FFWD Weekly
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| VIDEO VULTURE This week, Video Vulture looks at the best cartoon parodies of superheroes. Some of these shows are funny enough to cause internal injuries and yet still have you rooting for the hero. Unfortunately, only two of them (The Tick and Earthworm Jim) are currently available on video. Consider this a sincere plea to bring the remaining outstanding titles to home vid. · The Tick: Groundbreaking, hilarious superhero nonsense based on the hit comic book. Here are just a few reasons why The Tick kicks butt: 1) The Tick's non-sequitur tirades. 2) The Eastern Bloc Robot Cowboy (a walking vending machine topped with a cowboy hat). 3) The image of Flamingo Man leaping out of his Flamingomobile and standing on one leg. 4) Big Shot, the disturbed Punisher-like vigilante who runs around blasting his insignia into the landscape - by the time he reaches the villains, he's all out of ammo. He bursts into tears, murmuring, "Why didn't you love me, Mom?" 5) Continuity. After Chairface's almost-successful supreme vandalism attempt, the Moon has "CHA" written across it for the rest of the first season. (In season two, the Moon has a large bite taken out of it, for reasons obvious to anybody who saw the Omnipotus episode.) 6) Bizarre hero team The Civic-Minded Five featuring such weirdos as Four-Legged Man and Feral Boy. ("Stop licking yourself, Feral boy!") You get the idea. It rocks. · Earthworm Jim: As if the video game wasn't weird enough, it spawned this satisfyingly crazy cartoon series. The theme song explains how Jim, an ordinary earthworm, got transformed into a trigger-happy superhero when a powerful super suit landed on him from the sky. Now, with the help of sidekick Peter Puppy, Jim protects the world from the evil schemes of villains like Psy-crow, Evil the Cat, and Queen Slug-for-a-butt. · Dial M For Monkey and The Justice Friends: These 'toons appear semi-regularly in Hanna/Barbera's excellent Dexter's Laboratory series. Monkey is one of Dexter's lab animals: a research subject who is secretly a hyper-intelligent superhero, has a habit of sneaking out regularly to save the world - then it's back to the lab for a banana and some mundane tests. The Justice Friends are a full-on parody of the Avengers and other such hero teams. In one episode, the friends face the horror of finding a bee in their apartment. They react with all the overwrought melodrama of facing a global cataclysm. · Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures: In 1987, Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat, Cool World, Wizards, etc.) acquired the rights to the corny old TerryToons character, and did something different with it. Really different. The result was an incredibly twisted and funny series. If you saw it at all during it's brief run, you'll never forget it. It's Video Vulture's second most wanted superhero parody, right after Pith Possum! We want a home vid release and we want it now! Gimme, gimme, gimme! · Pith Possum: Super-Dynamic Possum of Tomorrow: Here is the superhero spoof that most deserves an immediate video release. This brilliant 'toon appeared in Disney's short-lived Shnookums and Meat Funny Cartoon Show , along with the title characters and the bang-on cliffhanger spoof, Tex Tinstar. Assisted by his polite and efficient sidekick Obadiah the Wonder Raccoon (who dispenses good advice like "Sir, maybe you should hold off on the waterskiing, seeing as how your head has just been freshly scotch-taped back onto your body and all"), Pith faces such enemies of justice as Super Water Buffalo and the World's most evil French-Canadian supervillain, Dr. Paul Bunyan. Why, oh why does Disney persist in shipping out millions of copies of Pocahontas 2 when they have a treasure like this sitting idle in their vaults?! |