cartoon

At this point in his creative career, Hayao Miyazaki has directed nine different animated feature films under his Studio Ghibli label, and every single one of them is available in the US, thanks to Disney and their talented team of translators, voice actors and dialogue-reconstructors. Take advantage of this.

While I have said before that I’m not a fan of what US television has done to anime, the films of Studio Ghibli feel like a beacon of intelligence among the horrible battling-trading-card-and-monster-shows-that-sell-merchandise which we’re now drowning in, or those cartoons that show just a few too many shots of schoolgirl underwear. While many of Miyazaki’s films focus around innocence, children, and the mystical circumstances they stumble into, rest assured that there are no underpants to contend with.

Disney has recently re-released some Miyazaki classics which you may have seen on the shelves a few years back : My Neighbor Totoro, Castle in the Sky, and Kiki’s Delivery Service. So, let’s dissect the differences of the US releases. It goes without saying that these are all excellent films – you can find detailed criticism elsewhere.

My Neighbor Totoro was released in 2002 by Fox, though this edition of the DVD was missing the original Japanese language track, and was presented in awkward fullscreen. It was again released in 2004 by Disney with an entirely new English voice cast, and again in 2010 – both of which are 2-disc sets which differ in special features.

The 2004 release, which features a colorful fishing scene over a river on the cover, includes a featurette with US voice actors Elle and Dakota Fanning, as well as the original trailer in Japanese and the complete film in storyboard form. The 2010 release, which uses a dark blue, rainy scene on the cover and a gold slipcase spine, features an extensive exploration of Studio Ghibli as they were making Totoro, previews for a few other films, and the same storyboard version of the film as the 2004 edition – as well as a beautiful little lithograph of the cover scene.

As a completist, do you want both? My favorite part of any animated DVD is the voice acting stuff, but the choice is yours. This film is so iconic that Ghibli uses Totoro as their logo. The earlier editions are currently out of print.

Castle in the Sky, which is also sometimes called Laputa, or a combination of the two, (and not to be confused with Howl’s Moving Castle, also by Studio Ghibli), was first released by Disney on DVD within the US in 2003. This version has a light blue cover with a tress in the center, and includes an introduction by Disney’s John Lasseter, the option to view the film as the original storyboards, the original Japanese trailers, and a behind-the-scenes feature with the voice talent.

The 2010 release, which has a floating girl and a gold slipcase spine, also includes the introduction from Lasseter, the original storyboards, and a new featurette about the awesome steampunk worlds of the film – but leaves out the voice actor features again, while including a small print of the cover. Both versions are still available at the time of this writing.

Kiki’s Delivery Service was also released in 2003, featuring a cover which uses a large portrait of the protagonist. This includes the same four types of features as ‘Castle’, while the 2010 release (depicting a girl on a broomstick flying over a cityscape), mimics the three features of the 2010 edition of ‘Castle’ also. All three of these films are being re-released now to accompany the release of Ponyo, which is the newest Miyazaki release.

One thing worth noting is that all of these are, and have been, available from other publishers which are not US-based. I’ve had a few experiences with attempting to purchase anime DVDs from discount distributors before, and the results have been completely disastrous. Unless it’s a producer that you trust and has a solid reputation for releasing films in the US, buying cheap anime DVDs is a colossal waste of money – unless you speak Japanese. Most often, the subtitles are completely unreadable, having undergone translation into Korean or Chinese, and then to English. Try doing this with any sentence in Babelfish and you’ll see what I mean. So, the only sure way to get your hands on these Ghibli releases and to enjoy them is to buy the real, Disney versions of them.

Since I started collecting cartoons on DVD, I’ve had a holy grail. Batman, He-Man, Thundercats, Duck Tales, Freakazoid – all checked off of the list, and keeping me company during late nights in the studio space.

Sure, I watch a lot of cartoons to appreciate them as an artform, to understand the art that goes into them and their societal relevance, but I’ll easily admit that a good portion of my cartoon watching is a very transparent attempt to revisit the warm, afterschool days of elementary school and junior high…. back when I had a glorious, full head of hair and the patience to play through Dragon Warrior without being distracted by whatever unearthly, expensive sound the car had made earlier that day. Those were the days.

I can almost completely reconstruct my afterschool cartoon schedule from existing DVDs, but one show had always eluded me : The Real Ghostbusters. You know, the good one with Egon – not the one with the big monkey. Ghostbusters played a very integral part in the formation of my brainmeats, and had a powerful influence over my interest in art and (though I couldn’t articulate it at the time) surrealism. It’s pretty much uncontested that the original Ghostbusters cartoons had some of the creepiest, most unsettling monsters that had ever been animated, and I loved them. Dripping, hissing, biologically improbable, weirdly-hued, slowly terrifying monsters. The action figures that the series spawned were used interchangeably with Ninja Turtles and He-Man during afterschool play, and I never got over my jealousy of my neighbor’s Firehouse playset. As if his Technodrome wasn’t enough.

I’d picked up a few grainy bootleg episodes from dark corridors at comic conventions, but it was an incomplete picture of the series as a whole, and while it wasn’t episodic in the sense that one episode usually had any critical relevance on things that happened later in the series (though references were sometimes made to the earlier cartoons and both movies), it’s always been important to me to absorb things as a full picture. Finally, finally, finally - Time-Life has released ‘The Real Ghostbusters : The Complete Collection’ on DVD. And it’s the handsomest DVD package I’ve ever seen. Seriously – you’d probably want to get dressed up fancy and take it out to dinner.

Packaged in a heavy box that mimics the Ghostbusters’ firehouse headquarters (which includes two lenticular panels), there are five metal cases that house 25 DVDs that span 61 hours, 147 episodes and all 7 seasons of the show. It’s practically an encyclopedic map of my id during the early 90s. The package also includes an episode guidebook, and a cardboard-slipcased bonus DVD with extra behind-the-scenes materials. The whole thing is no larger than a stack of 6 DVDs, and weighs about 4 pounds, so it fits perfectly on a shelf with your other DVDs, despite the enormous content.

The episodes haven’t gone through any digital remastering or whatever other processes studios awkwardly force DVD releases through to ultimately make them uncomfortable to watch – they’re all here as I watched them on TV 20 years ago, dust and all. Those were the days when animation was subject to slipped frames and dust, before things went the pristine digital route. The organic, energetic animation, mistakes and all, are left in perfect condition – and Ghostbusters had a surprising and uncommon amount of detail in its animation and backgrounds for the era in which it was produced. I’m all nostalgic for the days of painted scenery and mouths that don’t sync up to dialogue.

Sci-fi geeks might not realize that much of the series was scripted, guided and edited by notable creator J. Michael Straczynski, who went on to write well-received runs on Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, as well as Babylon 5. Extensive interviews with him on the set’s bonus disc give an insight into how much seriousness and passion he gave to the show, and why he was ultimately forced to leave (and later return) during a very dark era in which Slimer was deemed more important than the Ghostbusters by the network, and the show kinda sucked for a while. It’s all included in the set, even the sucky parts – which are retrospectively great because it shows the evolution of the show, and a sharp contrast emphasizing the level of quality that the cartoon was capable of.

The bonus DVD also includes an extended interview with Maurice LaMarche, a voice acting demi-god whom I’ve never seen a full interview with. As the voice of Egon (and the only cast member who stayed through the entire series, and even into the shorter-lived Extreme Ghostbusters, which is not included in this DVD set), he provides a very deep and meaningful insight into the family that the show created, and his remembrances of Lorenzo Music (the voice of Peter Venkman, who passed away in 2001) made me misty-eyed. Also interviewed are producers, and both voices of Janine Melnitz. I would give my left eye to have gotten an interview with Frank Welker, the voice of Ray Stantz and unarguably the god of all voice acting. Go ahead and argue it, and I’ll show you an IMDB page with five million credits. Me and my voice actor fetish.

The list of extras goes on and on, and includes the never-aired original pilot, with and without commentary. It’s not much more than a 5-minute musical cartoon that demonstrates the characters and animation of the show, and it’s interesting to see a few significant differences in design and purpose of some of the characters. The bonus disc also includes PDFs that include the series bible and storyboards.

Every disc includes some kind of bonus, usually in the form of scripts, storyboards and featurettes. It’s a exhaustive package, so while one might be inclined to balk and the $180 price, having the set in-hand definitely makes that price feel valid and justified – and it’s even less expensive than the full set of Thundercats. Giving myself over to a world where obnoxious ghosts are the biggest problem makes it a little easier to deal with the real world.

The Real Ghostbusters : Complete Collection can only be purchased directly through Time-Life’s website – and check out this gallery in our community to see all of this awesome set and what you’ll be getting. I don’t want to use the cliché that ‘no collection is complete without’ this set, but really – a sense of completeness has come over me.

Now, world, start working on re-creating my Saturday mornings.

My love affair with Futurama is undisguised. Not only is it a show that remains both hilarious, visually imaginative and emotionally resonant (when it wants to be), but it’s a show that’s developed a stronger character dynamic than almost any other animated series. You can’t ever, ever go wrong with mad professors, time travel paradoxes, robots that seem specifically designed to destroy Asimov’s three Laws of Robotics, and hypnotic toads. I try to incorporate at least two of these elements into my everyday life.

I’ve told the story here before : Futurama gets canceled because of grievous mishandling by FOX, and many years later, fan fervor causes it to be resurrected in the form of four direct-to-DVD animated movies (which eventually make their way to Comedy Central). This week marks the release of the third DVD movie, and like the others, it includes the full original voice cast and almost all of the original creative team that made the show so great the first time ’round. The fate of the show is still uncertain after the release of the fourth DVD, but us Futurama nerds are really, really hopeful. There are way too many creative possibilities, aliens to meet, and scientific theories to eviscerate to stop making the show now.

The most recent DVD, Bender’s Game (a reference to Orson Scott Card’s classic science fiction story, Ender’s Game), continues to live up to the standard that Futurama has defined for clever space adventure animation. One of the prerequisites for bringing the show back was that each DVD movie would have to be easily divisible into four full-length TV episodes which weren’t too reliant upon the events of the other episodes, and somehow, I found it impossible to see where the seams might be. That right there is the definition of smart writing.

Without going into too much plot summary, the first 44 minutes are spent in the Futurama world as we know it, as the world faces a fuel crisis not unlike our own, while in a subplot, Bender tries desperately to discover his imagination. Around the 44 minute mark, the two plots merge and some science-magic happens (which almost definitely has some actual science counterpart, as most Futurama events do) and the whole Planet Express crew is transported into a Dungeons and Dragons / Lord of the Rings parodyverse of Bender’s subconscious design. Whether or not this is a thin premise doesn’t concern me, because I’m watching new Futurama stuff, and shut up. The whole thing ties up nicely, with a startling character-revelation retcon as only Futurama can write.

The DVD is stuffed with extra features, my favorite being the Genetics Lab, which is a simple little DVD game in which you select two Futurama Characters (out of six) and merge their DNA, resulting in a displayed image of just what the concoction would look like. I can’t articulate why, but it amused me to no end. A bizarre Fry / Bender combination named ‘Friender’ shouldn’t have tickled me in so many places. Seriously. I’m calling the authorities.

The movie commentary, as always, is great stuff – Billy West and John DiMaggio just bein’ themselves is endlessly listenable. There’s a short documentar-ette about Futurama’s past D&D references (including a very notable episode in which D&D creator Gary Gygax provided a voice as himself), some sarcastic ‘how to draw’ lessons, only one deleted scene, and a scant two minutes of watching the voice actors do their thing behind the mic. All of you DVD extra creators, hear this : more voice acting footage.

Of course, this is an essential part of any Futurama collection, and very directly complements the existing episodes, and it made me laugh. The DVD was packaged, and created, with carbon neutral standards, so while you’re enjoying your ‘toons, you can also rest easy knowing that they didn’t shorten the planet’s lifespan. You know, as long as your TV isn’t somehow powered by a V6 engine and orca blood.

There are a lot of DC Comics superhero DVDs out there, and even as a professional nerd, I find myself confused a whole heck of a lot. I mean, you have 1973’s Super Friends, 1977’s The All-New Superfriends Hour, 1978’s Challenge of the Superfriends, 1985’s Super Powers Team, 1988’s Superman, and everything in-between. Well, it’s time to throw one more DVD onto the pile of awesome. Do it gently though, as pure, unexhausted Awesome is known to explode.

What? It’s on the periodic table. Right between Gnarlium and Radiclon.

While I was growing up, Filmation was known as two things : those guys who did He-Man, and those guys who did that ‘not-as-good’ Ghostbusters cartoon without Slimer. Everyone knows two fundamental things about monkeys : they can’t swim, and they can’t catch ghosts. It’s simple biology. Get with the program.

In the halcyon days of 1967, long before irreparably altering the direction of my childhood and compelling me to tear around my back yard bellowing ‘I HAVE THE POWER!’, Filmation took a whack at a variety of DC Superheroes. This DVD collection of eighteen 7-minute episodes originally appeared before and after Filmation’s ‘Superman / Aquaman Hour‘ (released by Warner Home Video previously). These Super Heroes cartoons are divided by hero on the DVD, with three dedicated episodes for each one : The Atom, The Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, The Teen Titans, and of course, the whole Justice League of America.

Being an excitable Green Lantern fan, I skipped right to the GL episodes, only to find him with a Venusian sidekick named Kairo, who would be a ridiculously offensive stereotype of SOMETHING were he not clearly from Venus. This was the Silver Age of comics, mind you – everyone was picking up extraneous youthful wards, and crazy pseudo-science was taking over comic book plots where basic crime tales once ruled. It was really a great time to be reading – visits to other planets, alien life forms and ridiculous machines were beginning to redefine comics, as well as the cartoons based on them.

It’s also worth mentioning that the creative climate of cartoons at the time tended to focus on quantity over quality, so studios would re-use animation, backgrounds and even plots as much as possible. While Filmation is usually regarded as the very worst offender and prolific re-user, it’s amazingly charming in retrospect. Long, slow pans over large, lush background paintings became a trademark of theirs, as these shots took up expanses of time without the expensive process of actually animating anything, or moving still characters across backgrounds. Still, these money-saving approaches to animation are brimming with nostalgia (are occasionally, hilarity), and current cartoons like The Venture Bros. have made segments purposely mimicking this limited animation style for the nostalgia effect. And you HAVE to love the quickly designed one-off monsters and bad guys who flounder around without real background or purpose and bad helmets. Well, at least I have to.

About 2 minutes into the classic Green Lantern episode ‘Sirena, Empress of Evil’, the best thing ever happens. Ever.

See, Sirena is SO evil that she’s designed a complex device that uses a magneto-beam to locate Green Lantern anywhere on her evil planet. By pulling a lever, the magneto-beam’s wavy lines search out the brainwaves of ol’ Hal Jordan. This, in itself, isn’t evil, but Sirena pulls another lever and a dopey-looking red bird is revealed. It’s purpose? Well… just watch.

Someone call PETA. Or help me train a bird to do that, because it is amazing. The sheer, open-ended bizarreness of the DVD drops unexpected, circuitous bombs like this every few minutes, along with a bevy of classic Burt Ward-ian exhortations, like ‘holy galaxies!’ or ‘great merciful sappho!’ or ‘jumping armadillos!’ Unfortunately, there’s not a Batman in sight, as this Justice League is comprised of the DVD’s aforementioned main stars, plus Superman.

The absolute best part of the DVD is the 40-minute documentary on Lou Scheimer and how he and two friends built Filmation from scratch, subterfuge and pure ingenuity, watched it create wonderful things and form a family, and eventually collapse. It’s surprisingly moving and emotional, and it conveys a newfound appreciation of Filmation’s approach to animation. They’d bring you in, give you a job for life if you wanted it, and teach you how to do whatever you wanted to know… and it was exciting! It was the Pixar of its day – interested employees creating things that they believed in, full of expression and wonder.

Within the documentary, Paul Dini articulates the appeal of Filmation’s cartoons best : they’re organic. You can see the process, you can see the hand of the artist and the brushstrokes. As more and more animation was sent overseas for production, Filmation kept almost all of their work within the US, and at one point, within the same building – from sketching to voiceovers to final product. It’s that insular, close environment that genuinely created a family, and if you watch carefully, you can see it in their cartoons. (Parents, use mild caution – the documentary involves one instance of medium-level profanity.)

I was prepared to laugh my way through the DVD’s continuity errors, mis-painted heroes and strange plot twists, but while I still can’t help but notice the amusing weirdness, it’s now easier to see the hands behind it, and that adds a whole new dimension to the experience.

The DVD holds an important part in any animation collection as it features some of the very first ‘Saturday morning’ cartoons. And, of course, birds flying into peoples’ heads. What’s cooler than that?

I always keep a short list of cartoons that I’d immediately and happily collect on DVD; Men In Black, Project Geeker, Earthworm Jim and Freakazoid have always been the top four, but because of their obscurity and relatively small cult following, I always just assumed that it would be an impossibility. I deal with this by crying a little, eating my feelings, and going to bed feeling all bloaty. Well, I can finally knock a dozen or so pizza rolls off of the evening’s sad repast, because Freakazoid is here.

Warner Brothers has finally released the first season of Freakazoid on DVD, ten years after the show’s premature cancellation. This DVD set includes 14 episodes on 2 DVDs, while the inevitable Season Two set will likely include the remaining 10 episodes. I’m counting on that, WB! Do you hear me? Freak me.

Freakazoid represents a very unique time in Saturday morning cartoons, inasmuch as it was pretty much the last time they were consistently good and unpolluted. We were still in the halcyon days before Pokemon aired in the US, and Freakazoid was like nothing that had come before it. It was completely dadaist (and often surrealist) in its approach to comedy, pulling influences from decades of popular culture, throwing in a great deal of vocal improvisation and non-sequitur, some ridiculously exaggerated classic slapstick, and finishing it off with a bizarre variety show structure – in no particular order. Not too many kids shows were referencing Jack Valenti, F-Troop, Ed Wood, Jerry Lewis, and Tom Lehrer at the time (or ever, because honestly, these are ‘old people things’, like ointments and brunch specials), but Freakazoid did it, and with Steven Spielberg’s approval – something that the writers are still trying to figure out.

And it was hilarious. I was 14 at the time, and it redefined my whole perception of comedy, even if I didn’t understand many of the references. All I knew was that a 5-minute scene of two hands sloppily making out was comedy gold. I didn’t appreciate the Harlan Ellison cameo until five years later, and it’s taken even longer for many more jokes to fully marinate. I don’t know if this is the mark of madness or genius, but it works well for me. It’s the kind of show that I want to own on DVD so that I can share it with people who haven’t witnessed it, just to see how they react, or if they hit me.

Admittedly, the best parts of the show happen when Paul Rugg, the voice of Freakazoid as well as a writer for the show, is allowed to just go wild – off the script, improvising bizarreness – while the animators try to make sense of it later. Most of the first episode is Rugg’s raw audition tape, and it’s so full of energy that it can barely be matched by subsequent episodes – especially when Freakazoid is scripted. It’s the dada, say-whatever approach to Freakazoid that makes him endearing and amusing to watch.

Of course, there are other heroes (and villains) who make appearances, and most of them are completely ineffectual in their roles – which makes for even more humor, even when the show leans towards the ‘corny’ aspects of the WB cartoon repertoire at the time.

The DVD provides commentary on the first two episodes, as well as episode twelve (which is one of the very scripted episodes). I don’t know exactly why the episodes detailing Freakazoid’s origin weren’t worth commenting on, but the revelations provided in the existing episodes are enjoyable enough to make me want behind-the-scenes stuff on every episode. There’s enough running under each one to keep it entertaining, no doubt.

The other DVD bonus is a small documentary about how Freakazoid began as an action cartoon and slowly metamorphosed into a wacky comedy, with interviews with Paul Rugg, producers, writers, and the revolutionary designer Bruce Timm, creator the animated Justice League universe that I love to much. While nothing is too revelatory, and I’d have loved to see many, many more of Timm’s original character designs, it’s a pleasant watch.

There are a few instances when it’s clear that WB hasn’t tried to clean up the dusty prints of the show, as segments might appear blurry or with lines running across the sides, and in two instances, entire half-episodes are repeated as filler within other episodes – which is how they originally aired, but is it really necessary to have the same 30 minutes of video repeated twice on the same DVD when it could have meant more space for a Bruce Timm design gallery or something? I’d have been happy to settle for a 15-minute episode, understanding that that’s just how things work when an episode isn’t done on time. It’s a strange choice to include this duplication, but it doesn’t make the existing stuff any less awesome.

For me, Freakazoid isn’t a ‘want’ so much as a ‘need’, and it remains 98% hilariously absurd. The DVD is scheduled to be released on July 29th, and I think it marks a very important point in televised animation.