Tag Cartoon Network

Toons & Tunes: Dueling Wabbit Themes

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Warner Brothers’ latest animated outing, Wabbit – A Looney Tunes Production, which currently airs simultaneously on both Boomerang and Cartoon Network, isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty decent overall, especially since the show is much welcome return to form for it’s star, the wascally wabbit Bugs Bunny himself. Ol’ Bugsy is back to being an energetic, wise-ass trickster and troublemaker again, rather than his much more restrained self from The Looney Tunes Show. In Wabbit, Bugs takes on every manner of foe from tiny peg-shaped ninjas to giant irascible painters to a feisty King of the Jungle to the Tooth Fairy. The art and drawing style takes some getting used to (Yosemite Sam in particular looks like he jumped off the Spumco drawing board) and some of the stories work better than others (the shorts in which Bugs interacts with Bigfoot tend to irritate more than amuse) but overall the hyper-kinetic pace and the non-stop barrage of gags keep things entertaining, and with the promise of more Looney Tunes stars to appear on the show, including Porky Pig and a “totally nuts” Daffy Duck, Wabbit looks to be a winner.

However, the series has already performed a bizarre oddity: it suddenly and without warning switched its’ opening and closing theme music from this jazzy score:

To this more Bluegrass-ey number:

 

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“I’m a -pickin!” “And I’m a-grinnin’!”

This is not a complaint, mind you; both themes are OK (I admit to liking the first one a little more, but that’s probably because by this time I’ve grown more accustomed to it). I don’t mind the change necessarily, it’s just that there was nothing wrong with first theme and the switch just seemed to come from out of nowhere, like the sudden shift from Power Rangers Zeo to Power Rangers Turbo. Weird, right?

Fry_Looking_Squint

“That seemed unnecessary.”

 

Cartoon Country: Teen Titans – Dressing Up Like Robin

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Today’s Cartoon Country comes to us from Teen Titans: TAS, specifically from season 4’s “The Quest”. After getting defeated in battle by a criminal martial artist, Robin heads East to seek out additional training from the legendary “True Master”. While he’s away, the other Titans try to fill the shoes (among other things) of their leader in this amusing B-plot. This is “Dressing Up Like Robin”.

Is it wrong that I enjoyed these kinds of goofy shenanigans more than superhero/action elements of the show? If Teen Titans GO! could consist of material like this instead of the characters shouting all of their lines and acting like uncaring, sociopathic a-holes, then I could enjoy that show.

Toons & Tunes/Nerdvana: Party Tonight

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This is another one of our jams. I’ve wanted to showcase this song here for a while, but finding a decent copy of it wasn’t an easy task.

When JG Quintel’s Regular Show made it’s debut on Cartoon Network on September 6, 2010, I noticed right off of the bat that this was not just your typical Saturday morning kiddie fare, what with the 80s-90s feel to it and the saltier language (although CN insisted that JG and company tone down the offensive words in later episodes). But then, RS aired an episode titled “Mordecai and the Rigby’s” and I heard this song for the very first time. Like many others, I immediately began searching for an mp3 of the song (I found one eventually). The song  was written by RS writer Sean Szeles, who has a recording of the complete song on his blog with himself doing the vocals, although it was later-re-recorded with Mordecai (JG Quintel)’s voice. Also, in the episode, the song had to be cut for time because of course, there was a story to tell.

I couldn’t find a copy of the original version sang by Sean Szeles (it’s no longer on YouTube), but the song was used again for a Cartoon Network promo for Regular Show, which is the one that I’m going to use here. The visuals with the costumed actors look like they stepped right out of Cirque De Soleil, but it’s a great song. Enjoy one of my all time favorite songs, “Party Tonight”.

Toons & Tunes: Soul Coughing Groovies Double Feature

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Today’s Toons & Tunes is a double play. Both of these tracks are from the band Soul Coughing, and both are from the same album, El Oso (‘The Bear’). Also, both of them have been used by Cartoon Network (and later Boomerang) for their old Groovies filler segments. First up is “Rollin'”, which is used to accompany the animation for a classic Betty Boop cartoon, complete with Koko the Clown and all.

Next up is “Circles”, the accompanying animation cleverly pokes fun at the old Hanna-Barbera tradition of looping backgrounds (i.e., the “lamp-chair-couch”) syndrome.

-Like many folks I suspect, these segments were my first introduction to Soul Coughing. To this day, I have both of these tracks on my mp3 player.

Toons & Tunes: The Nudist and Mr. Pendleton

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Today’s Tunes & Tunes is a music video (of sorts) which aired on the late Cartoon Network series Whatever Happened To Robot Jones?, although the title character himself only appears for a couple of seconds at the very beginning. My guess is that the shows’ creators just had this song number and didn’t have anywhere else to put it, so they aired it on Robot Jones. Still, it’s a groovy, retro chic song and it’s memorably bizarre. Enjoy “The Nudist and Mr. Pendleton” by The Lavender Fudge Experience.