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Building a Better Mouse House

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There’s a thread on the Toon Zone Forums (specifically, in the Disney Animation Forum) titled “How Would You Improve Disney?”, and since I can’t respond to the thread on TZ, I’ll instead say what I would do here. In order to improve the Disney Studios’ productions, I would:

1. Re-re-invent the Disney Channel – And I don’t just mean the logo. I have no problem with the DC logo looking like this
But I do have an issue with TDC’s current programming. I don’t really care about the tween sitcoms. I think that most of them are stupid and a waste of space, not only because they’re not funny, but also because they’re all pretty much interchangeable, and running them all in the same block makes them look like endless carbon copies of one another, like Dawn of the Stepford Shows. But they aren’t made for me nor for my age demographic, so I just ignore them. Plus, as insipid as those shows are, they do bring in ratings and put butts in seats, so I know they aren’t going anywhere. Like Hot Topics in the mall, they’re here to stay. However, I don’t think that TDC should cater to teens and tweens exclusively. I preferred it when DC actually had a variety to it’s lineup and provided entertainment for the entire family, not just the teens, which brings me to the next thing that I would do…
2. Put the old theatrical shorts back on TV. – I hate to sound like a nostalgia person, but for once I agree with them. It’s whicketty-whack that we can no longer see classic Disney shorts on the Disney Channel. Back in the ancient 1970s, the Disney studio didn’t loan out it’s properties to syndicated markets and network affiliates. There was never a “Bugs and Mickey Show” or a “Daffy & Donald” or a “Goofy & Popeye” half hour. The only time we got to see the Disney shorts on TV was on Sunday evenings during NBC’s The Wonderful World of Disney, and even then, I’d be hoping that they would show cartoons that week and not something like Lefty, the Ding-a-ling Lynx. Then the Disney Channel was invented and suddenly, we could see old Disney shorts everyday on the umbrella titles like Good Morning, Mickey!, Donald Duck Presents and Mousterpiece Theater. Sure, most of the Disney shorts paled in comparison to Looney Tunes and the MGM shorts, but it was still pretty cool that we could see them regularly. But now, the shorts hardly ever air on TDC anymore. Pretty much the only time that ever see Mickey, Donald or Goofy on TDC is in the mornings during DC’s Playhouse Disney block. Occasionally, and edited-for-time Disney theatrical short will air between shows on TDC under the title Have a Laugh, but that only once in a blue moon. Sure, many of the Disney theatrical shorts are available on DVD and some are floating around on YouTube, but still, it’s kind of stupid that one place you can’t see the old Disney shorts is on the flipping Disney Channel.
3. Revive The Disney Afternoon – And no, I don’t mean to just bring back shows DuckTales, Chip ‘N’ Dale Rescue Rangers, TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck and Goof Troop (although it wouldn’t be a bad thing for Disney to air those shows somewhere). Rather, I’d like for Disney to produce some new and original shows that are made in the same vein and creative spirit as those shows aforementioned. More specifically, I’d like to see Disney produce some more animated series built around the studio’s established characters which aren’t strictly geared to tiny tots (which doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want there to be any more series starring original characters such as Phineas & Ferb and Gravity Falls, because those shows have their place also). In the 1990s, the Disney studio actually took risks. The carried the attitude of “Yeah, the old Disney shorts were good, but this new stuff with Donald Duck, Goofy, Baloo and the like are good too”. Unlike now, when the Disney studio execs seem to have this idee fixee that the only thing that Mickey and the gang are good for is for entertaining preschoolers. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that Mickey and the gang are still around, but I think that he and the other shorts characters deserve better.
4. Either kill Disney X-D, or remake the channel into something else. – Why, exactly, do we need to have a Disney Channel for boys and a separate Disney Channel for girls? Why can’t there just be 1 Disney channel that airs good and entertaining programs? Disney X-D was apparently created to be a Disney Channel for boys, but when did TDC become exclusively a girls’ channel? There’s no reason for this channel to exist at all. Hey, Disney. You want to have programming for the boys? Fine, create a program block for them, but you don’t need an entire channel just for “dude bro” shows.  At least Toon Disney offered something of an alternative to TDC; it showed nothing but cartoons, and everything was fine until the Jetix action cartoon block was added and then the block spread throughout TD like a virus, eventually devouring the entire channel. i’m not really sure what I’d with Disney X-D. An old-school Disney Channel wouldn’t work, since most people don’t want to just watch old stuff 24/7, but a Vault Disney block could conceivably work. I’d probably just merge TDC and DXD into one and possibly revive Toon Disney.
5. Kill ABC Family – Just kill it. Kill it with fire. It’s a wasteland for reality TV and trashy teen dramas. The ONLY thing on ABC Family that’s worth watching is “The 25 Days of Christmas”, and that’s only once a year.
Overall, I think that The Disney Channel should go back to being a channel for everybody, not just teenyboppers. This doesn’t mean that I think there shouldn’t be any teen pop stuff on TDC at all, mind you, just that the tweenybopper stuff shouldn’t be the only things on the channel. Surely there are enough hours in the day for TDC to designate certain times for certain types of shows.

Out of Fuel

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It looks like we can add another cable/satellite channel to the list of fallen channels which decided to stop being a specialized entertainment network and instead become a sheep that runs the same crap as everybody else. TV’s latest casualty is Fuel TV.

Fuel TV is just the latest channel (after G4, A&E, Bravo, TLC, SyFy, History and several others) to sell out and lose sight of what put them on the map in the first place and instead try to cater to the lowest common denominator by running generic shows that you can see on any other channel, but while most of the other channels have chosen to run reality show garbage, Fuel TV has opted to run nonstop UFC shows in place of variety.

Now I’m a homebody couch potato who’s about as athletic as a sloth on Ritalin, and I admit that I didn’t watch Fuel TV all the time, but I did watch some if its’ shows, and what they aired then was tons better than UFC footage 24/7. I watched The Captain & Casey Show, American Misfits, Stupidface and GKA, and Fuel introduced me to bands such as Bad Religion, Tweak Bird, Damone and The Aquabats, whose videos I saw for the first time on the now late show The Daily Habit.

So I’d like to welcome all surf, skate, motocross an wakeboard enthusiasts to the club; you’re now in the same boat as us geeks and nerds: namely, those who used to have a channel just for them but don’t anymore. Is it any wonder more and more people are cutting the cord and getting their entertainment from the internet nowadays?

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.

Can A Looney Tunes Movie Not Bomb? Part 1

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There’s a new Looney Tunes theatrical film in the works. One that will reportedly combine CGI animation with live action. When this news was posted on the Big Cartoon Database, it was met not with “Ooohs” and “Aaahs”, but with moans and groans. Fans still have bad memories of Looney Tunes: Back In Action reeling in their heads. It’s a question that has baffled the greatest minds on the planet for years: Why can’t someone make a good Looney Tunes movie? It’s ironic that Looney Tunes, which is among the greatest animated franchises of all time, seems completely incapable of making a commercially successful feature length film, but why is that? What’s the formula for making a Looney Tunes animated feature that would score box office gold? Does such a formula even exist?

One issue as I see it is that the Looney Tunes characters were never intended to be used in features. They were created for animated shorts. Shorts and features are 2 completely different beasts each with their own set of rules. The average short typically tells a very simple story and is packed with gags. Features, by contrast, have much more complex plots and cannot be so intensely packed with gags. Tex Avery, Frank Tashlin, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, Robert McKimson and Arthur Davis never tried to get more than 10 minutes out of any of the Looney Tunes stars, and they were all great directors who produced the studios most memorable shorts. Even the features like Friz Freleng’s Looney, Looney, Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, 1001 Rabbit Tales and Daffy Duck’s Fantastic Island were actually collections of the theatrical shorts with new linking material rather than being original, feature length stories. One reason why Back In Action failed was for the same reason why Tom & Jerry: The Movie failed; the characters simply don’t have deep enough personalities to sustain an audiences’ attention for over an hour. In order for a feature length story to work, the protagonists must learn something from their experience and be forever changed, but no one wants to see Bugs, Daffy and company change, because then they wouldn’t be the Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny that we know and love. We want Bugs and Daffy to remain Bugs and Daffy forever. And sure, you could conceivably bring in some live action human characters and give them the story arc instead, but the problem with that is the audience doesn’t go to a LT movie to see the live actors, so they’re not going care one whit what happens to them.

Another issue is plot. The Looney Tunes movies typically have a story line which involved the totality of LT characters appearing together as a group, and the shorts were never like that. The LT shorts typically only involve a couple of characters: Bugs and Daffy, Bugs and Elmer, Bugs, Elmer and Daffy, Daffy and Porky, Daffy & Sam, etc. It’s no easy task coming with a decent formula which can bring all of the LT characters together, save for them putting on a show or participating in some sort of competition (i.e., a sport). And then when one brings real life celebrities into the mix, it’s gets even more complicated, because then you have to have the Looney Tunes characters, and the celebrities, and a reason for why they’re brought together, and some kind of conflict for them to resolve. Finding a workable formula that combines all of these elements is no easy task.

My personal feeling is that the Looney Tunes don’t need to be in a 90 minute movie. The characters work best in shorts. That’s the medium in which the characters perform best. Instead of trying to use the LT characters for something that they were never suited for, Warner Brothers should instead focus on making new theatrical shorts featuring Bugs, Daffy and company, and more TV projects such as The Looney Tunes Show.

So, bearing all the above in mind, I think that the question that needs to be raised here isn’t “Can a feature film built around the Looney Tunes be made?”, but “Should such a thing be done at all?”

And the magic 8-Ball says “Signs point to ‘No'”.