Wednesday, May 6, 2009

STUNT DAWGS - DIC Enterprises

Back during the late '80s, Ralph Bakshi decided to get permission to create an all-new Mighty Mouse cartoon for Saturday morning television. What he basically did was simply hire a bunch of artists and simply let them have at it; they were given the lowest budget in town and in exchage were allowed to do anything that they wanted. As a result, this artistic honesty made Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures an instant hit -- a program that felt at the time like a breath of fresh air during a moment when the merchandising tail had been allowed to wag the dog.

Unfortunately, as with always the case with something like this in any area of the entertainment industry, other producers seeing dollar signs in the "new style" completely misread the reasons as to why it had been such a success while bending over backwards to copy it. Instead of learning the lesson of "creators need to be in charge of their own output in order for it to work", they instead believed that "cubism", "funky" shapes, and "outrageous" ideas were supposedly the "new thing" and proceeded to flood the market with every single imitation imaginable. Everywhere you looked, you encountered everything from A Pup Named Scooby-Doo to Hammerman.

But now we have come to the absolute worst of this genre, the most unfunny cartoon that could ever have been inspired by Mighty Mouse or, for that matter, by anything else.

This one's unbelievable. You think you've seen bad cartoons in your time? Try this one on for size. It's an eyesore so bad, so awful, so putrid, so painful, so irritating, and so completely flat out totally and thoroughly useless, that you could start joking with your friends about how it could be used for Chinese-water-torture-style interrogation when all else fails. It's really something, a huge wad of ignorant design, style, writing, directing, vocal acting... hey, you name it, it screws it up.

But here's the weirdest part of this thing; exactly what inspired it besides the Mighty Mouse trend, and what genre is it convinced it's spoofing?

Oh well, I guess that's the sort of question you're not supposed to ask with a program like this, or at least that's what Do It Cheap Enterprises appears to believe, anyway. For the record, it appears to be something that some marketing moron attempted to dream up from scratch somewhere along the line in an attempt to be original, and if that's the case then I can say that in that one sense they did appear to have actually succeeded in accomplishing something here. The only reason I say this because the "stunt dawgs" in this cartoon resemble absolutely no known profession or position either real or imagined known to man, appear to be an ensemble of Hollywood stuntpeople doubling as crimefighters -- or something along those lines -- and I'm forced to admit that that is indeed an idea that has, I suspect, never actually been done before in any form of reality or fiction.

If it in fact already has, please don't bother telling me; I don't know to know.

And by the way, if there is an actual source of inspiration for this thing, please don't pass it along; I really don't want to know that either.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm pulling the plug on this commentary -- simply thinking about this annoying atrocity gives me a headache.