Cartoon Network’s late skit-comedy series Incredible Crew rubbed a lot of fans the wrong way, but I myself had no major qualms with it; I just didn’t think it belonged on CN since it was a live-action show. I felt it could’ve worked had it run on a different network, plus I like the title Incredible Crew (fun trivia fact: Incredible Crew was one choice for the name of this site!). Here’s one of the better (I thought) bits from that show. IC is unique due to some of its’ cast members’ outside activities; Jeremy Shada also serves as the voice of Finn the Human from Adventure Time, and another regular Shameik Moore would go on to star in this summer’s Dope. Here’s “Running Errands with My Mom”.
Tag Cartoon Network
Cartoon Country: Flipping the Script – Chowder
It’s script-flipping time again! Today the show we’ll be giving the business to is C.H. Greenblatt’s Chowder.
How would I fix/improve/mutate Chowder? Let’s start with the title character….
I’d make the titular character a human, specifically a girl human. There’s no reason for the character to be an anthro, and boy-centric shows are all over the tube.
I’d also infuse the lead character with a touch more gray matter. As an apprentice chef, she shouldn’t be perfect, she should still be a touch scatterbrained and bumble from time to time, but she wouldn’t be portrayed as Too Stupid to Live. For that matter, there’s also no real reason for her to be an orphan, let’s make her guardians Mung Daal and Truffles her actual parents. Speaking of…
For the Mung Daal character, no major surgery is needed; just make him younger, less of a grotesque and less of a Lothario. He wouldn’t need to have such a roving eye after the changes being made to Truffles…
Truffles could retain some of her original sass and sharpness, but she’d definitely be kinder, gentler and more maternal. The abrasive grouch shtick just wasn’t doing it for me. Even Greenblatt realized that a little Truffles went a long way, so he relegated the character to only turning up occasionally in the later episodes of the series.
Other changes:
The lead characters would still work at a catering company, but I’d place a greater emphasis on sweets and desserts, ’cause who doesn’t love desserts?
- Only the central characters who work at the catering company would be named after foods, sweets, desserts and dishes, not everybody in the entire freaking universe. That was just overkill.
- Greenblatt’s original idea was for the show to be about a sorcerer’s apprentice; while I do like that idea, I also like the culinary shtick too and don’t want to lose that, so I’d combine the 2 (go with me on this): in this universe artists, chefs and other creative/talented types would function as the wizards and mages of this world, with their particular crafts, skills and talents serving as their “magic”. These talents would also enable these gifted individuals to perform some light magic, like telekinesis, matter transformation, etc. Odd, but I think it could work.
- There would be a greater emphasis on the lead characters’ filling food orders, cooking, preparing recipes and hunting/searching for ingredients. Not that that has to be dominating force of each and every episode, but it is the principal premise of the show, and I feel it was abandoned far too soon and too greatly in the later episodes.
- I’d do away with the all of the other apprentice characters on the show. If every kid in Marzipan City is somebody’s apprentice, then there’s nothing special about Chowder.
- Endive would still be around, but I’d make her rivalry with Mung less personal and make her more of a Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force or Squidward Tentacles type character: a pompous jerk who regularly receives her come-uppance. And I’d definitely tone down her man-hungry libido.
- Lose Panini. She could have been a decent girl character had the writers not opted to crank her up to full-blown one-dimensional stalker mode. Besides, with the Chowder character now being a girl, there’s no need for her character.
- I’d keep Gazpacho around with no real changes made to him, except I’d keep his appearances brief and only use him when he’s called for. I wouldn’t shamelessly shoehorn the character into every single episode.
- I’d greatly tone down on the breaking-the-4th-wall jokes and meta references. I’m generally not a fan of excessive 4th wall breaking because it kills tension if the characters know what’s going to happen, thus ruining any surprise. It also breaks suspension of disbelief by calling attention to the fact that it’s just a cartoon/work of fiction and therefore the audience can’t or shouldn’t get emotionally involved with anything that’s happening.
- Lose Reuben. I’m a fan of Paul Reubens, but I never liked Reuben.
Finally, what about Shnitzel?
I wouldn’t change anything about him. Shnitzel’s fine the way he is. No need to fix something that isn’t broken.
The rock monster stays in the picture!
For Those Who Were Wishing Cartoon Network Would Make More Teen Titans
Be REAL careful what you wish for.
The Couch: Cartoon Gene
Let’s wax about Out of Jimmy’s Head for a bit, shall we?
For the uninitiated, Out of Jimmy’s Head was a live-action/animated television series. It was Cartoon Network’s second live-action/animated television series, the first being Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, and was based on the live-action/animated telefilm Re-Animated that aired on December 8, 2006. It was about a kid who after a trolley accident at a cartoon theme park, receives the brain of a deceased legendary animator via a brain transplant (why or how a trolley accident would require a brain transplant is beyond me); the animator happened to possess schizophrenia, and as a result, our young hero ends up with cartoon characters residing inside his noggin which only he can see. The show also featured such hee-larious characters and tropes such as Jimmy’s astronaut mother, who tends to walk around the house in her spacesuit, dispenses dehydrated food pills for dinner and whose daily routine consists of such tasks as blowing up random moons and laser-blasting alien invaders, his father who was like if Goofy came to life as a human being, his adopted sister who was a green skinned space alien, complete with My Favorite Martian style antennae, the mad scientist son of the deceased animator who was hell bent on murdering Jimmy and obtaining his father’s brain so he may gain notoriety as a cartoonist (his companion is bag of money with a dollar sign painted on it which he talks to), and take over the world, as well as stuff like the alien sister’s werewolf boyfriend, cyborgs, criminal grannies, a septuagenarian junior high school student, a preteen animal lover who brings his menagerie of critters to school with him and an opera singing duck. All of that’s fine and dandy except……
MOST OF THESE THINGS HAD ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE [BLEEP]ING PREMISE OF THE SHOW!
The show was allegedly about a kid who had cartoon characters living in his brain. That’s already wacky. You don’t make the ‘real world’ around him also a zany cartoon, because that only makes the cartoons seem unnecessary and redundant by comparison. If the human world is wacky, nutty and cartoony, then why even have the cartoon characters at all? I personally think the only reason why the Appleday Gang (the toons in question) were on the show at all was to justify the show’s presence on CARTOON Network. The Appleday Gang would typically just pop onto the screen at certain intervals, engage in some little bits o’ business and then literally disappear until they were needed again; rarely if ever did the toons actually play a major part in the stories. There was no reason for the separation of human and cartoon at all on the show, as OOJH was just silly stuff on top of other silly stuff.
Why am I talking so extensively about Out of Jimmy’s Head when that’s not subject of this article? Because it’s necessary for context.
“I know yer thinkin’ ‘Well, when’s he gonna stop beatin’ round the bush? Well I’ll get there when I get there, so there ain’t no need to push!”
You see, years later in 2009, Teletoon, the Cartoon Network of Canada, released a pilot of their own with a similar premise entitled Cartoon Gene, about a teen whose wacky scientist father invented a way to bring cartoon and video game characters to life and somehow got biz-zay with one of them, a hardcore video game heroine named Kitty (played by Karen Cliche–if you watched a lot of bad syndicated TV in the 00’s you may remember Ms. Cliche as Lexa Pirece on the 3rd and last season of Mutant X) and as a result of this odd tryst, is half-human, half-cartoon. (I can relate.) The highjinks ensue whenever Gene’s cartoon half kicks in at given moments, resulting in stuff like idea light-bulbs, rain clouds and hearts sprouting out around him depending on his mood and the situation. AFAIK, Cartoon Gene was never made into a full series, all we have of it is this 3-minute pilot trailer.
Granted, “surviving the high-school” (TM) shtick was very, very cliche (the ’emerging toon powers’ thing was meant to be a metaphor for adolescence, after all, see also X-Men), so while it’s not too surprising that this didn’t get bought, Cartoon Gene did one thing very right: it actually incorporated the cartoon angle into the main premise, whereas OOJH felt like a generic tweencom with some cartoon characters in it, and also unlike OOJH, Cartoon Gene had a more real world-ish setting, so the cartoon style gags stood out more. Plus I liked what I saw of Kitty. (Rawr-rawr.) Also, think about it: Gene’s dad managed to develop technology that enabled him to not only bring cartoon and video game characters to life and into our world, but also make them 3-dimensional, to the point where he could have sex with one and produce a child. How is this guy not a billionaire?? In the real world, nerds and geeks would be beating down this guy’s door for this formula so they could fulfill their lifelong dreams of making love to Wonder Woman, Wilma Flintstone and Judy Jetson.
Was Cartoon Gene a master work? No, but had it actually been made, it looks like it would’ve been a better Out of Jimmy’s Head than Out of Jimmy’s Head turned out to be.
Toons & Tunes: "Jabberjaw" by Pain
Here’s a favorite Cartoon Network Groovie of mine: ska/punk band Pain pays tribute to the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Jabberjaw. I usually can take or leave ska music as well as the show, but this tune is a 5-star earworm. Enjoy.
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