Author silverstar

What’s All the Hub-bub, Bub?

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Today is October 10th.

If that date doesn’t hold any significance to you, then you’re either not into toys or you don’t receive bonus cable or satellite, because The Hub turns 2 years old today.

Hub Logo

For the uninformed, The Hub is an American digital cable and satellite television channel that launched on October 10, 2010. The channel, which replaced Discovery Kids, is a joint venture of Discovery Communications, Inc. and Hasbro.
The Hub targets a dual audience, young children in the daytime with original and acquired children’s programs, and families at night with reruns of older television sitcoms, dramas and feature films. Veteran television executive Margaret Loesch serves as president and chief executive officer of The Hub. The channel is available to approximately 60 million subscribers.

Since The Hub turns 2 today, I figured I’d give a basic overview of the channel, its’ highlights (and not-so-highlights) and what I’d like to see happen on Hasbro’s brain child in the future.

Among The Hub’s highlights are Dan Vs., Pound Puppies, Strawberry Shortcake’s Berry Bitty Adventures, Care Bears: Welcome to Care-A-Lot, The Aquabats! Super Show!, Family Game Night, Transformers Prime and Transformers Rescue Bots, Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters, the HuBoom! block which features the likes of G.I. Joe Renegades, the Batman and Superman animated series produced by Bruce Timm, Batman Beyond and The Super Hero Squad Show.

But of course THE show that The Hub is known for is My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. It is an animated television series based on Hasbro’s My Little Pony toy property that has proven not only its highest rated production for the intended young girl demographic, but has also attracted an unexpectedly significant cult following in the teen and adult male and female categories. If you’re unaware of the whole ‘brony’ phenomenon, then it’s clear that the rock you’ve been living under doesn’t offer cable. Of the MLP explosion, one member of Toon Zone had this to say:

I don’t know why

What is going on Why is Transformers Prime coming second To ponies?

More to the point why are grown boys watching it? 

What is this world coming to?

To which I have only this to say:

Madea Shut Up

  1. “Grown boys” makes no sense. A grown boy is a man. If they’re still boys, they’re not done growing yet.
  2. OK, let me get this straight: you’re all flabbergasted that people are watching a show about colorful talking ponies, yet you yourself are a fan of a show about colorful talking robots. Double standard much? Seriously, go back to your glass house before casting stones in a nerd site.

After that verbal runoff, you should be embarrassed…at yourself. You act like if you’re a certain gender, you’re not allowed to like certain things, and once you reach a certain age, you’re not allowed to enjoy certain things anymore. News flash, Skippy: people can like whatever they want! And they don’t have to explain themselves or defend it either. THAT’S what being an adult is, not worrying about if things are “too kiddie” or “too girly”. That’s something a teenager would worry about it. The above remark is something I’d expect an 8-year-old boy to say, not an intelligent member of a discussion forum, and the thing is, I’ve heard from more intelligent and enlightened 8-year-old boys on this subject.

I myself enjoy the Ponies (though I’ve been on a self-imposed vacation from them until season 3 begins, which is said to be “sometime in October”), but my personal favorite show on The Hub is The Aquabats! Super Show! It combines the pure camp of the old 60’s Batman show and Sid & Marty Krofft’s Saturday morning series with wacky slapstick and nerd rock music from one of the geekiest and coolest superhero rock bands out there. (And the lead singer of the band is also the co-creator of Yo Gabba Gabba!–can’t be bad.) If you haven’t seen this show, I urge you to check it out. Cartoon Network really dropped the ball by passing on this show; if they really must have live-action, they could get good live-action like Aquabats!.

Lately, The Hub’s also been scoring style points for their HuBoom! action block, and deservedly so. Where else can one check out Transformers Prime, Superman: The Animated series, The Super Hero Squad Show and Batman Beyond all in one block? While I’m happy that HuBoom! is doing well, I hope this doesn’t lead to Action Overload. I’d hate to see The Hub become inflicted with Jetix Disease. Why not launch a comedy cartoon block to counter the action block? I’d watch that.

Now, I’d like to address what (in my opinion) is the weakest link in the Hub’s chain: their nighttime schedule. Presently the channel devotes its’ nightly schedule to prime time TV reruns of shows such as The Wonder Years, Family Ties, The Facts of Life, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Doogie Houser, MD, ALF, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, Sliders, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Lois & Clark: the New Adventures of Superman. Not terrible, I suppose; there’s nothing wrong with “preserving our TV heritage”, but nostalgia loses its’ sting after a while, and let’s face it: some of these shows were garbage when they were new. I don’t watch The Hub at night since I’m not a nostalgia person (especially when it comes to broadcast TV reruns); while I don’t mind revisiting the occasional show from my past once in a while, I much prefer watching new shows. It’s my hope that as The Hub continues to grow and thrive, they can afford more original series and newer and more diverse acquisitions for its’ PM lineup. The 60’s Batman show is a good start, I’d create a quirky alternative comedy block (sort of a less raunchy Adult Swim or a throwback to the old HA! TV network, the precursor to Comedy Central) featuring shows akin to that: shows like On the Television, Mad Movies with the LA Connection, The New Adventures of Beans Baxter, Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, Mystery Science Theater 3000/Rifftrax, Stupidface, Clerks: TAS, Daria, Undergrads, SCTV, etc. (Not all of those specific shows per se, obviously, but shows along those lines.) It would finally give Dan VS a proper place to air on the schedule, since it’s really not a good fit alongside the superhero cartoons, and it fits in with the likes of Strawberry Shortcake and Care Bears even less.

Finally, someone on TZ suggested that The Hub throw some sort of on-air celebration to commemorate their 2nd birthday, to which I say: Nah, too soon. 2 years is too early for balloons and confetti; lots of channels make it to 2 years. If The Hub is still kicking in 10 years, then it’ll be time to bust out the party hats.

Can a Looney Tunes Movie Not Bomb? Part 2

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As Jason already mentioned in part 1, a new Looney Tunes movie has recently been announced. Now, understandably, people are more reluctant than enthusiastic about this news, especially in the wake of Looney Tunes: Back in Action. But I personally didn’t think that LT: BiA was all that terrible a film. Not a great movie, but not the abomination that so many thought it was. I liked Back in Action; the problem is I didn’t love it. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. I’d like to love a Looney Tunes project again.

It’s wishful thinking, but I’d like for this movie to do for the Looney Tunes what Joss Whedon’s The Avengers did for superhero movies. The Avengers was awesome. It was well-done, impeccably handled from Iron Man all the way up to the big team-up film at the end, the cast and crew worked their collective asses off to make that film work, and it paid off. That’s what I’d like to see happen in the next Looney Tunes project. I’m not saying that this Jenny Slate is the one who can deliver the goods, but hopefully there will be enough people behind the scenes who actually care about the characters and aren’t just interested in making a quick buck.

Here’s all that’s known about it right now:

  1. The film is being written by Jenny Slate, a former Saturday Night Live cast member and co-writer of the web short Marcel, the Shell with Shoes On.
  2. The film will be a CGI/live-action hybrid.
Among the more memorable comments I’ve read upon hearing this news was this statement in regards to the latter:
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“For that reason alone, I hope it bombs as bad as LT:BiA. “
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For the life of me, I’ll never understand all of this hate for CGI. I understand if one just prefers hand-drawn animation over CGI, but wanting a new project to fail just because it’s CG? That I don’t understand at all.

It’s sad how some folks allow themselves to get so butt-hurt over the prominence of CG animated movies that quality doesn’t matter to them. You should want the movie to be good. Simply being traditional hand drawn animation doesn’t instantly make the movie good and just being CG animated doesn’t instantly make the movie bad. Refusing to watch a movie or hoping it bombs just because of how it’s made is a really closed-minded thing to do. It’s one thing to be disappointed by the lack of traditional animated movies and another thing to refuse to watch or hope for the failure of potentially good movies because they’re not made the way you want them to be. Wishing for a movie to crash and burn will not bring traditional animation back.

I wouldn’t mind seeing more traditional hand-drawn animated movies myself but films like Meet the Robinsons, Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph were still good movies. They showed that the type of animation doesn’t matter, it’s what you do with it. CGI doesn’t automatically mean something’s bad and animated movies shouldn’t be shunned or ignored for that reason alone. This mindset annoys me to no end. Quality is what matters, not how something is made. Quality.

Is CG overdone in American animated films? Yes, a little. But who’s fault is that? If one wants to blame someone for the overabundance of CGI over hand-drawn animation in American animated movies, don’t blame the film producers or the movie studios, blame the American movie-going public, because by and large they aren’t going to see hand-drawn animated movies. Studio bigwigs don’t care about how “more artistic” or “more authentic” hand-drawn animation is, they care about profit, and regardless of whether it was the fault of bad writing, poor scheduling, faulty marketing strategies or what-have-you, the fact remains that Shrek and Tangled performed better in the BO than The Princess and the Frog and Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and the Powers That Be take that to mean that CG movies put more butts into seats than hand-drawn features, and that’s why 9 out of 10 animated movies are in CG now. Anyone who wants to see more hand-drawn animated features in the future should show greater support for the few that come out in the present. It would only take 1 hand-drawn feature to rake in Toy Story or Shrek-sized box office numbers for other studios to get dollar signs in their eyes and follow the trend and then we’d see a second coming of hand-drawn animated movies.
Another unique statement I read in response to the news that this film would be CG was this:
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“I don’t (like the idea of CGI Looney Tunes) since I believe Looney Tunes is funnier in 2D because of their expressions they made in the originals. CG characters in my opinion don’t have that many funny expressions.”
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OK, first, not all CGI is 3D. 3D is a visual perspective, not an animation style, and 3D existed long before the creation of CGI. Regarding the “evils” of CG: CG can’t do expressions properly, CG doesn’t look genuine, etc., I have 2 counterpoints to that argument: 1 of them is the Hulk in The Avengers. (Yeah, I guess you can tell I enjoyed The Avengers.) As far as live-action goes, Hulk was made for CGI. There’s no way that the filmmakers could’ve accomplished half of what they did with Hulk if they had just sprayed some dude with green makeup. You need only look at how lame the Thing came off in the Fantastic Four films to see how the producers of those movies should’ve stuck with their first choice and made Thing a CGI effect. If The Avengers’ producers can do what they did with a ‘realistic’ comic book character, then I don’t see how doing the same thing with ‘funny cartoon’ characters would be too much of a stretch.
The other counterpoint I’d like to cite is Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph. The trailers for that movie look amazing. The marriage between the various art styles looks incredible. So CG can do great things if handled professionally by people who care about the product.
 Personally, I honestly don’t care how an animated movie is rendered as long as the end product is good. I don’t see CGI as this great Satan that so many others do; it’s just another way of presenting a story to me, and like all animation styles, I’ve seen good and bad examples of each.  As long as the movie doesn’t look cheap and the characters act like themselves and don’t just spout out buzzwords and fart jokes, and as long as the script is a decent one, I’m all for a new Looney Tunes project, CGI or not.

Take a look at these 3 recent short clips and tell me how “awful” and “expressionless” CGI is:

There. Were those really so bad? If WB made a movie or a TV show like these shorts, I’d watch the heck out of it.

The other (well, one of the other) major complaints I’ve read regarding this movie is the fact that it’s part live-action; in fact, some have questioned why a Looney Tunes movie needs any live-action elements at all? Surely, we could get a Looney Tunes movie with just the Looney Tunes alone, all animated?

Regarding that,  it’s likely that present day Hollywood doesn’t think that the Looney Tunes are capable of carrying an entire movie on their own (especially given their less-than-impressive track record with features as of late), unless said movie were just going to be a compilation of old shorts with original linking material, and there’s no need for another one of those with the majority of the shorts being available for viewing in other other outlets, nor would I personally want see another film like that, as that formula’s been done to death. If Warner Brothers wants to keep the Looney Tunes relevant, they can’t just keep recycling their old material, they have to periodically update themselves and present us with something new which we haven’t seen a hundred times already.

The current mode of thinking in Hollywood is that most established older cartoons need to appear alongside big-name live actors in order to get more people into the box office. Familiarity and big-name stars have always been an easy way to increase box office numbers; folks are generally more inclined to go see a new movie if so-and-so from such-and-such is in it. But if this movie is intended to feature all or most of the core Looney Tunes characters as a group, then this technique can prove to be problematic, as the original shorts directors very seldom, if ever, used the characters all together for a singular story, especially not a feature-length story, save for those aforementioned compilation hodgepodge movies and TV specials, which again consisted of re-airings of the shorts with new linking material. Toss in live actors on top of that and some storyline involving how and why the cartoons and the live humans are together and having to create some sort of conflict for the characters to resolve and you’ve got a huge writing task on your hands, especially considering that you’re working with a set of characters who were never designed to carry out a feature-length plot in the first place.

This is why I think new LT shorts are a better idea than a new feature. Short subjects are what the LT characters were created for, and that’s where they shine. I really don’t think there’s some magic formula that Hollywood has yet to hit on to make a Looney Tunes feature film work; I don’t think the Looney Tunes are suited for feature films at all. A Looney Tunes movie has always been a bad idea and it always will be a bad idea. I could be proven wrong about that (and believe me, I’d like to be), but I’m not betting danger money on it.

An Idea for a CN Block: HBTV

silverstar 2 Comments

Recently, the news of a new Tom & Jerry series from Warner Bros. (who absorbed Hanna-Barbera in 1999) sparked a conversation about WB’s treatment of HB’s properties. Many people feel that while it’s good that WB continues to make new shows and movies starring Scooby-Doo and Tom & Jerry, they feel that WB should stop acting like Scooby and T&J are the only HB properties there are; that there are numerous other properties in the HB library that Warner could be relaunching.

Now, let me first state that I’m not the biggest Hanna-Barbera fan there is. Never have been. While I don’t hate HB, I feel that many of their shows, properties and characters are 1-note and interchangeable, even their greatest works like the aforementioned Scooby-Doo and Tom & Jerry, The Flintstones, Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear I’ve found to be ‘meh’ at best, and I’ve never felt that HB deserved to be placed among the great cartoon studios like Warner Bros., Disney, MGM or even Jay Ward. That said, I do know that a lot of people love HB’s shows and stars and as such, it wouldn’t kill WB to show some of their other franchises besides Tom & Jerry and Scooby some love once in a while.

So last night Jason and I were kicking the ol’ idea nut around regarding this subject, and we came up with an idea for a programming block that could conceivably run on Cartoon Network, which would be the most logical place to run anything Hanna-Barbera, seeing as how CN is co-owned by Turner and Warner Bros.

The block would be called HBTV. Said block could either be 60 minutes or 2 hours long, consisting of 2 or 4 half-hour shows (again, depending on the length that CN chose to make the block); either 2 or 4 premiere cartoons (some examples: the 2nd season of Scooby-Doo: Mystery, Inc., the proposed relaunch of Wacky Races entitled Wacky Races Forever, the hypothetical Swat Kats reboot proposed by Christian and Yvon Tremblay,  a new Blue Falcon and Dynomutt show, new action cartoons starring the likes of Space Ghost, Birdman, The Herculoids, The Galaxy Trio, etc.) intermixed with shorts and filler segments. Among the filler segments could be 1 minute shorts starring HB’s lesser and frankly, more interchangeable animal toon stars like Wally Gator, Squiddly Diddly, Magilla Gorilla, Atom Ant, et al as well as music videos featuring these characters akin the old ‘Shorties’ and  ‘Groovies’ CN used to air, re-airings of the recently aired Banana Splits shorts which aired on Boomerang for a time, some of the old Super Secret Secret Squirrel shorts from 2 Stupid Dogs, the old 3 Robonic Stooges shorts from The Skatebirds, and others. It would be like a 2-hour love letter to HB fans, combining old established characters with new material.

The main thing preventing such a block from happening is that the Hanna-Barbera studio is no more; neither Bill (Hanna) nor Joe (Barbera) are with us anymore, and Warner Bros. holds the rights to all of HB’s properties. WB would be the ones required to make such an idea a reality, but in order to something like this to happen, WB would have to have an interest in such a project, and most suits won’t jump on an idea unless they think a profit can be made from it.

More’s the pity; this could be the perfect thing to run on CN once a week; I’m not even a big HB fan, but I’d much rather see CN run something like this instead of horrendous-looking crap like Team Toon.

The REAL Reason Why Boomerang Sucks

silverstar 3 Comments

Boomerang is in a bad place right now. There’s no denying that. The channel is badly in need of some TLC (and I don’t mean that crappy cable channel that shows reality shows about little people, toddler beauty show contestants made up like hos and women who treat their vagina like it’s a clown car.)

There are differing opinions as to what should be done with Boom: some feel the whole channel should be scrapped and re-integrated back into being a block on its’ big brother Cartoon Network where it began. Some feel it should become an ad-supported channel so they can earn some money and gain more 3rd party acquisitions like shows from the DiC and Filmation libraries like Boom’s neighbor to the North, Teletoon Retro. Some feel Turner should start taking greater advantage of the shows which they have available to them in the Turner and WBA vaults and designate certain hours and days to certain decades and eras (I’m in this camp, BTW). And of course, the retro-snobs just want all of the newer (post 1989) shows to go away and for Boom to go back to being the way it was in 2003 or 2004, when all it did was Hanna-Barbera reruns and the occasional MGM and Looney Tunes shorts.

Well, here’s your wake-up call, folks: NONE of those things are ever going to happen. Boomerang is going to stay exactly as it is now unless Turner decides to kill the channel outright or transform it into something profitable. Failing one of those scenarios, Boom will never get any better.

Hey, didn’t mean to bum you out, but that’s the truth. Boomerang is not going to improve any (unless someone at Turner gets dollar signs in their eyes), nor is it ever going to go back to being 90% H-B Rerun Boomerang. Why? I’ll tell you. No homespun crapola. No sugar coating. I’m going to share with you the reason why Boomerang is never likely to improve, and its’ certainly never going to regress. Here’s why:

1. Flat-out, Turner doesn’t care about Boomerang. Why should they? It doesn’t live off of ratings. It makes Turner no money outside of subscription fees. They just don’t care about the channel. Turner regards Boom as a dumping ground for all the shows that they don’t care about any more. It’s basically CN’s recycle bin, and that’s all they use it for.

But there’s another reason why Boom isn’t ever going to back to being early ‘all classic’ Boomerang. It’s a chilling and eerie reason, but it’s there nonetheless. There’s a HUGE elephant in the room that everyone (including myself) would rather ignore, but it’s the other reason why Boom isn’t going to change back. It’s time to turn and face that pachyderm. Ready? Sit down, take a deep breath, have a glass of water. Here it is………………….

2. We’re getting old.

Sorry, I had to say it. No one wants to face this (I sure as hell don’t), but that is why Boomerang is never going to go back to being early Boomerang, and why the newer post 1990 shows aren’t going to be leaving the channel. Face it campers, we’re all getting older.

Boomerang is never going to return to being early Boomerang, just like MTV is never going to go back to showing music videos 24/7 and Nick@Nite is never going to go back to being the Donna Reed/My Three Sons/Dobie Gillis Nick@Nite. ‘Cause we’re getting older and we’re not the primary target anymore.

Yes, as the channel’s name implies, when Boomerang was first launched it was supposed to be a haven for baby boomers to relive the cartoons of their youth, but here’s the thing: as of this writing the Gen Xers are in the same place in their lives that the boomers were in when Boomerang was first launched as its’ own channel back in 2000.

The problem with marketing a so-called “classic TV” channel of any kind is that time never stops moving forward. What’s considered “old” or “classic” changes from generation to generation, from decade to decade, and in some cases, from year to year. We’re experiencing with stations like Boomerang and Nick@Nite what our parents and grandparents experienced when the elevator music stations that they used to listen to got replaced with soft rock.

The 18 to 20-year-old demographic is usually the audience most coveted by TV networks because they attract the most advertising dollars, and people who are old enough to have grown up watching 50’s, 60’s and 70’s shows firsthand are currently outside of that demographic. The kids who grew up watching 50’s and 60’s TV (including my generation, who grew up watching these shows secondhand in syndicated reruns) are either dying off, moving on to other venues (like the internet and home video) or simply are reaching an age where they can’t be persuaded to buy useless junk they don’t need by advertisers, so The Powers That Be aren’t zeroing in on us anymore; they’re focusing the attention on the Gen X-ers, Gen Y-ers and all of the other On Beyond Zebra letters who are coming after us. The 90’s kids are in their 20’s now and the 80’s kids are in their 30’s now. They want to relive the experience of watching the shows that they grew up with too. But these kids didn’t grow up watching Leave it to Beaver,  Yogi Bear, Dennis the Menace and Rocky & Bullwinkle, they grew up watching Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, The Adventures of Pete and Pete, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Sonic the Hedgehog. These kids don’t have fond memories of Snagglepuss and the Brady Bunch, they have fond memories of Stick Stickly and Kenan & Kel. Unfortunately for us (well, the retro-snobs, anyway), many of the folks in this generation don’t have a burning desire to watch shows from before they were born (keep in mind that they didn’t grow up with the local and syndicated venues that we did) and a great deal of them are automatically turned off by black-and-white. That’s why Nick@Nite is currently rotating The Nanny and George Lopez instead of Bewitched and Car 54, Where Are You?.

The 90’s and 00’s cartoons aren’t going off of Boomerang anytime soon, and in all likelihood their presence is going to increase before it decreases, so we Boomers are just going to have to learn to share. Boomerang isn’t a baby boomer’s channel anymore, deal with it. Be thankful you’re still at least getting a portion of that Old School Cool instead of the vintage stuff getting tossed by the wayside altogether. Yes, Boom is bad now. But It could be much, much worse.

mtv-logo
I’m looking at you.

The Leftovers: Disney Channel, Nickelodeon and The Hub

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As those of you who regularly follow this blog already know, Goldstar and I discuss Cartoon Network and its’ shows a lot here. Some of you may be wondering why there isn’t much discussion about the shows on the other kids’ entertainment/animation channels Nick and Disney on Astral City. The answer is simple: we really don’t watch anything on either of those channels.

I probably only watch about 40% of CN’s schedule, but that’s more than I watch on Nick and Disney Channel put together.

But in the interest of diversification and playing to all sides, I’ll give a brief run-through on my opinions on the other channels.

Disney Channel/Disney XD/Disney Junior

I put these channels together because it’s easier to discuss them all at once. To say that Disney Channel has become stagnant nowadays is like pointing out that cotton candy has sugar in it. The biggest problem with Disney Channel right now is that they’ve become too complacent. Animation-wise, they’ve put all of their eggs in one basket, relying entirely on Phineas and Ferb (I don’t count Fish Hooks, no one does). Sure, Disney has some new animated series coming down the pike, most of them on Disney Junior, which I don’t get since I’m a DirecTV subscriber and even if I did receive DJ, I probably wouldn’t watch it much because it’s a preschool channel; not being a preschooler nor having any preschoolers in my house, I don’t have much use for Disney Junior, though it’s good that some of the older Disney cartoons are airing somewhere. It would be nice if the Mouse House would put their classic characters in some new shows which aren’t specifically designed to appeal to wee tots, as well as some new decent, clever and creative animated shows which don’t have the names Phineas or Ferb in the title.

I’ll bet you thought I was going to say that the worst things about the Disney channels are their live-action teen/tweencoms. No, I don’t bemoan the fact they exist, nor that they’re popular. Disney has been catering to teens since the studio first hit television (Annette Funicello and Spin & Marty were nothing but the Hanna Montanas or Zack & Codys of their day), so I don’t mind that their 2 main channels, Big Disney and X-D, are saturated with these shows; though I’d mind even less if there were more animated shows to compliment them and if they’re live-action comedies were, you know, funny. I know it’s wrong of me to pass judgment on these shows since I’m far from being in the target age group for these shows coupled with the fact that I was never really into tween shows even when I was a tween, but what I’ve seen of Disney’s LA shows, they look really, really stupid and not funny at all. All involved try way too hard to be zany. The kids on these shows all mug so much they all should have little handles on the sides of their heads. Their LA shows are so formulaic that Disney has enacted a requirement that each of them have 6 to 7 regulars. I kid you not. What’s sad about it is that some of them actually have potentially interesting premises, but then they whiz that potential right down the drain; Hanna Montana could’ve been a scathing satire of the pop star industry (think a kid-friendly Larry Sanders Show), but instead they made it into another dull-as-dishwater school-centric tweencom with one of THE stupidest gimmicks imaginable (a secret identity? Really?? Like no one would recognize the same person in a blond wig), Pair of Kings could’ve been an enchanting little froth island show with a touch of fan service, but they made the 2 stars a couple of goony guys instead of cute girls and made the characters so stupid that they’re almost brain-dead (I swear you’d have to have had a partial lobotomy to be entertained by this or Kickin’ It), Wizards of Waverly Place actually made wizardry boring, not to mention all of that malarkey about the competition to see who gets to keep their powers (they never bothered with that crap on Bewitched) and Lab Rats could have been a cool sci-fi comedy about super-beings and quirky science, but they ruined it by making it yet another show about surviving high-school (this is why I’ve always been turned off by tweencoms: too many of them center around school. I hated school as a kid, so why would I want to spend my non-school hours watching people attending school??), plus, while I don’t want to be that guy, it bothers me how all of the super teens with the cool powers are white and the 1 normal kid is black; as a non-white myself, that just doesn’t sit right with me. Whenever I catch a glimpse of these Disney ‘comedies’, I have to wonder: just how the heck did Out of Jimmy’s Head get canceled?

Finally, though I hate to have to side with the retro-snobs and nostalgia-tards, I have to say that it is a shame that the Disney Afternoon/1 Saturday Morning era shows aren’t airing on any of the Disney channels right now. (Disney should also be doing something with the Fox Kids shows that they currently own rather than just letting them collect dust in the vaults, but that rant’s for another day.) At this point, it’s clear that a Retro Disney channel is out of the question; Disney clearly doesn’t have the desire nor the money to launch a 5th channel, but I don’t think that a Vault Disney program block running on either of the 2 main Disney channels–most likely Big Disney, since X-D is all about boy-centric action shows–would be out of the question.

Nickelodeon/Nick At Nite/Nicktoons/TeeNick


Again, it’s just easier to talk about all of these channels at once. TeeNick I neither watch nor care about, period. So let’s move on. I used to watch Nicktoons periodically before it went all action-y, so now I don’t bother with with it. (I prefer comedy over action overall, so aside from the DC and Marvel superhero shows and the occasional shonen anime, I really don’t bother with action cartoons much.)

Big Nick, like Disney Channel, has become too reliant on a few shows: they literally hinge everything onto SpongeBob Squarepants, Dora the Explorer and iCarly, figuring as long as these 3 shows continue to earn ratings and put butts into seats, why should they bother to try to make anything else of note? If I were CEO of Nick, I’d consider enacting a 65 or 72 episode limit to the channel’s original productions, so they wouldn’t risk outstaying their welcome. And sorry, but Nick’s live-action efforts are just…boring. Disney Channel’s LA shows are bad, but some of them at least sound interesting on paper. Nick’s current LA show ideas are so bland, dull and generic that I wonder if they weren’t conceived for heart patients. A show about 2 polar opposites who are aspiring songwriters and a show about a girl who’s the only female in a house full of guys, namely her single dad and her brothers? This is comedy to these people?? You know what I miss? The goofy ‘green slime’ era of Nickelodeon. The time when Nick wasn’t preoccupied with trying to out-Pop Disney Channel and just said “We’re goofy as hell and we don’t care!” When their shows were actually creator-driven and not just based on some successful movie or game franchise. Don’t get me wrong, some property-based shows can be entertaining too, but when that’s all your network airs, it comes off like the soulless by-product of committee thinking. I don’t need for Nick’s older shows to come back, but I would like to see a return to that old spirit. Maybe then there’d actually be something on that channel I’d go out of my way to watch.

As for Nick At Nite, some have suggested doing away with Nick’s nighttime block altogether. Admittedly, the sitcom reruns doesn’t serve much purpose now that Viacom has an entire channel for that (TV Land), but at this point Viacom can’t just sign off at 8PM or run the kids’ programming all night long, not even the classic Nick shows. Presently, they’re locked in a competition for the 18-34 year old demographic and competing with the likes of Adult Swim, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and Conan for that age demo, and they’re not going to win them over with reruns of AAAAHHH! Real Monsters.

I personally don’t think N@N needs to go away, but I would revamp it. Here’s what I would put in its’ place:

I’d keep the Nick @ Nite name; the nighttime block doesn’t have to go away just because the programming would change. I’d have N@N start at 9PM and switch back to Nick proper at 7AM, except on weekends when Nick proper would be expanded to end at 10PM when kids wouldn’t have to get up early the next morning. As for what this “new” N@N would play, if anybody remembers the former N@N shows On the Television, Mad Movies with the LA Connection and Turkey Television, I would fill N@N with alternative comedies similar to those and possibly mix that with animated shows akin to Liquid Television and Daria and unconventional sitcoms like The New Adventures of Beans Baxter, the FOX live-action version of The Tick and Parker Lewis Can’t Lose (heck, while we’re at it Viacom could revive their former young adult-skewing game shows like Remote Control and Beat the Geeks on this block as well) as sort of a Comedy Central/Adult Swim lite, and on Friday and/or Saturday nights I’d toss in a Nick Rewind style block of former Nick shows, both live-action and animated during N@N’s first 1 or 2 hours. Just rotate the lineup every couple of months to keep viewers interested since there wouldn’t be any new episodes coming down the pike. But that’s just what I’d do.

The Hub

Finally, we come to The Hub, aka, The Little Channel That Could…or Hopes to One Day. Hasbro has made no bones about how they wish to be thought of in the same breath as the Big Three kids’ and general family entertainment channels CN, Nick and Disney, thereby making this trio a quartet, and while The Hub’s ratings could stand to climb a little, I think they could actually pull this off, if they stay alive long enough. Shows like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dan VS and The Aquabats! Super Show! are creating substantial internet buzz, though that doesn’t always equal ratings. Hub’s nighttime schedule, however, is a joke., at least to me it is. Aside from Dan VS, I don’t watch anything on The Hub at night, as nothing on there interests me. Those 30-year-old sitcom reruns are flatter than day-old soda. the only ones I cold see myself peering in on occasionally are the Adam West Batman show and maybe Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. I’d personally go with the quirky comedy block like I mentioned above with Nick@Nite, but I just plain love quirky unconventional comedies and miss them on TV. I understand Hasbro doesn’t want to run anything too edgy as that would taint their “where kids and families come together” image, but I’m really hoping The Hub will stick around long enough to find its’ voice and offer some nighttime shows which aren’t as dull as drywall. I personally think Mystery Science Theater 3000 would be a great fit for The Hub, but again, that could just be me wanting to see the show somewhere other than YouTube again.