woo woo woo.. nyuk nyuk nyuk
March 2, 2009 11:28 PM   Subscribe

 
Punk Jabberjaw.
posted by Bernt Pancreas at 11:46 PM on March 2, 2009


Since there's no context here, I'll add: I hated this cheap Scooby Doo knock-off worse than the Funky Phantom, and the only redeeming quality of the show was it wasn't Baggy Pants and the Nitwits , or Super Globetrotters.
posted by Bernt Pancreas at 12:11 AM on March 3, 2009 [1 favorite]


Oh, Bernt, it gets even worse.
posted by hifiparasol at 12:20 AM on March 3, 2009


Since there's no context here, I'll add: I hated this cheap Scooby Doo knock-off worse than the Funky Phantom.

I get no respect! Nooo respect!!!
posted by uncanny hengeman at 12:43 AM on March 3, 2009


I think I hated Shmoo most of all.
posted by maryh at 2:15 AM on March 3, 2009


Groovy Goolies has got to be the worst for me. Even as a child in my single digits I was aware of how awful this show was. "Hey, here are the three coolest monster archetypes ever, turned into unfunny caracatures of their former selves, spouting bad jokes to canned laughter. Oh, and they sing!"
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 2:35 AM on March 3, 2009


I have nothing but rancor for Hanna Barbera.

Even Scooby Doo I only watched when nothing good was on.

Though Gleep and Gloop were pretty cool. The Cartoon Network should make a whole half hour show of those two saying "guguguguGUGgugug?" to each other.
posted by aubilenon at 4:00 AM on March 3, 2009 [2 favorites]


There was once a Lavern and Shirley cartoon in which they were privates in the army, and stationed in rank between them and their Sergeant was the Sergeant's pet pig.

There was also once a cartoon in which Casper the Friendly Ghost was in the future, where he hung out with two female space police officers who rode around on flying space mopeds. Space had air and gravity in that cartoon, by the way.

Another? There was a Happy Days cartoon in which the gang traveled through time with the aid of a girl from the future, christened "Cupcake" by The Fonz. Fonz had a pet/sidekick, a dog named Mr. Cool.

DON'T LOOK AWAY THE DEPTH OF THE HORROR IS NOT YET REVEALED!

I Dream of Jeanie with a sidekick genie, Apu, getting their master into omnipotent mischief. They once solved a mystery with Scooby-Doo. Twice, in fact, Scooby met up with the Harlem Globetrotters. Also twice, Batman and Robin. Once, the Addams Family, or maybe a Addams Family; they certainly weren't the cool ones.

Punky Brewster had a magical pet named Glowmer. They got into all kinds of hijinks, those rascals. Those horrible rascals.

Latino kids solving crimes with the air of Rubik the fucking talking cube.

The Three Stooges as bionic superheroes.

The Shmoo you say? You think you know of this Shmoo? Do you remember it on the Bedrock police force, walking a beat with Fred and Barney, who were ALSO police officers?

How about the Laff-A-Lympics? Do you think I don't cry myself to sleep at night over memories of the "Scooby-Doobies?"

This, mind you, is just the crimes of Hanna-Barbera. You think they invented bad cartoons? They were geniuses in the classic era you know. But then there are the Terrytoons. Have you heard of Terrytoons? BABY HUEY WILL BLAST YOUR SOUL!

But there's worse. There's far worse.

Have you ever heard of Jerry Beck? He has a collection of hateful 50s cartoons that make HB's limited animation output look like Bugs Bunny. Some of them are featured in Frank Conniff's Cartoon Dump. They are putrid.

But there's worse, yes, worse even than those. Look and see.

I bring these up to teach you all an important lesson: there is no bottom to the Hole of Cartoon Badness. There will always be something worse that you repressed the memory of as a child. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its cartoons. And soon we shall either go mad from them or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety away from the TV set.
posted by JHarris at 4:05 AM on March 3, 2009 [74 favorites]


MarisaSTPT, bite your tongue, Ghoulies kick ass!
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:49 AM on March 3, 2009


You think Hanna-Barbera was bad? What about Filmation? I'll never forgive them for what they did to Tom n' Jerry! NEVER!
posted by orme at 4:57 AM on March 3, 2009 [1 favorite]


JHarris: that was virtuosic, but no way in ever-loving hell am I clicking those links.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 5:26 AM on March 3, 2009


JHarris what the fuck was that?!?!?!?! That pelican thing was probably the closest thing to a bad acid trip that one can get without taking bad acid. I don't know what is the biggest waste of life.... me watching that crap or the people that actually made it.
posted by Mastercheddaar at 5:30 AM on March 3, 2009


I'd like to stick with my previous theory. That's the one that says at some point in the late 1960s, Hanna-Barbera got ahold of some wholly erroneous market data which suggested that kids in their target demographic mostly solved mysteries in their spare time when they weren't playing in their own band.

It's the only plausible explanation, really.
posted by Spatch at 5:36 AM on March 3, 2009 [3 favorites]


What about Filmation?
Yeah, that spinning circle in the end credits was a guarantee of suck. Each show had about 12 cels each they repeated over and over (that shot of the Fat Albert gang yukking it up must have been shown at least 3 times each episode). You couldn't tell Tarzan from Star Trek if you were just listening because they used the same music.
posted by Bernt Pancreas at 5:39 AM on March 3, 2009 [2 favorites]


Congratulations to JHarris for turning pwedza's shitty FPP into a classic .
posted by briank at 6:09 AM on March 3, 2009


I was about to say how much I hate Jabberjaw, but that comment was pushed aside by this one: I saw a purple Zorak eleven seconds into that first video! Thanks for this!

I still fuckin' hate Jabberjaw. I find the Curly Shuffle much more entertaining.

Hanna Barbera sux amirite peace imouttahere
posted by not_on_display at 7:03 AM on March 3, 2009


Fonzie cartoon.
Laverne & Shirley cartoon.
Gilligan's Planet, with all the original voices, I think.
posted by hifiparasol at 8:30 AM on March 3, 2009 [3 favorites]


Whoops, didn't notice the Dawn Wells thing.

But I did notice that the Partridge Family 2200 A.D. clearly uses all the old backgrounds from The Jetsons.
posted by hifiparasol at 8:33 AM on March 3, 2009


Behold The Mighty Hercules!

Not enough for you? May I present Tales of the Wizard of Oz.

Shall I go on? The Undersea Adventures of Captain Nemo.

These are shows with tenuous Canadian connections, which means generations of Canuck children have been exposed to this with far more veracity than wholly-American shows of similar ineptitude.
posted by evilcolonel at 10:56 AM on March 3, 2009 [1 favorite]


Paging Doctor Legua...
posted by not_on_display at 11:52 AM on March 3, 2009


I Dream of Jeanie with a sidekick genie, Apu, getting their master into omnipotent mischief.

Oh gawd, why. WHY did you make me remember that.

For the record, though, the genie's name was Babu. He had a voice like Paul Lynd, only more annoying, and some awful catch phrase. "Yaffle daffle" maybe.

I can't say for certain if that was my least favorite cartoon, but I remember that on the whole, Saturday mornings only had one bright spot - the Bugs Bunny hour, followed by old Tom and Jerry (not that sanitized 70s crap) and then the Pink Panther. It seemed even the station progammers in my area were wise enough to push the HB closer to the Hour When The Parents Wake Up, mercifully sparing most of us kids and encouraging us to get outside and play.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 1:22 PM on March 3, 2009 [2 favorites]


MStPT: You are probably right about that damn genie. I do remember, though, that what he said was "Yapple dapple."

YAPPLE. DAPPLE. You see? There is no god.

Don't forget, though, that the reason Hanna-Barbera were once thought geniuses was for directing those original Tom & Jerry cartoons. Even when Chuck Jones took over making them later on, they just weren't the same. Pink Panther, in retrospect, seems quite over-rated except for a couple of the first cartoons, and the first two or three of movies. Much like the Pink Panther movies themselves ha ha zing.

The Hour when the Parents Wake Up. Around here, it was three or so hours. I can barely expect myself to believe that I used to get up before dawn to watch cartoons. ("Damn you Farm Report, I don't care about livestock if it doesn't talk and walk in a three-frame cycle!") But that was the only time that Rocky and Bullwinkle, Underdog and Tennessee Tuxedo were on. They weren't any better animated than the HB stuff, in fact they were a bit worse, but they more than made up for it with writing.

Come to think of it, I'd still get up early to catch those.
posted by JHarris at 4:06 PM on March 3, 2009 [1 favorite]


Oh, evil colonel: The Mighty Hercules is one of the cartoons Jerry Beck is known to bring to Cartoon Dump. Actually it's one of the better things they show; say what you will, it has a kick-ass theme song, a common feature from the time.

Another Dump cartoon is Big World of Little Adam, which makes whole cartoons out of clips from cold war documentary videos and so few character frames that it can only be called "lack of animation." There's an episode in the second Cartoon Dump YouTube video (which they sadly seem to have stopped posting). If you don't care about the impossibly happy woman host in a leotard and TV's Frank as a clinically-depressed owl, the cartoon begins 3:26 in. Here's an internal link.

One who isn't too dismayed by the abysmal nature of these things can find a few more clips linked to from YouTube user cartoondump, though surrounded by their comedy bits.
posted by JHarris at 4:26 PM on March 3, 2009 [1 favorite]


Crikey, I never realised Jabberjaw was a Scooby Doo rip off. Clamhead = Shaggy, to be sure.

The 1960s Spiderman was pretty bloody awful. Its craptacular nature reminds me of The Mighty Hercules – possibly from the same mob[?]. Of course at the time I thought it was fine. Recently been on free-to-air TV and my 4yo gives it the two thumbs up, too.

Josie and the Pussycats was big at around the same time. Starring a band that travelled around in a space rocket. The girls were all hawt and wore short dresses. Had an extremely goofy chase scene at the end of each episode.

The Herculoids rocked my world.
posted by uncanny hengeman at 4:52 PM on March 3, 2009


Oh ye gods...I'd hoped I'd permanently blocked out Gilligan's Planet.

of course, there was always...The Dukes
posted by rhythim at 6:24 PM on March 3, 2009


Hm, I just noticed there's an error in my first comment. Baby Huey isn't a Terrytoon; he's from Paramount. Terrytoons did the original Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle.
posted by JHarris at 11:48 PM on March 3, 2009


That was kind of the thing to do in the 80s, was to make an animated version of a kids' series where they put them somewhere else. We're lucky they didn't do a live-action Simpsons where they lived in Atlantis and Homer was a claims adjuster with an "adorable" fish sidekick voiced by Frank Welker. It still probably would've been better than the show about Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm as teenagers.

The 80s even had their own Super Globetrotters -- PROStars, with Jordan, Gretzky, and Bo Jackson as crimefighters. Bo's hook was that he also put out fires and taught junior high sex-ed courses in the same pair of sneakers. Not really.

Metafilter: The X-Entertainment It's Okay To Like.

As long as I'm here: Has anyone else ever seen the "Herculoids With A Laugh-Track" that CN used to run sometimes to fill space after a Space Ghost Coast-To-Coast? How is that not on some video sharing site?
posted by britain at 8:45 PM on March 4, 2009 [1 favorite]


I remember that britain, it was pretty good. I still remember that gravelly-voiced guy who'd say "Oh no!" Or something like that. Okay, I sort of remember it. But yes, it was pretty good.

But then, I'm of the opinion that, except for Venture Bros., Adult Swim peaked with Cartoon Planet. The thing about self-referentialism and massive irreverence is that, if you keep doing it over and over, on and on, it gets so old.
posted by JHarris at 12:33 AM on March 5, 2009


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