Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Tiny Toon Adventures: It bears the famous "WB" logo. So what?

We all know the real reason why television critics at the time all wet their pants over Tiny Toon Adventures, so I won't go into any of that, except to say that if I had been one of those studios putting out some of those other shows back then, such as My Little Pony or The Care Bears, or any of the competitors attempting to knock down The Smurfs such as Herself The Elf or even the televised version of The Littles for that matter (or, duh, Disney's Tale Spin), who were all doing the exact same product placement attempts at letting the merchandising tail wag the dog and sucking every bit as bad at it, I'd have strongly considered slapping Spielberg's name on to my product too. Let me just say that the animators whom the show's episodes were farmed out to were fast making it at least seventy-five percent of the time the worst looking production that the beloved Warner Brothers name had ever produced. I mean, they didn't even have half the fraction of natural ability of a Ralph Bakshi (much less a Chuck Jones), so they went all out trying to bust the show's guts open with nutty exaggerated actions and behaviour which were completely over the top and filled with motions that were convinced the actions and expressions themselves were funny as opposed to realizing that it was what was being reacted to that had made such techniques hilarious in the first place.

The program does have it's occasional (in a "classic" way) moments (i.e. strange ideas here and there), and if I'm charitable I might also say the same thing regarding the cameos of the traditional WB crew (who are all being drawn by hacks who obviously couldn't draw a Looney Toons character to save their souls). However, since this show has yet to this very day to do anything that progresses beyond the obvious (skunks chasing anyone with a white mark of some kind going down their backs, recycled Road Runner gags, egotistical ducks, etc.), and since the writers are not being allowed to cut loose and do their own thing while being shackled to this glop except for maybe a small handful of genuinely entertaining cartoons (the whole "Plucky Duck Goes To Hollywood" bit, which remains the grooviest of the bunch), and since the current "resurrected" WB studio is too paranoid to relinquish marketing control just as stupidly as everybody else, why split hairs/hares?

In Tiny Toon Adventures, the producers created a personal so-called "original" excuse for using the precise same formula of "character age reduction" so inanely popular at the time thanks to The Muppet Babies by claiming that these little imps were supposedly a whole new generation and then turned said "new" characters into overly calculated, recycled cash machines. Cartoon lovers, turning the television set off when this thing comes on will not make you uncool, I promise you.