A discussion about Cartoon Network and Boomerang on The Big Cartoon Forum got me thinking about this: if Turner doesn’t want to air all of it’s CN produced shows and content on the Boomerang channel, would Turner be interested in airing them online?
Here’s the idea: Turner could launch a website which for now I’m calling Boomerang Online. The site itself would be similar to YouTube, except that Boom Online would only show Turner owned and produced content and shows such as entire episodes of Dexter’s Lab, The Powerpuff Girls, Johnny Bravo, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Ed, Edd ‘n’ Eddy, as well as the shows that have yet to be run on Boom such as Whatever Happened to Robot Jones?, Megas XLR, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Time Squad, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Cartoon Planet (the 1st series) and the like. 3rd party acquisitions seem unlikely to be aired on the site, since Turner would likely need to pay for those. Like with Hulu, there could be 2 versions of Boom Online; customers would could access the site at any time and would have the option to view episodes on the site for free, but there would be ads run before and after each video. Fans would also have the option to pay a monthly fee of say, $1 or $2 per month in order to view the videos without commercials, so the site would make money either way.
Again, this may not be the greatest idea, but it’s something that Turner could or should at least consider, since Boomerang the channel leaves something to be desired.
This morning, I came across a thread/discussion on Toon Zone (a forum that I have a love/hate relationship with) about what shows some fans would want to see on the syndicated children’s program block Qubo. One member posted this statement: I’d like to see Qubo expand into more a more older-skewing boy’s action oriented programming. Add Batman the Animated Series and TMNT 1987 to the lineup. Now, I’m not in the business of crushing peoples’ dreams, but this is something that I really, really hope doesn’t happen. There are already plenty of boy-skewing action cartoon blocks on TV. Toonzai, and HuBoom are perhaps the 2 most notable examples. Action basically took over Toon Disney after the Mouse House added Jetix to TD’s lineup and then shortly afterward the entire channel was re-christened as Disney X-D. Same deal with Nicktoons. Nicktoons TV started out as Viacom’s equivalent to Boomerang, and now almost all of Nicktoons’ programming is action oriented. I’m not delusional; I understand that kick-butt actiony super hero stuff is hot and action puts butts in seats, but I honestly don’t understand the yearning for such a program block when boys’ action blocks are all over TV. Saturday morning TV needs more boy-centric action like Flava Flav needs another gold tooth.
If anything, I’d like to see more alternatives to this kind of programming. Why doesn’t someone launch a comedy animation block? No action at all. Heck, even a girls’ cartoon block along the lines of the now defunct KOL Secret Slumber Party or KEWLopolis would be preferable to more boys’ action oriented programs (although I generally would prefer that shows be aimed at a more general audience and not be gender specific, but since there are so many TV shows and program blocks aimed at boys already, I don’t think that the world would spin off of it’s axis if there were at least one block designed for girls).
I don’t like to sound like one of the ‘nostalgia people’, but I remember a time when action wasn’t a requirement for a cartoon to be enjoyable or regarded highly. There were shows on the air like Looney Tunes, The Disney Afternoon, Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs!. Those shows were all about FUN. None of them were action oriented, nor did they need to be. Nickelodeon had shows like Doug, Rugrats (although I feel that this was and still is one the most overrated animated series of all time), Ren & Stimpy and Rocko’s Modern Life. This was a time when cartoons didn’t have to be action oriented in order to be good, and this was a time when any cartoon that didn’t fall into this category wasn’t immediately written off as being “kid stuff”. I’d like to see a return to this mentality. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate action as much as anyone else. I loved Justice League/Unlimited. I enjoy both DC Nation and Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, but I don’t want action all of the time. I’d prefer a variety. Thank goodness for SpongeBob Squarepants, Regular Show, The Looney Tunes Show, The Amazing World of Gumball and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Not all of these shows are perfect, but at least those shows are trying to keep the self-contained comedy tradition alive.
Following from Damon’s entry on Warner Brothers’ latest revamped Tom & Jerry animated series, I got to thinking about what other former Hanna Barbera franchises could WB bring back from the abyss, if they cared enough about any H-B properties besides T&J and Scooby Doo, that is.
A new take on Hong Kong Phooey might be entertaining. I read a few years ago that there are or were plans to make a HKP live action movie, but that news was at least 2 years ago, and I’ve since heard no follow up to it. The movie would likely have Penry Pooch (Hong Kong) as a “real” dog who somehow becomes anthropomorphic and gains mad Kung-Fu skills. I know that after the major bomb-a-saurus that was the Underdog movie, a lot of people would (understandably) not like this idea, but at least that would make a tad more sense than Phooey being the only anthro in a world full of humans and yet no one was smart enough to make the connection that Penry and Phooey were one and the same!
Someone suggested that WB revive The Jetsons, but frankly, the idea of a new Jetsons series wouldn’t excite me. As much as I like the idea of a Utopian future as a setting, I find the characters themselves to be rather dull and generic. The Jetsons was basically the Blondie movies set in the future, and the series as a whole might have been better if it had made better use of it’s fantastic setting. Compare to the far better Futurama.
When talking about potentially reviving old H-B properties, I guess I’d pretty much have to mention the grand daddy of them all, The Flintstones. Now, The Flintstones celebrated it’s 50th anniversary last year, and Cartoon Network did nothing to commemorate the occasion. All that happened was a 24 hour Flintstones marathon on Boomerang and Post released a specially made Pebbles cereal, Cupcake Pebbles, and a single commercial advertising the product, with no mention of the occasion that sparked it.
Now, my initial thought was “This is wrong. Warner Brothers and Turner should do something to commorate The Flintstones‘ 50th anniversary besides just this. Why not make a new series or at least some new animated shorts (Seth MacFarlane was going to produce a remake of The Flintstones that was to air on FOX in 2013, but Seth already has too much on his plate and so production on this reboot series is on hiatus until ???)?” But then I thought :What could do they do?” What could WB and Cartoon Network studios possibly do with the The Flintstones that hasn’t already been done? It seems like the series has been around longer than Europe, and in at least the 42 years and 5 months that I’ve been alive, we’ve already seen the Flintstones and the Rubbles become parents. We’ve seen the Flintstones contend with not 1, but 2 sets of monster neighbors (first the Gruesomes and then later the Frankenstones). We’ve seen Fred and Barney meet up with a magical alien with the voice of Harvey Korman. We’ve seen Fred do the James Bond spy shtick in a theatrical film. We’ve seen the families travel to the Old West on numerous occasions. We’ve seen Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm as teenagers (who not only got together, but were in a band at one point). We’ve seen Fred and Barney as cops. We’ve seen Wilma and Betty doing double Lois Lane duty opposite Captain Caveman. We’ve seen Dino doing the Tom & Jerry thing with an obnoxious cave mouse. We’ve seen Fred, Wima, Barney and Betty as preteen kids. We’ve seen Pebbles, Bamm-Bamm and Dino solving mysteries a la Scooby Doo, and through made-for-TV movies, we’ve seen Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm get married and then subsequently move to Hollyrock and become the parents of fraternal twins. About the only Flintstones related things that we haven’t yet seen are Fred, Wilma, Barney and Betty as unmarried twentysomethings or the Flintstones and the Rubbles as grandparents, and I personally have zero desire to see either of those things.
But, it’s not as though the Flintstones’ characters have been completely forgotten. Recently, there have been a new revamped set of Post Pebbles cereal commercials which feature the characters rendered in a new animation style (stop motion puppettoons) and after 3 decades, they’e finally moved on from the “Watch me trick Fred out of his Pebbles!” shtick. These new ads aren’t the worst thing that I’ve ever seen. The different animation style is interesting and the guys doing Fred and Barney’s voices at least sound enough like the oriignals for it to not be an issue. The main thing that I find somewhat odd about these current commercials is how unbelievably calm and laid back Fred is in them. At no point does Fred look even remotely as if he’s about to lose his temper. I guess that he’s mellowed with age.
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.
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.
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