtle continuities. I only have a problem with media changes when there's just one version, or it's retroactively applied, but when Turtles, like Transformers, has all these different continuities, there's not expectation of consistency or fidelity, or even of any emotional attachment to be carried over.

However, no other Turtles thing would quite give me the charge that this nostalgic experience has. It's this perfect Id supercharge, one where you don't care about anything except being happy. You can talk about flaws and the reasoning behind your reactions, but it doesn't change your attachment either way. There's an impossible shine to all of it, and you know that nothing you observe can change that.

Hardcore nostalgia can be a dangerous feeling in large doses. It can be good to simply not care, to go back to those feelings of basic happiness that don't require critical thinking. But there's also something good about being able to step away from something, to look at it more clearly, and to have a deeper attachment that is related to your slightly-more-rational mind.

I always make this distinct split between a nostalgic and a contemporary nerdy interest. The material may be of the same quality, but I can't transform a nostalgic interest to the typical active fandom. Nostalgia is brief, and it seems stronger, but it fades fast and leaves very little behind. An active fandom is something that operates on slow burn, and demands a little bit more consideration, but also leaves something that stays. And more in the way of…not totally critical thinking, but at least the sensation of having a clearer head.

What I'm thinking is that I'm going to slowly forget about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because it is just something from my past, something that can't take over my brain in any new way.

Nice vermin, though.

Guilty Pleasures: Certain Dragonlance Novels

Dragonlance is a universe of novels based on some role-playing game. The universe is huge, and goes on to this day. As anybody might expect, the central storylines are bland Tolkien knockoffs: motley people in search of MacGuffins to defeat their assorted Dark Lords. The most popular and longest series tell different versions of such a story.

However, when I was a kid, I loved the hell out of some of Dragonlance's dragon-centric side stories. There were both short stories and novels with dragons as viewpoint characters, and that was total catnip to me. It's true that non-tie-in fiction has a lot of sapient dragons, but the stories tended to be ones with dragons, not ones about dragons, which was an important distinction for me. Dragonlance had a surprising number of stories told from a dragon's point of view, more than I could find anyplace else, so I was hooked good.

I eventually got around to reading the "founding" Dragonlance novels, and found them boring, but it wasn't because I knew how bad they were, just that they had less dragon-ness. It wasn't until later that I really began to wise up to issues like quality, and lose interest in the franchise for those reasons. I blame this on being young and also not growing up in a very literary household, but soon I got a little more experience and realized how badly-written and how badly-executed these books were.

I mentally threw out most of them, and didn't want to look for any new ones, but there were some that I couldn't let go of. One of them was The Black Wing, which I've spent more time talking about than the writer probably did thinking about. It's about a dragon named Khisanth, a young villain-in-training with a crappy life that's mostly the result of her own bad choices. Khisanth is still my favourite dragon character of all time, far above the more iconic dragons of mythology or modern fiction. However, the novel is a disjointed mess, and doesn't develop its ideas well enough. The book isn't anything I would have admitted to liking if I wanted to be taken seriously, but it's sort of a personal icon nonetheless.

I also have a weakness for the Kang's Regiment stories, too. In order to spice up the ranks of their enemies, Dragonlance introduced the draconians, a race of mutant dragon men created by corrupting the eggs of good dragons. They were cannon fodder in the early stories, but two authors decided to write a series of short stories and novels focusing on a draconian named Kang and his comrades.

These started out as comedic short stories about put-upon workmen, before transitioning into an oddly touching pair of novels about draconians leaning to define themselves as an independent people despite being created as servants of evil. It's a very cute series, even if they are not well-written. Again, my interest is not something I want to spread around, but my preference is genuine.

I wish I could have grown up reading better fantasy or being encouraged to, but I really do love those stories, and a couple of other short stories that I decided were still worth keeping around. One of my favourites is "Aurora's Eggs", a creation myth about one dragon defeating five of her evil counterparts alone.

A Half-Baked Self-Analysis of a Checkered Past

I've written briefly about my break-up with The Lion King, a beloved movie from my childhood that I just can't  love for itself anymore, though I also can't bring myself to hate it. It's because I can't swallow the film's support of ironclad hierarchy, one in which everyone has their place and those who try to change it are evil or misguided. I also find the handling of Simba's exile unconvincing in a few ways, and the easy diffusion of Scar as a threat once he becomes ruler to also be disappointing.

Which just leaves me wondering why the hell I loved it so much as a kid. I've decided I'll never know for sure, but that doesn't prevent me from thinking about it. The strongest thought was that I interpreted Scar and the hyenas as positive anti-authoritarian characters, and having decided, by age ten, that I liked characters who defied authority, I latched onto them as fellow aliens. In my mind, Scar was "snarky" and thumbed his nose at royal pretentions. The hyenas were (not literal) underdogs who had been treated unfairly and were looking for a better lot in life, and they also were "snarky" and didn't give a shit about authority.

If it really was the way I looked at those characters in the past, it's impossible for me to do it now. I look at those characters now and all I can see are the ways they support the "real" messages of the film. Scar is an idiot, and most emphatically not a saviour of the downtrodden, but one who uses them for his own ends. He can scheme his way to the top but isn't smart enough to be an effective villain once he gets there.

The hyenas are also not meant to be oppressed in any way. Their desire for food is because they are gluttonous rather than starving, and according to the rules of the narrative, they "deserve" to be kept out because if they don't, it'll fuck everything up. They're also too stupid to realize when they're being manipulated, and not intended to be worthy of sympathy for it. All four characters are anti-authority, but negatively so. Their refusal to stay in their pre-ordained roles is why they are villains.

I know part of the beauty of fiction is seeing characters in different ways, finding emotional resonance that the creators may not have intended. I still believe that, and there are times when I balance my feelings towards a character with the knowledge that these reactions were not intended by the writers. However, in this case, I can't see the Lion King characters as anything but what I believe they were intended to be, with no other emotions in the way.

I just cringe to imagine the Lion King villains being spun for any kind of progressive interpretation, because I see them as so strongly the opposite of that, so obviously meant to show why defying authority/order is a bad thing, that I can't connect with the characters on any other level anymore. They're not competent, they're not "right", and they don't care about each other. Something's just gotten screwed up in the last eighteen years.

Samurai Pizza Cats

Step off my nostalgia! It is mighty

What you have to learn to accept is that there are some works you can't look at objectively, works for which you will forever surrender your critical considerations because there is no alternative. When nostalgia or good vibes, these just swamp your higher brain functions. It might lead to the worst ways of fandom, but sometimes it's harmless.

Samurai Pizza Cats is one such example, of the chronological nostalgic type. I haven't equally embraced everything from my childhood that I've re-explored, but with Samurai Pizza Cats I get the very strong sense that I'm not entirely thinking with my Adult Brain when I enjoy watching it. I can point to reasons why the series is good,  but it doesn't change the fact that watching or remembering it turns me into a raging nostalgia monster.

Okay, for those who don't know, Samurai Pizza Cats was a Saban Entertainment dub of Cat Ninja Legend Teyandee, a series about a historical-Japan-styled futuristic town populated by animal-robot…things. The three heroes run a pizza parlour while moonlighting as sentai-style heroes, battling the rat/fox Prime Minister and his group of crow allies, with a different giant robot (usually) every episode. For variously-given reasons (having a bad script translation, receiving no script translation, there being too many untranslatable jokes, etc.) this children's anime was dubbed into a comedy containing fourth-wall breaking, characters speaking as if they were employed actors, references to adult pop culture, bad puns, weird interpretations of onscreen visuals, and an overall junior MST3K feel to it.

While I became an anime nerd long ago, in this case I don't give a damn about the original version of Samurai Pizza Cats. One could easily say that since this series comes from the Woody Allen school of dubbing there's an exception to be made, but I have seen anime fans getting riled up about privileging the dub edit, so I'm just making my place clear. It's not surprising somebody would feel this way, when people have angrily catalogued the censorship in the Pokemon dub. One can't place a standard on which altered anime are "worthy" of being complained about, but we all don't have to care.

As an even more specific example, while it's now obvious now that the character Big Cheese was supposed to be a fox, not a rat as the dub says (he has a face that looks like stylized foxes in Japaense art, not to mention that tail), part of my brain refuses to process this. It's easy to take his dub-species as a "truth".

There was nothing really new about the series' style of humour by 1990, but the dub does it well. You can't trust what I say, but honestly, the dub holds together. There are a few moments when the dialogue obviously doesn't match the facial expressions or the onscreen content, but it mostly flows. However accurate they might be, the writers also have a good handle on the new personalities they created, keeping them consistent and distinct.

Strangely enough, for all its rewriting the dub seems to be less censored than other anime from that time period. It'd be hard not to have a dub that looks like this be said to take place in Japan, but you know somebody would have tried. Pizza Cats doesn't, but calls their place Little Tokyo and say they are in a "Japanese cartoon". The heroes are also clearly launched from a giant revolver without any alterations, and the main villain is still a campy gay cross-dresser. Oh, and Japanese text appears from time to time, and jokes are made about it.

I also like the character designs: while the dub doesn't make it that clear, apparently they're supposed to be…robots? The robotic animals have super-deformed proportions and bright colours, and are, well, pretty damn adorable and also kind of cool-looking in all their details and fancy armour (except that pretty female mammals have humanlike jawlines and tiny noses, which are weird; so is Lucille, the sheep girl with horns).

When I was a kid, my favourite characters were the bad guys: the "rat" Big Cheese and his various crow helpers: Jerry Atric, Bad Bird, the Rude Noise (they're some kind of birds anyway) and the horde of disposable Ninja Crows. There's no real deep reason for it, except maybe that I love all those animals much more than cats. And I still like them better than the heroes, though it all blends together into some kind of nostalgic fog.

As I mentioned above, Big Cheese loves to cross-dress, and in the dub is played as campily gay. He doesn't do it so often that he could easily be dubbed as a female character, but that he wasn't is still surprising considering the time period. And yes, he's supposed to be a fox, but I don't really care that much, as I said above. Though now it answers my old question of why he had such a thick tail….

(I can't help but wonder if being a fan of Master Splinter predisposed me to accept canine features as part of Rattus anatomy. And that, while the rodent vs. cat thing is an obvious reason to change his species, I wonder if  another part of the inspiration was the canid look of Master Splinter, given that the dub takes other jabs and TMNT, even in the theme song.)

Bad Bird (which I keep wanting to type as "Brad Bird") is extra-notable because the end of the cartoon throws in a change-of-heart for the character, motivated by previously discovering honest work can work out, and rediscovering an old sweetheart. It happens fast, and his girlfriend, Carla, doesn't really have a personality, but this was probably the first thing I shipped, and I know I had a drawing of Bad Bird and Carla on the wall of my childhood bedroom. I'd be really reluctant to call this any sign of Japan's "superior" storytelling, but man…it is so…cute. And having even a crude attempt at character development probably makes him the best character in the show, and the best out of all the villains I loved as a kid.

Yet I'm not going to harp about that, because as I said above, a love for Samurai Pizza Cats has more to do with a generalized nostalgia than any specific interest or attachment to a specific character. I have my preferences, but it all blurs together into a general feeling of nice good happy time. Bad Bird is a character from the past, and while he's the character I like the most, I can't approach him as I would a present-day character I love, or even one that I've rediscovered. He's not to be talked about that much, but just admired as a beloved figure from childhood.

Naturally, this was all prompted by the announcement of a DVD release, for which I trotted back to the show to see if it still held up. Having 52 episodes and being put out by a small company probably means I'd have to pay through the nose for this release, and I'm actually not sure if I would want to go that far. But I'm not sure that I don't, either.

It wasn't prompted by the news of a Speedy Cerviche action figure release, because, well, I never liked Speedy. For all the pratfalls he takes, he's still supposed to be the Brash Young Hero that I usually never like, and re-watching the series, there's still something off-putting about him. People claim the article says they'll be making other characters, too, but at about $50 a pop, I probably wouldn't pay that much for a Bad Bird of similar quality. Maybe.

Anyway, my gut tells me this series has some recommendable quality for older nerds who've never seen it. While a lesser edited dub would try to follow the original story but make the same typical mistakes, by setting Samurai Pizza Cats up front as a comedy, and a relatively well-done one at that, it becomes something far different, and far more interesting.

Dat Freak

It’s a story a lot of us 90s kids are familiar with: going back over a cartoon we loved as a kid, only to discover we missed all the adult-targeted humour that was fuel-injected into every episode. At the best of times, it adds a new dimension to a show that’s still entertaining to us, years later, making it even better.

It’s been over a decade since I’ve watched Freakazoid! on TV. I caught some episodes on YouTube a while back, but apparently that wasn’t enough for the final click, for it wasn't until a short while ago I was hit with the sudden and very powerful impulse to rebuy and rewatch the entire series. Now I totally love it all over again.

Freakazoid! has always been my favourite of the Amblin/WB animated comedies, ranking above Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain. I don’t know what it is, but I keep being drawn to superhero spoofs, even though I’m not that big a fan of superheroes. I’m smart enough to know that not all superhero stories are endless tales of black-and-white morality and shallow characterization, so it’s not a misplaced mean-spiritedness that drives my interest, either. Nor is it feeling that superheroes are somehow more absurd than the rest of SF and fantasy. I don’t know what it is, but I love The Venture Brothers, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, The Tick, Mystery Men, and so on.

The appeal of Freakazoid! is easy to discern: it’s just the type of humour I grew up with and still love when it's done right. Just when I feel I’ve become exasperated by the endless tide of pop culture parodies, fourth-wall breaking, and celebrity impersonations, another good cartoon comes along to remind me that this type of humour can still be used effectively. Freakazoid! is a great example, even if it might be the nostalgia talking.

However, it’s the characters that really sold this show to me, then and now. I loved the character of Freakazoid, and it ain’t hard to see why. Yeah, people hate “random” humour too, but Paul Rugg plays Freakazoid with such loud earnestness, there’s no way I’m not going to think he’s awesome. Ed Asner, western animation’s quintessential Grumpy Old Man, is wonderful as Sgt. Mike Cosgrove, the guy whose reaction to the must absurd situations is always his crotchety deadpan. Freakazoid’s family is also great, bland sitcom-folk with the occasional bouts of weirdness.

The only weak link in the good guy” cast is Freakazoid’s girlfriend Steff. While the joke probably is supposed to be, “She’s Freakazoid’s girlfriend with almost no personality, you know like superheroes have”, given that the rest of the characters, male and female, are funny in a more individual way (Dexter’s mother may have a creepy Stepford grin, but she’ll also eat 24 pizza rolls offscreen), I still wish Steff had actual characterization instead.

Not keeping to a steady viewing schedule in my childhood, I had no idea that The Lobe was Freakazoid’s arch-enemy. It makes a lot of sense: not only is The Lobe ostensibly the rational mind to Freakazoid’s silly insanity, but often The Lobe seems like he believes he lives in a world that takes itself more seriously than it actually does, while Freakazoid knows exactly what the score is.

David Warner gives The Lobe a voice full of grandeur and conviction that fits this perception of the world, and it makes him even funnier. Of course, The Lobe can delve into comedy with the rest of the cast, including the entire “Bonjour Lobey” musical number, but the idea that he takes things more seriously than anybody, even Gutierrez, (who is a weenie) remains strong. This gives Freakazoid and his arch-enemy the kind of opposite dynamic that apparently makes for good hero/villain conflict.

The Lobe is probably my favourite villain in the series for these reasons (though it’s a little disturbing that his hands and his head are a different colour, and that he thinks a pterosaur is a dinosaur). Up behind are Cobra Queen and Cave Guy, even before they were a couple. The reptilophile in me says that casting reptilian characters as evil is usually a bad thing, but there are so few female reptilian characters that I’ll give Cobra Queen a pass. It doesn’t hurt that she isn’t protected from slapstick, and unlike Steff, she’s funny as an individual character (I also positively love the design of her tusked, horned cobra). Cave Guy, well, he’s just hilarious because he’s a snooty, pretentious caveman in a loincloth, though I still wonder why he’s blue. In short: I ship it.

I don’t miss any of the back-up segments from season one, and I still can’t say whether I prefer Freakazoid! in a shorter or longer episode format. If I were to pick the back-up character I liked the most, it would have to be Lord Bravery. As a kid, I totally didn’t get that he was a Monty Python pastiche, but now it’s perfectly obvious and awesome. It’s just that I don′t mind jettisoning any of them for a Freakazoid-only series.

I want to give a special shout-out to the episode “House of Freakazoid/Sewer or Later”. At some point, my household TV stopped getting Freakazoid!, save for a channel that had perfect audio but extremely distorted picture. However, on a day when the station came through, I managed to watch and tape a rerun of this episode, and watched that thing into the ground. Since it had a werewolf (albeit based on the Wolfman rather than the more wolf-headed werewolves that I prefer) and giant snakes, I considered it the best of a bad situation.

Freakazoid feels like a cartoon made by funny people, for funny people, to please themselves, and thankfully coming out with something the rest of us could watch. The names of the writers and I loved it as a kid, and I love it again now. What the hell was I waiting for, taking so long to buy it?

Picking out the voice acting greats is also fun, and recognizing the names of writers well-known in nerddom.

‘Cause Lions Ain’t the Kind You Love Enough

Seeing the new set of Lion King plush at the Disney Store last month set off a chain reaction, in which I bought all the plush dolls of Scar and the hyenas in order to satisfy a blind nostalgic urge, and then remembered just how crazy I had been about the film when it first premiered. I had shed this obsession years ago, both because there was nothing about the source material that held the interest of the person I grew up into, and because I was embarrassed about a period where I was as loudly obsessed as only a grade school kid can be.

This nostalgic reflex didn’t lead to any new appreciation for The Lion King. As I said, there’s very little about the movie that fascinates me anymore. Looking back, I can see the roots of my tendency to focus on some secondary characters while ignoring the main characters or even the actual themes of a work, but there’s also nothing about The Lion King that appeals to my current tastes and desires for fiction. It also can’t wriggle past my defences and still be likable in spite of that. In fact, when viewed in relationship to those same tastes and desires, I really ought to hate The Lion King, but I just can’t bring myself to.

Essentially, The Lion King is a film about the ways that altering preordained roles and causes destruction and doom. There is no room for individualism, subversion, or rebellion on a large scale. Even if the goofy comic relief are self-made exiles and happy hedonists, they’re a second branch to the main narrative, and we’re not supposed to take Timon and Pumbaa that seriously anyway.

The first subversion of the natural order is above reproach in terms of the villainy it represents. Scar messes with the secession rights by taking kingship through blatant fraud and fratricide; not much Unfortunate Implications there. However, one of the blackest marks against his reign is that he brings the forbidden hyenas into the lion lands. Scar even phrases this new integration as a “glorious future”, but it is presented as nothing but a bad idea. The Pride Lands become a waste, leaving everyone starving. It’s obviously intended that keeping the two species apart was a good thing, and only the bad guy would try changing this, because look-what-happens.

Because I was just a fourth-grader, I chalk my past up to being fond of hyenas, and that Scar has a wonderfully dark and expressive character design. Today, there’s not much interesting about their individual personalities. Scar looks cool and refined, but turns out to be a dumb coward when the chips are down, perhaps to reassure us that villains can’t really be that big a threat. Shenzi and Banzai are almost the same kind of “greedy thug/stupid minion” character, except for her being the leader and a little bit smarter, and Ed is just deranged.

(However, I still cared enough to be slightly dismayed at seeing the hyenas become even more anachronistic and anthropomorphic for the sake of comedy in the Timon and Pumbaa cartoon)

I’m also not about to re-interpret these characters as anything more palatable to my tastes, the hyenas as wrongfully persecuted, or Scar as the unjustly overshadowed sibling who hangs out with fellow exiles and altruistically helps them. The Lion King is so obviously stating that the hyenas live in rock and ruin because they somehow deserve to, and that Scar fucked up big time by bringing them into more prosperous areas, that it’s impossible to re-interpret the villains as victims.

There’s nothing in The Lion King that’s as unsettling as all this, but a few things come close. It bothers me that none of the lionesses seemed to be able to do jack until the adult Simba arrived, despite clearly being unhappy. Sure, it might be analogous to the way that real lionesses can do little when new males take over, but since lions in the movie do a billion other things that are contradictory to real lion behaviour, it’s hard to let that bit slide. The only apparent justification was that the lionesses apparently needed The King to bring them to action, since they easily subdue the hyenas in the final battle.

In terms of how the rest of the film demonstrates that pre-ordained order is above reproach, Adult Simba’s initial refusal to re-take the throne is of course set up as something that would make him look like a total dick if he followed through with it, but that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s a world where only the bad guys and the comic relief try to change their roles, and to reinforce the message, the hero is put into a position where to try to change his role means doom for everyone. Simba’s justifications for staying in the jungle, sprung from denial though they are, sound uncomfortably like the words of someone who actually has found a life that he, as an individual, desires. Of course it’s all a ruse to himself, and he really has to go back—no harm done.

In theory, I do like the idea of Simba being so psychologically traumatized that he runs away for years and tries to hide from his problems, still believing that it’s all his fault just for existing. However, he doesn’t feel so much like a flawed, crippled hero so much as one doing something for the plot’s sake. Before and after his self-imposed exile he functions perfectly as the standard male lead, and, though he has a character arc of sorts, it doesn’t feel like a very strong one. Li’l Simba leaves his post only because he is traumatized, and only re-learns his responsibility, not through his own initiative, but because Sky Dad and the others tell him to.

In addition, even if it’s breezed over by the “Hakuna Matata” number, we’re still dealing with a story where there’s a huge gap of nothing in its middle, a timeskip where Simba grows to an adult and nothing else happens. You can even play the Morality Card and get angry at the protagonist for living it up in the jungle while his home dies. Thus, I don’t quite accept the way that the plot moved Simba aside for enough time to grow into an adult, with little consequence after Simba decides to take his place in things.

It’s possible for something to be well-made but that I disagree with, yet even disregarding the subtext, The Lion King just feels like a film in which so much effort was put into animation, music, and art, but so little into story, trusting to archetypes and formulas to win the day, with that huge gap in the middle.

I’m not completely heartless about this movie: the film is still artistically gorgeous, with excellent animation and some great songs. It’s easy to be swept away by it all: despite what I said about Scar and the hyenas today, the “Be Prepared” number is still visually wondrous, and demonstrates much of why I once thought these characters were cool. In short, I can easily see why The Lion King received all the accolades it did, yet its hold on me can’t ever be that strong again. I can’t go for long without sighing over the various subtexts in the film, and realizing that I don’t deeply enjoy any of the characters anymore.

As time has passed, I’ve also come to admit that Disney does look to have ripped off Kimba the White Lion for this movie. I’ve never seen or read any of the various works in the Kimba pantheon, but the borrowing of imagery and certain character/animal roles is too obvious to ignore. It’s almost horrifying, to wonder how so many crew members could pull this shit off and get away with it, and to realize that even when Disney tries for a relatively original story, it still borrows from someone. However, it’s not enough to make me shake off the childhood cobwebs for good, even as, in the intervening years, I’ve become a big fan of Osamu Tezuka’s more mature manga.

The Lion King also reminds me of why I bought into the hatred of the Disney Monopoly. Today it’s easy for me to forget how much they overshadow the rest of American animation, but here they are…so many pretty films, a lot of them buying into the same type of story, yet they are still seen as the alpha and omega of our local cartoon content. I count some Disney movies as my favourites, and no formula is inherently bad, butut when one company dominates a local medium to the extent that animation dominates Disney in North America, it’s souring. I try to forget this rage and focus on the other animation North America has to offer, but it’s still true.

Years ago, I watched the sequel, The Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride, which wasn’t...horrible, but it suffered hugely from a couple of things. The first is that it’s built on a premise that had no evidence in the original film: that there were lionesses who supported Scar, and were kicked out when Simba assumed the throne. Now they are are now back for revenge, which leads to a forbidden romance between Simba’s daughter Kiara and one of the evil lionesses’ sons, Kovu.

The Outlander’s reasons for supporting  Scar are never explained, and indeed their existence is so contradictory to the “spirit” of the first film, the writers look to be scrabbling for something to base their plot on. The idea of Scar having supporters is a great idea if one were starting a story from scratch, but here it’s just tacked on, the themes of the film series contradicting themselves—why present rule from an “unnatural” king as absolutely hated, and then retcon in supporters, unless you’re really starved for content?

However, funnily enough, The Lion King 2 still has more in the way of themes that appeal to me. The exiles (fellow lions, this time, which probably helps explain it on multiple levels), are allowed to return to prosperous lands instead of their exile being part of The Way It Is. Kovu specifically decides that he does not have to live the legacy that’s been created for him. Having Zira, Kovu’s biological mother, be the main villain, in a way that pulls almost no punches, is also refreshing.

That doesn’t make this a good film, though. Besides its thinly-supported premise, The Lion King 2 also falls prey to many of the clichés of works that depict former protagonists as parents: Simba and Nala’s original personalities are almost entirely subsumed into cardboard parent roles, and Simba, being the father character, gets all the focus, and is over-protective rather than free-wheeling like he once was. It’s possible to balance old and new protagonists in a character-family, and not have anyone’s personality left behind, but The Lion King 2 isn’t where one should go looking.

Secondly, though Scar’s design was wonderful in itself, the “evil” lionesses are designed around the same mentality: that the antagonist lions must look leaner and longer and nastier, so that the audience knows who to root for. It makes them stand out even more in comparison to the generic, voiceless lionesses of the rest of the original pride.

And of course there’s the main hero, Kovu, who is not supposed to be Scar’s biological son but his selected successor, despite growing up to look like Mufasa with Scar’s colouring. This is supposed to have resulted from the production staff belatedly realizing what convoluted incest would result when Scar’s son got involved in a romantic relationship with Simba’s daughter, although you think somebody would have noticed before Kovu’s design was finalized. As a result, the film looks awkward in another, entirely different way. And who the hell is Kovu’s father, then?

All in all, I’ve ended up with a film/franchise that I loved as a child, but have been finding it more and more difficult to accept into my current world, but also difficult to reject on those same terms. The Lion King is impossible to forget, but hard to love consciously for a long period. I can get swept up in the art and music of the film, but it fades. The characters that I used to love I find wanting, and the messages of the film can get unsettling, though I know this wasn’t their intention.

The Animation of Sally Cruikshank

I’d already become aware that independent animator Sally Cruikshank was responsible for a beloved childhood short from Sesame Street, and that she had produced other, stranger animation, but going back to her catalogue for a second time made me realized how much I loved her material.

It’s entirely unsurprising. After all, her art is very brightly-coloured and extremely surreal, with a penchant for reptile-people…how could I not like it? When I have some extra money, I’m definitely going to buy the DVD of her shorts that she offers from her website, though the Sesame Street ones won’t be on there.

For me, it started out with the Sesame Street animation, “Above It All”, about an alligator-girl and her flight-enabling beanie. Normally I’d boo and hiss at a reptile with hair and lipstick, but the short was so good I really didn’t care. It perfectly captured (and may have triggered) some of my childhood dreams of flying.

Going through her catalogue reveals other Sesame Street shorts I remember/or are memorable. “From Your Head”is a great adventure in dreaming and thinking, and “ “Beginning Middle and End”   is another something I do remember from childhood; it’s about storytelling, and has a pterodactyl in it. Good times, and there are many more of such shorts, instantly recognizable.

When it comes to her independent work, the ultimate standout is the short “Face Like a Frog” an innocuously titled short which is the most bizarre cartoon I’ve ever seen. There is a bit of a plot, but it’s really just an excuse for weird shit to happen. Driving on a night road, a frog-man is lead by a frog-woman named Gluey to a hexed house that she thinks he can un-hex. The house turns out to be filled with her weird frog family. He does manage to escape with Gluey on a subway that goes to hell but “makes one stop in Miami Beach”. With the visuals it’s even weirder, and even the bland, brief dialogue becomes a window to strangeness once put in context. There’s also a cameo by Danny Elfman and Oingo Boingo, as a lizard who tells the protagonist in song to avoid the house’s basement.

Two of her other longer shorts, “Quasi at the Quackadero”  and “Make Me Psychic” don’t quite match that level of strangeness, but they are pretty strange. The first thing you’ll notice is that the protagonists of these shorts are called “ducks” but like some kind of strange Muppet, with long muzzles in place of noses and mouths, and yellow colouring for the male characters, being their only presumably avian features. Cruikshank even admits that, “they came out looking like ducks only her, which is a wonderfully strange statement. One short is about a trip to a fair, the other about a device that allows its owner to have psychic powers, though both are given innumerable bizarre twists.

However, her more recent shorts are sadly disappointing. They lack the vibrant colour and detail of her older works, and instead look like crude MS Paint facsimiles of the same. The use of text-to-voice software over actual voice actors is also very off-putting, and the attempts at satirizing consumer culture (in shorts like “Whinsey on Your Phone”and the “Charbucks” series) also fall flat.

Still, her major material is worth checking out, and needs to be seen to be believed. Find most of her work at her personal YouTube channel, Sally Cruikshank Films, or her website Fun on Mars, through which you can order her DVD.

The Greatest Generation

If fandom is something involving interaction with like-minded people, the seeking out of additional information, and the construction of meta, fanart, and fanfiction, then my first fandom was Transformers. Beast Wars: Transformers was my entry into that, but the Transformers work with which I most expressed the most overt geekiness was the third season of the original Transformers cartoon. In doing so, I cemented a lot of personal tropes and desires that I would express in later fandoms.

I actually like Beast Wars better on both a critical and affectionate level, but one of my peculiar tendencies is to lavish more attention on works I consider engaging but critically inferior. Perhaps it is because a less well-constructed work leaves more room for imaginative analysis, or that I revere the better works so much it would feel almost blasphemous to try to create my own inferior homages to them.

I left Transformers fandom around 2002, but recently re-watched Transformers season 3, partly in tribute to the year 2010, with the Japanese dub of the season once billed as a sequel series, Transformers: 2010.  My feelings had changed and yet had not changed, and I felt a comforting boost of joy and nostalgia. For my pleasure (and maybe yours), I’ll share my new thoughts on an old favourite.

I was born in 1984, and thus was too young to catch the original Transformers boom. I never saw season 3 when it originally aired in 1986, but only in 1999, due to the fandom’s tape-trading circuit. While the early Transformers cartoon is somewhat remembered by the general public, the third season is considerably less so. It had an all-new cast of Transformers, and lost a lot of the iconic staples and imagery that fans remember from their childhoods—gone were the deserts and canyons and transforming Earth vehicles, though these were already beginning to be phased out.

This was because of The Transformers: The Movie, which jumped the timeline forward from 1985 to the then-future 2005, killed off a lot of the original characters, and introduced new sci-fi settings into the mix. The third season followed from it, and some Transformers fans insist that the third season was a huge shark-jump, an enormous drop in quality with unlikeable characters and suddenly cracked-out storylines.

This opinion has become somewhat less popular throughout the years, with there being a notable number of fans who prefer the third season outright, or who are neutral towards it, or who see the entire original cartoon as a single body to be embraced or discarded as it will. The attitude that Transformers suffered in season 3 seems to be more the province of casual fans rather than fandom veterans, though as with everything else, there are exceptions.

When it is observed through adult eyes, however, it is hard to imagine the Transformers cartoon suffering any precipitous drop in quality. The series always suffers from poor animation, nonsensical plots, bad science, and tenuous continuity. And too, it always had some small spark of warmth and wit that makes it easier to understand why it is still so beloved.

I will admit that it was, on multiple levels, foolish of a series to shove an old cast out of the way for a new one, instead of gradually introducing them into the ensemble. However, any criticisms I make feel like lip service. I have utterly no interest in the original Transformers cast, and thus to have them bumped from primary character status is the best thing for me. It is only with this new cast of Transformers that the cartoon becomes engaging to me at all.

The third season of the Transformers cartoon left a deep mark on me and my relationship with fiction. I realized my taste for flawed characters who walked a little off the beaten path, who were snarky or standoffish or insecure. This was also the first time I began to more deeply consider why I chose to favour certain characters, and I still indulge in those thoughts for later characters. This was all in spite of the fact that many Transformers fans considered the newer characters more flawed and less competent than the characters who came before them.

Of course, when I speak in the generic, I’m really referring to the two new leaders, Galvatron and Rodimus Prime. Rodimus’ flaw was that he was insecure. A handful of episodes dealt with his insecurities over suddenly assuming leadership, either as one-off lines or major plot points. Galvatron’s flaw was that he was the TV version of insane: screaming, capricious, and violent.

However, since I now have a more cynical view of the cartoon’s quality, and realize that all of its faults were intrinsic to the whole, I don’t take too seriously any of the ethical issues raised by the characters or the storyline of season 3.As part of this new mindset, I am now uninterested in fretting over whether Rodimus Prime and Galvatron were “good” leaders or not. By adult standards, none of the Transformers leaders could command their way out of a wet paper bag, no matter how confident they were. The best thing you can hope for is that they entertain; no need to sweat if they might be leading their faction into a dark age, because Transformers didn’t really go into that.

My unconcern was also helped by realizing the series developed no real arc with either Rodimus or Galvatron. Their fans and haters alike will focus on certain episodes to define the characters’ infamous traits, but proportionally more of the episodes forgot these and treated them as normal cartoon leaders. In addition, with Galvatron the lines between “insanity” and just being a cheesy cartoon villain are sometimes pretty blurry.

As I’ve tried to grow and develop as a writer, I’ve realized that characters’ prominent traits usually need to serve a larger purpose, some relevance to the plot. Character flaws, for example, are things to purposely overcome or never overcome, depending on the tone of the story; they build towards a change, good or bad. Nothing of this sort happens in The Transformers. The flaws of Rodimus and Galvatron appear and disappear again and again, building towards nothing that isn’t resolved by the episode’s end. Much as the two characters fascinate me, I still see how poorly their story was told. Again, this is not an artifact of the series’ drop in quality in the third season, but part of the series’ general difficulties. The earlier seasons had no character arcs, either.

Yet because I love it, I am generous. I can see season 3 as a season that was trying to grasp at things that North American TV cartoons didn’t have a lot of at the time, especially through Rodimus’ existential angst. Sometimes it seems like it was trying to become something a little bigger than seasons prior. There are fleeting signs of a series that might care more about telling its own stories instead of appeasing the audience, which is a major step in writing a quality work.

I would have killed to be a fly on the wall when Hasbro and Marvel and whoever else decided to write Rodimus Prime and Galvatron in that way. Wanting to sell new leader toys is understandable enough, but why take this route wither their characterization?

Regardless of why they appeared, I liked them. I do have a stronger awareness that Rodimus should not have allowed his insecurity to get the better of him at all, but it’s still an interesting aspect on many levels. I also love how sarcastic and snippy Rodimus is at times, which his detractors fail to mention and is an amusing selling point. Galvatron is also amusing when he is angry, his rage is fun too, and there’s an additional dimension to his relationship with his much put-upon lieutenant, Cyclonus.

Cyclonus is another favourite of mine. He’s basically an evil robot Klingon who’s loyal to the bad guy despite living in a culture of backstabbers. At times, this loyalty looks doubly foolish, since he’s prone to getting a punch in the face from his leader when the writers remember Galvatron is supposed to be crazy.

I used to find an ethical dilemma here, constantly trying to prove that Galvatron did care for Cyclonus, but I just don’t worry anymore. Now my stance is that these characters are absolute villains in a children’s series, so it doesn’t really matter if one character I like will strike the other on the same side. In more serious or nuanced characters I might look twice, but for now I just let their relationship be. I still appreciate Cyclonus because he is imposing and arrogant rather than weak and sycophantic, giving some grandeur to his convictions, as foolish as they might look to an adult complexities. His genuine concern for Galvatron is also still strangely touching.

There is also Ultra Magnus, Rodimus Prime’s right-hand-man. With Rodimus, Galvatron, and Cyclonus, Magnus completes the quartet of beloved characters from season 3. While I like or tolerate the rest of the movie’s new Transformers, these are the ones that I truly declare myself a fan of. It makes for a neat package.

In Ultra Magnus’s case, he gets a bad rap from the fandom because of his “I can’t deal with that now!” line from the Transformers film, delivered when they’re under fire in space and it’s noted that their friends’ ship had gone down. Because of this, and the character’s humbleness, Magnus is seen as insecure and wimpish, though not met with such bile as Rodimus Prime is.

There have been many other versions of Ultra Magnus, met with more appreciation because they are more “badass” characters. Still, the 80s cartoon Ultra Magnus is my favourite. There’s something kindly and loveable about him, and he’s not really insecure outside of that meme--just modest and altruistic, always willing to step up to the plate when he’s needed. Magnus may come off as stolid, but I like stick-in-the-mud characters, sometimes.

My interest in the characters is what fuels my affection for the Transformers cartoon, creating an iron-clad shield against the series’ cheapness and ludicrousness. The earlier seasons don’t have that shield, which is why I cringe when I manage to catch a piece of them, and of most other 80s cartoons. Still, there are minor things that appeal to me outside of the four main characters.

First, while Rodimus, Magnus, Cyclonus, and Galvatron are the only characters I would declare myself a specific fan of, I have some affection for nearly every character associated with them--the original ones from the movie. Kup, Arcee, Blurr, and Springer on the Autobots’ side, and Scourge on the Decepticons’; I don’t include kid-robot Wheelie since he appeared later in the film, but I don't hate Wheelie as much as other people do. Arcee still bugs me somewhat, because she’s often just “the girl robot”, but I can’t totally hate her.

The idea that these six Autobots and three Decepticons should be “together” is indelible in my mind, and will taint any attempts to engage with other incarnations of them outside of the cartoon. Logically, I know that they (except for Arcee) were just toys that happened to be produced in the same year, and they could be mixed and matched however a Transformers writer pleases, which is what happened.

These characters had many other incarnations in the 1980s Marvel comics of the US and UK, in modern comics produced by Dreamwave and IDW, and even stories exclusive to the Transformers conventions. However, other portrayals of these characters never feel quite right, even if their stories were written better than the cartoon’s. Also, because better writing requires a less capricious status quo, “my” characters also ended up as secondary or tertiary cast members rather than the leads.

Further appeal can be found in some of the plots of season 3. While criticizing season 3 for being too outlandish is ridiculous in light of the many “wacky” episodes that aired before it, there were plenty of insane episodes in this season. In keeping with taking a less serious view of the cartoon now, I can laugh along with many of these insane plotlines, and find a cheerful joy in them due to my taste for the bizarre.

This bizarreness is also reflected in the art style of the series. Many episodes are populated with offbeat aliens and creatures, including the new antagonist Quintessons, and these monsters make the series even more engaging. The designs of the new Transformers are also more appealing, with a brighter range of colours, strange “futuristic” vehicle modes, and sleeker, more organic body designs.

And, even though it was established in a hasty and clumsy way, I still appreciate on principle the idea of the previously static Transformers universe undergoing some kind of change. Maybe not if I didn’t enjoy the result, but even so, for all its haphazardness, season 3 did try to establish a backstory and mythology for the Transformers, and did things like having the kid sidekick grow up and have a son of his own.

One of the ideas was that the Quintessons, random aliens from the Transformers movie, would turn out to be the creators of the Transformers, banished when their slaves rebelled. This is a very obvious retcon to an adult viewer, since nothing suggested this was the case when the Quintessons first appeared, and you can see painful attempts to shoehorn this in. Nonetheless, it was something. The comics, and many other continuities, instead proposed that Transformers were create by the robotic god Primus, for a grander purpose, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the Quintesson origin because the Transformers had to fight for their freedom.

As the Transformers brand has gone on to become a multimedia, multi-continuity franchise, nothing like season 3 was ever attempted again. While longer series had changes to the cast rosters, the leadership positions remained intact, with the main leaders always named Optimus and Megatron. Furthermore, while these series made several tweaks to it, nearly all incarnations of the Transformers replicated the premise from the original cartoon and comic.

My bias finds no problem when Beast Wars started this trend, especially since that series acknowledged the re-using of names in terms of historical gravitas, but after several more times it began to feel redundant. Since the franchise’s primary goal is to sell toys to the generations of toy-buyers that cycle ever more quickly, it’s no surprise that they would raid their own stores for the same thing over and over…very few would remember the previous iteration.

Still, I would like to see a greater variety of Transformers premises, which is another reason season 3 appeals to me. It was one of the rare times an “Optimus” and a “Megatron” were not in charge, and it was not just about fighting the enemy robots on Earth. I still enjoyed the newer material (I loved Transformers: Animated), but I craved difference, even when I was not the target audience.

Even though I have a slight preference for Rodimus Prime over Galvatron, I’d have to say the best episode of Transformers season 3 is “Webworld”, written by Len Wein and Diane Duane (yes, really), which focuses on Galvatron and Cyclonus instead. Threatened by the other Decepticons, Cyclonus tricks Galvatron to going to the planet Torkulon to be “cured” of his madness. It’s a world of webs, staffed by creepy simian aliens who put Galvatron through parodies of real-life psychological therapies. Galvatron ends up destroying the planet after he prevents the Torkulons from essentially trying to lobotomize him with giant insects (yes, really). It’s a strange episode full of purple and blue and orange with aliens everywhere, and nicely encapsulates both the stupidity and the small moments of earnest emotion that Transformers could have.

Not all the episodes of season 3 were great, however. Like most people, I disliked there being several episodes which focused on the new kid sidekick Daniel (offspring of the previous kid sidekick, though Daniel was much younger), and some were just a little too boring or absurd. However, my mellowed attitude means that even such episodes were easier to get through. There is also the alternate anime continuation “The Headmasters”, but as it’s a different continuity and has its own issues with characterization, I will ignore it for the purposes of this essay.

Still, the other shoe must drop, as they say, and by the end of season 3, I would have to contend with the same kind of hurried alterations that fans of the original seasons did. The two-part episode “The Return of Optimus Prime” aired after so many people complained about Optimus being gone. It depended primarily on continuity errors and contrivances, everything designed only to get Prime back on the table as quickly as possible. I can’t blame them, not when I embraced the same kind of immediate gratification for TF:TM, but obviously I didn’t like it, especially when later episodes acted like Rodimus Prime hadn’t existed at all.

Despite this revival of Optimus, the Transformers cartoon ended shortly afterwards. I’m glad that it did; there was something wrong about Optimus Prime living in the same world as Galvatron and Ultra Magnus and the rest--he was intrusive, a creature from an earlier aeon. Furthermore, if the show had continued, the 1986 characters would largely suffer the same fate as their predecessors: shuffled aside to make room for newer toys.

There were hints of that in the three-part “The Rebirth”which closed off the series. In this “season 4”, the new 1987 characters had the spotlight, and a whole bunch of them were introduced rapidly. There were even hints that Galvatron would be challenged in the future by one of the new villains, though the series ended on a cliffhanger.

In all this, it’s surprisingly easy for me to forget about the actual Transformers: The Movie. I had rewatched that more recently, and waited until the end of my rewatch to discuss it. As with season 3, I love this film dearly, though there is far less meat to it. Most of the character traits that I talked about weren’t present in the movie. Ultra Magnus is probably the character that gets the most play on those terms: Galvatron is there, but he is more of a standard “cool” character there, his insanity coming later, and Rodimus Prime mostly exists in his previous incarnation as the “teenage” robot Hot Rod. Just as with the television series, very little about the film makes any logical sense, but it’s still a treat, a blinding nostalgic rush of bright colours and laser blasts.

What more can I say? It’s one of those things that means a lot to you, but that you don’t feel comfortable recommending to anyone else, even other nerds. After getting older I can see the flaws more clearly, but the attachments to the characters are just as vivid. Here was where it all began for me, and it’s nice to go back once in a while.