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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.

Talkin’ Nerdy: Robot Chicken Dungeons & Dragons Sketch Gets an F

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I’m sure that most of us here are already familiar with the Adult Swim stop motion animated sketch comedy series Robot Chicken, created by Seth Green and Matt Senriech (sorry if misspelled your last name, Matt), so I wont go into that.  Anyway, RC has done numerous parodies of popular toys, games and TV shows, primarily from the 1970s through the early 00s, so for a while, I was wondering when is RC going to do a parody of Dungeons & Dragons, the Marvel produced Saturday morning cartoon that was loosely based on the popular card game which ran on CBS from 1983 to 1985? I used to watch the D&D cartoon every week. I even have the DVD of the entire series. There were a lot of elements and tropes about the D&D cartoon which were ripe for parody. Well, in Robot Chicken’s 5th season, we finally get a D&D parody sketch and we get…this:


One word: Lame.

Seriously, Robot Chicken? You guys had the Smurfs engaging in an all out battle to the death with Snorks. You had Archie and the gang reenacting the movie Final Destination. You had the cast of Fraggle Rock in a parody of Watership Down You had the Keebler elves fighting off a rampaging Cookie Monster, and that’s really the best that you could come up for a Dungeons & Dragons parody?

Allow me to break down the reasons why this D&D sketch fails:

First, anyone who has seen the show knows that there were 6 kids who transported from our world into the Dungeons & Dragons realm courtesy of the D&D ride at the amusement park, and yet there are only 3 kids shown in the sketch (Hank, Diana and Eric). So what happened to Sheila, Presto and Bobby? If they weren’t going to be there, there should have been a reason provided as to why they weren’t there.

Second, the kids in the sketch barely resembled the cartoon characters that they were supposed to represent. Now, I wasn’t expecting Willie Aames to come back to reprise his role as Hank (although it would have been great if he had), but the guy who’s supposed to be Hank looked nothing like the Hank on the cartoon. They just took the Matt Tracker figure from their earlier MASK sketch and dressed it in an outfit that kinda sorta resembled the one that Hank wore, even though Hank’s Ranger outfit was green, not brown. And also, Hank had medium length rock-star hair, not short hair. Did these guys even see the show?

Third, no lines for Eric. After having seen how brilliantly Reggie Mantle was handled in the aforementioned Archie sketch, I couldn’t wait to see how RC was going to depict the spoiled, sardonic, complaining Eric, but he doesn’t get a single line of dialogue to utter here! Talk about dropping the ball.

Fourth, out of all the tropes and running bits on the show that RC could have made fun of, all we get is a lame  bit about Venger only having 1 horn on his helmet? That’s been joked about in the actual show. They could have parodied how Dungeon Master was always sending the kids off on dangerous missions and also have him sending them to perform demeaning tasks that he himself doesn’t to be bothered with on the promise the he’ll send them home once they’ve completed their tasks (which could include buying DM’s groceries or taking his car to the shop), only to discover that DM could send the kids back home anytime that he wants to and just like having them do stuff for him, and upon finding out the truth, the kids proceed to beat the snot of Dungeon Master. And that was just something that I pulled out of my pants a couple of days ago!

Finally, the sketch ends with a cut to a caption which reads “Venger never found his horn”. Not funny. RC have ended a few of their sketches this way, but it fails to amuse each time it’s been done.

Bottom line: If you know very little about the show, don’t bother trying to spoof it (and this also goes for RC’s painfully unfunny documentary skit about the 90s cartoons).

Robot Chicken is a mixed bag overall. The show is funny when the team has a good concept, but when the show misses the mark, it really misses the mark. I’ve been waiting since the show began to see Seth, Matt and the team write a parody of another CBS Saturday morning cartoon, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, when of if that ever happens, I really hope that they’ll actually put some effort into it and we’ll get a better result than what we got with this parody of D&D.

Everything Old is…Still Old

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This week, it’s been announced that Cartoon Network will be premiereing a new block being called Best of CN on Friday March 30th at 8PM (EST). The block will be a quintet of Cartoon-Cartoon shorts shown in no particular order and apparently with no commercial breaks. The initial schedule (subject to last minute change, of course) is said to go thusly:
Cow & Chicken – “Happy Meat”
The Powerpuff Girls – “Meet the BeatAlls”
Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends – “Sight for Sore Eyes”
Johnny Bravo – “Johnny Bravo Meets Adam West”
Dexter’s Laboratory – “Star Spangled Sidekicks”
Not surprisingly, this news has caused a bit of a stir on the 2 message boards that I frequent. On Toon Zone in particular, 80% of the posters there are treating this news like the Second Coming, saying this is ushering in a new “Golden Age” for Cartoon Network and “Cartoon-Cartoon Fridays are back!!!” It never ceases to amaze me how so many peoples’ ideas of “improving” networks like CN, Nick and Disney simply entail bringing all of their ‘old’ (as in 90’s era) shows back.
Personally, I see this as more of a desperation move on Toon’s part. Everything else they’ve placed on Friday night thus far has gotten trounced, so part of me is cynical enough to think that this has little to do with Toon having an intense desire to bring back the good ol’ days. There’s also the matter of Cartoon Network giving this block zero promotion as of this writing. CN typically only promotes the shows and blocks that they actually care about and are banking on for huge success (ref: Level Up, Hall of Lame).
As such, I don’t see this getting huge ratings, nor do I see it sticking around for very long (though to be fair, the latter depends on what kind of ratings the block gets). But I know a lot of people have been wanting CN to show its’ older shows some love for a while now, so I suggest savoring the moment while it’s here. (I personally hope that this doesn’t start a trend on CN going retro; I may be alone with this opinion, but while a little retro is OK in small doses, I’d rather see these networks plow forward and make solid new shows as opposed to keep jumping into the WABAC machine and pulling out their past shows. You can’t move ahead by constantly looking back, after all. If you look back for too long, your neck starts to hurt.)
What I find even more surprising is the number of people who seem to think (and who knows where they got this idea) that this Best of CN block somehow means that Toonami is coming back. Somewhere folks have gotten this notion that because CN is making an old-school (so 90’s is “old school” now? Thanks for making me feel old) comedy block, that at some point the block’s hosts Zorak and Brak will mutate into TOM and the block will one night become a night of old Toonami shows, and then all crime, poverty and famine will disappear from the world, and then Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Mother Nature, Uncle Sam and Joseph Smith will descend from the heavens and give everyone on Earth free money and their own Slurpee machines, and all will be right with the world once more.
Huh?
Why and how does this ‘Best of CN’ block signify Toonami’s return? Did I miss something here? Do these people not realize that Toonami was a block which relied heavily (though not entirely) on 3rd party acquisitions, many of which Turner no longer has the broadcasting rights to anymore, and therefore a ‘Best of Toonami’ night would be next to impossible as it would have to be without most of the shows that people would be clamoring for like Dragon Ball/Z, Sailor Moon, Outlaw Star, Yu Yu Hakusho, Gundam, etc? Acquisitions cost $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$, folks, and CN is not about to shell out the amount of lettuce needed to re-acquire all of these shows for one night on a block which probably won’t even be around 12 months from now. Also, if memory serves, didn’t action cartoons fail to garnish ratings on Friday night? So why would CN risk running Toonami on there? If action was doing well on Friday nights, then why aren’t Thundercats and DC Nation airing there?
I’m going to let you all in on a little secret: CN doesn’t need ‘retro’, nor a block like this in order to resurrect Toonami; if The Powers That Be wanted so, Toonami could be airing on CN now. Not in a year, not next month, but now. It would be a different Toonami than the one we knew, but a block by it’s very nature has to keep rotating shows in order to stay fresh. CN could revive Toonami tomorrow and place TOM bumps around NinjaGo is they chose to. They could conceivably run all of their current action cartoon shows under the Toonami banner; just place the Toonami graphics and TOM bumps around the lineup of Ben 10, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Thundercats, Green Lantern: The Animated Series, Young Justice, Pokemon, Bakugan, Bayblade and NinjaGo, and place the sports fillers and DC Nation shorts between the shows, or they could just repackage Adult Swim’s anime on Saturday nights with Toonami wraps and bumpers. CN owns the Toonami name, lock, stock and barrel, so doing so wouldn’t cost Turner a red nickel to do so (though IMNSHO people suddenly clamoring to sit through the same programming just because a robot with the voice of Steven Jay Blum is chatting before and after the commercial breaks is kind of sad in a way). CN could revive Toonami any time they wanted to, they just don’t want to.
I know people get tired of me saying this, but here it is again: If Cartoon Network still wanted Toonami around, then it would still be around. Period.

EDIT: Well, after an obviously planned and prepped April Fool’s Day stunt, it seems that according to co-creator Jason DeMarco that Toonami will be coming back in some way, shape or form on Cartoon Network, possibly on Adult Swim anime on Saturday nights, at least that’s the current rumor. So it seems that this blogger needs to dine on some humble pie.



 
Mmm, humility.

Oh, Mickey, Where Art Thou?

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Recently, I read a post on the Toon Zone forums about members requesting what shows they would like to see airing on Hasbro’s fledgling cable/satellite channel The Hub (which debuted on 10-10-10 and as of this writing is 1 year and 4 months old). In this aforementioned thread, one member, a self-described “Classic television fan” requested that The Hub should air old-school Disney cartoons such Ducktales, Chip ‘n’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers, TaleSpin and even the classic Disney shorts starring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto and company with the reasoning that “Disney Channel isn’t airing them anymore, so why not bring them to The Hub?”.

I’ve read similar posts like this before with fans wanting Disney cartoons and Nicktoons to air on Boomerang and similar requests. Now, I think at this point that it’s obvious that you’re never, never, NEVER (and did I mention never?) going to see Disney cartoons on The Hub, and it should be equally obvious why this will never happen. Disney and Viacom are notoriously stingy when it comes to loaning out their properties; they don’t play ‘sharsies’. Exactly how would Disney benefit from loaning out shows featuring it’s trademark characters to a competing network so the competitor can make money off of them? And how would Hasbro benefit from their channel becoming a vessel for the competition? A “Disney Too” channel, if you will? Answer: They wouldn’t. Not in the least. Yeah, I know that The Hub has aired Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, which is a  Disney movie, and  I know that The Hub has aired Muppet movies, and the Muppets are also currently owned by Disney, but here’s the thing: Cartoon Network has also aired less celebrated Disney movies such as Operation Dumbo Drop and Angels in the Outfield. Movies and TV shows that aren’t directly associated with the Mouse House are OK, but anything with Mickey, Goofy, Minnie, Donald, Buzz, Woody, Belle, Ariel or any other characters that are synonymous with Disney, forget about it! That would be like promoting the competition. Disney would sooner sit on those cartoons than let one of it’s rivals get rich off of them. Sure, from a fan’s perspective, that would be great, but from a business perspective, that wouldn’t be a smart move. At all. Mickey’s head doubles as the studio’s trademark. Disney loaning out it’s trademark characters to The Hub would make as much sense as KFC letting Popeye’s have it’s secret recipe.

In response to others’ statements regarding this, the Fan goes on to type:

I think Disney should let them go and air elsewhere as opposed to them just sitting around collecting dust and not getting any air exposure. From a viewer standpiont, I could care less where they air as long as they air SOMEWHERE. I want to see them.

Ignoring the fact that saying “I could care less” is incorrect. The expression is “I couldn’t care less”, as in “I couldn’t possibly care any less than I do now”. Saying “I could care less” implies that you could care more, It’s the general attitude conveyed in the above statement that annoys me. First, this goes back to what I covered earlier; Disney wouldn’t benefit financially in the slightest by “letting their cartoons go and air elsewhere” as in on a channel that’s owned by one of their competitors, so doing so would be just plain stupid. Second, In my time on message boards, I’ve read this rhetoric several times. This attitude from so-called “fans” that they’re dissatisfied that their favorite shows aren’t airing on their favorite channels anymore, but they’re not so dissatisfied that they’d be willing to get up off of their duffs and actually do something about it. Yes, it is too bad that we can’t see Disney theatrical shorts on the Disney Channel anymore. I agree with that, but it’s not like Disney has completely washed it’s collective hands of the “classics”. There are DVDs currently available of the classic Disney shorts, as well as some of the Disney Afternoon shows. If you really want to see them again, buy the DVDs. Look for them on legal streaming sites such as iTunes or Amazon.com. Look for them on YouTube. That’s a much more reasonable course of action than just sitting on the couch waiting for the networks to come around to your way of thinking.

I understand fans wanting to complain about their favorite shows not airing on “their” channels anymore, but what I don’t understand are these “TV or nothing” fans or this bizarre sense of entitlement that many (not all of them, mind you, but some) seem to carry around with them like spoiled children, as if the networks owe them something. The networks don’t owe you these shows any more than they owe you an explanation as to why they’re not airing them anymore. Entertainment is a business, just like any other, and in order for a network to stay in business, it must keep moving forward. Networks don’t program for individuals, and they can’t endlessly loop their shows from 1 era for all eternity just because a small group of fans refuse to let go of the past. Your wanting to see the Disney shows isn’t Hasbro’s concern, and The Hub is no more obligated to provide you with old Disney cartoons than The Disney Channel is.

Anyway, you’re not at the mercy of TV. There are other resources out there. You just have to look for them. And to the people who reply with “Not everybody has a job and can buy DVDs”, My response to this is: Irrelevant. Alcoholics will do whatever they have to do in order to get a drink. Junkies will do whatever they have to do in order to get their fix. You just need to think of your favorite shows as your personal drink or drug. If you want them bad enough, you’ll do whatever you need to do in order to enjoy them, and if you’re not willing to do that, then it obviously doesn’t mean that much to you, so there’s no point in complaining about it. These people always seem to be the ones making the most noise about how dissatisfied they are, but at the same time, they don’t want to do anything that requires any sort of effort on their part. If you’re not willing to leave your “comfort zone” or compromise even a little to get what you want, then don’t go around calling yourselves “fans”, because a true fan would do whatever he or she needed to do in order to get their TV goodness, and if you’re not willing to muster any of your cash to buy DVDs or get up out of your chair to search the internet, then you obviously don’t want it bad enough, which makes you only a fair-weather fan, and as we know, close only counts in horseshoes.


Something Funny Isn’t Going On Here

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Recently, everybody’s favorite guy of the moment, Stuart Snyder, Prez of Cartoon Network, took part in an interview about the current state of CN and the machinations that he’s made with it over the past 4 years. This, in a nutshell, is what he said:

“c21 Media profiles and interviews Cartoon Network chief Stuart Snyder, giving the network topper the chance to describe and justify the network’s moves over the last four years.

In the buzzword-heavy article, Snyder points to better demographic numbers for his network and credits a strategy of targeting specific nights toward specific audiences while also providing a balanced array of programming. “We look at our strategy as always being a comedy focus, boys-skewing but girls-inviting,” he tells the magazine. The article notes that anime has a much diminished presence on Cartoon Network, and glances at the anger generated by “fanboys” at the presence of live-action programming on the schedule, but offers no direct explanation or justification for the changes beyond an implicit nod at the “diversification” strategy.

The article also describes some of the network’s business moves, including its continuing association with Time Warner sibling Warner Bros. Animation. The channel is also developing a live-action Ben 10 feature film with Lethal Weapon/Die Hard/Matrix-producer Joel Silver.”
Yeah.
It goes without saying that this so-called “interview” was little more that a softball piece of PR noise. Snyder didn’t address any of the points that we would’ve wanted him to, like how action is getting the red-headed stepchild treatment by the network (the debut of DC Nation is less than a month away, and it’s gotten just above zero promotion on the network, not to mention how DCN will be airing on Saturday mornings rather than an evening time slot), and of course Stu casually tap-danced around how his attempts to remake Cartoon Network into Nickelodeon Too with a fresh coat of live-action paint has resulted largely in failure. Someone more versed in action cartoon lore could address that issue better than I could, I want to specifically address the statement in bold.
Cartoon Network comedy-focused?? Girl Inviting?? Really? Is that really what he thinks his network is?
Anyone who knows me and/or regularly follows this blog already knows how I feel about the prospect of live-action on Cartoon Network, so I’ll spare you the usual noise, suffice to say that in an ideal world, the number of live-action shows on a channel called CARTOON Network should be zero, except for host segments and wraparounds. Having said that, if Stu really wants CN to be comedy-focused, then why are so many of his live-action projects reality and sports-themed crap? What’s funny about My Dad’s A Pro, other than how somebody actually thought this dreck would be entertaining? If we really must have live-action on Cartoon Network, shouldn’t it be comedic live-action? Even if Snyder wants to integrate live-action into Cartoon Network to make it more like Nick and Disney, he’s going to have to do better than stuff like the Hall of Game Awards and My Dad’s a Pro. This wannabe cool sports-themed stuff might fly if Fox ever decides to make an offshoot network of Fuel TV aimed at kids, but those shows just don’t gel with CN’s animation-heavy, comedy-focused format. Part of the reason as I see it why so many of Snyder’s live-action show ideas have crapped out or were DOA was simply because they’re just too much of a departure from what people expect to see on Toon. The best show of the lot so far has been Unnatural History (that’s what people tell me,anyway; I never saw the show myself) and even that was too much of a deviation; an hour long action/drama with no animation, puppety oddballs or silly stuff just wasn’t a good fit on a channel that alleges to be comedy focused.
Why doesn’t Snyder put something like this on Cartoon Network?

For the uninformed, that was a clip for the upcoming Aquabats Super Show!, a live-action/animation hybrid series built around our favorite rock/ska superhero band, which will be premiering on The Hub in March. If Snyder thinks of CN as being comedy-focused, then didn’t he make a bid for this show to air on Cartoon Network? The Aquabats Super Show! would’ve been a better fit for CN than Tower Prep or Bobb’e Says, and not just because TASS! has animated segments in it. It just fits the alleged bill so well: hip music, cartoons, wacky characters and all-around craziness. I already plan to watch TASS!, but if it were coming to CN, then maybe I’d have a tinge more faith in Snyder’s master plan.
For that matter, I’ve been kicking around an idea which I think would be cool for CN to do, since it’s obvious that Snyder’s not going to be swayed away from his little scheme of getting live-action shows on Cartoon Network. I call my show idea Toons and Tunes. This show would either air on early weekend evenings or perhaps on Saturday mornings. (My thought is that there could be a 30-minute version of Toons and Tunes which would air on early Saturday or Sunday evenings and a 60-minute version on Saturday mornings.) The stars of the show would be a zany pair of youngsters who host a half-hour cartoon show from their shared bedroom. The duo also happen to be computer/tech wizards, so their room is chock full of crazy gadgets and wacky contraptions, including a hapless robot nanny who tries unsuccessfully to keep these 2 goofballs in line. The 2 kids would perform their own shtick while introducing 2 cartoon shorts and a music video each show. The cartoons would be from the Turner/WB vaults: a Looney Tunes short, an MGM short, a Tom & Jerry short, a Herculoids short, a Birdman (not Harvey!) short, a single Chowder short, a single Kids Next Door short, a single Ed, Edd ‘n’ Eddy short, etc., but since our kid stars are tech geniuses, they would add their own commentary and trivial facts about the cartoons via pop-up bubbles, which would appear on the screen during the shorts. After the 2 shorts (and some more shtick from our hosts), there would be a music video. Said video wouldn’t be typical pop music stuff, but rather an unconventional video which is either animated, comedy-oriented or just plain weird. Kind of a Dr. Demento sort of thing. Some examples of the music videos which would be featured on the show:
  • “Come On Feet” by Quasimoto
  • “Fish Heads” by Barnes & Barnes
  • “Elephants and Little Girls” by Loch Lomond
  • “Atomic Dog” by George Clinton
  • “Vanz Kant Danz” by John Fogerty
  • “Life in the Slaw Lane” by Kip Odotta
  • “Polka Changed My Life Today” by Rotondi
  • “Killer Joe” by Manhattan Transfer
  • Anything by Weird Al Yankovic, They Might Be Giants or The Aquabats
Now, is that the best idea for a Cartoon Network show? Perhaps, perhaps not. But it’s definitely better than any live-action show idea that Snyder’s come up with so far. At least my ideas are actually comedy focused and would be, you know, entertaining.