cartoons

While shopping at an antique store in Illinois, I came across a very charming old book. Called Bird Center Cartoons. It is further described as “A Chronicle of Social Happenings at Bird Center, Illinois.” It was by John T. McCutcheon, a long-time writer for the Chicago Tribune and Pulitzer Prize winner too. This book has a publisher’s date of 1904, way before MY time. Actually, you’ll find some of the comics are timeless.

An early page tells me that these “cartoons concern the social doings and adventures of the following people” and numerous names, descriptions and titles follow.

One of the illustrations shows the Fourth of July Lawn Fete. I know it has been a long time since men dressed in suits and ladies in long gowns and hats at any of our local celebrations. But the gent reading a historical decree, children running about and older people reminiscing still take place.

The section called “The Church Bazaar” was really a chuckle. We see all sorts of booths set up, from selling “fancy work slippers”, to a grab bag tent and also a booth with a Fortune Teller! Near the back is another one that is jam packed with people – they are voting for “the most beautiful young lady and the homeliest man – 5 cents a vote.”

Throughout the book they refer to “The Mysterious Stranger”, first spotted at Mr. Peter’s Lawn Party. He has evidently helped out Captain Fry by paying off his mortgage but no one has been able to identify him. He is mentioned throughout the book, including the Baby Show, Football Game, and various parties. But not until the very end do we learn who he is! (And you will have to wait to the end of this article to find out!)

At one of the Grand Social Functions, thrown by Mrs. Riley Withersby, we find another delightful scene. There is a spotted dog growling at a bear-skin rug, a black manservant bringing food, and a young man using a stereoscope to view those two-sided pictures.

Two of the funniest sections are the “Arrival of the Ninth Little Walpole” and the next chapter showing a community wide “contest” to name the baby! When that did not work, they went to the newspaper, the Argosy, and its readers to come up with a suitable name. I read and re-read the next chapters, but had no luck in finding out what the final determination was. But in a paragraph under the heading of “Return of the Travelers” (nifty train scene), I see the results. “We selected the name Timothy Withersby Walpole announced Rev. Walpole – Timothy after my old college president and Withersby after a lady whom all Bird Center delights to honor and love.” Later in the paragraph I learned that because Mrs. Withersby was so delighted by the name, she deposited $1,000 in the bank for the baby. Gee, that worked out swell. Hope the kid held onto it since $1,000 in 1904 was a huge amount!

This is a large, delightful book, with loads of illustrations and references to social events such as engagements, marriages, births, a visit from a cousin from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, even mention of a new suit ordered by a local dignitary. Newsworthy in a small town back then.

Well, you’ve been waiting to learn the Mysterious Stranger’s identify, right? It turns out that he was Col. Calhoun Peyton, a Confederate Soldier, who had survived many military skirmishes, a battle with Geronimo, and the battle of the Battle of Appomattox. He tells the anxious crowd that he was “shot to pieces” at Gettysburg and a Yankee soldier stopped to give him water and ask if he wanted to send any message home. His response was “You’re a Yankee and I hate you but you are a noble man just the same. Take this old sword to my mother, it was my father’s in the Mexican war and my grandfather’s in the war of 1812. Tell her that it has honored the name of Peyton to the last.” That Yankee soldier was Captain Roscoe Fry and he lived up to his promise. Col. Peyton somehow survived and had been searching for Capt. Fry to thank him. He found him in financial distress and came to his aid. “Bird Center is agog over the event If you get a chance to read this book, please do so. It has been an enjoyable “look back” at simpler times with fantastic illustrations and marvelous narrative. A good place to shop for older books would be antique stores and malls. I am sure you’ll be delighted, as I was to find these treasures.

I have made absolutely no secret of my gushing, nerdly adoration of the Justice League animated series. Repeatedly. To the point of annoying the bejesus out of everyone here, no doubt. In short – it’s the greatest thing to happen to cartoons in, well, forever.

Building upon the epic stylings of the Batman and Superman animated series (masterpieces both), the Justice League animated series took all of this and added in just about everyone in the DC Universe. It brought obscure characters to the forefront of battles, threw in mentions of just about everyone else, spawned the most extensive comic-based action figure line ever, and really told meaningful, smart stories. So smart, in fact, that episodes aired in prime time and in a letterboxed format. That’s the kind of ‘classy’ we’re talking here. It’s rare to encounter a cartoon that can be defined as ‘powerful’, but this is one.

And I have to be completely honest here – I always cry like a baby during the episode ‘Epilogue’. Not only does it depict the perfect Batman, but it’s one of the best five television moments ever created.

This is not to say that the series didn’t have a few clunkers. Any show that depicts a ‘war world’ usually puts me to sleep, but the rest of the series more than makes up for it. Episodes featuring Batman singing, a Wonder Woman pig, and an episode where the JL is turned into kids that actually doesn’t suck all add up to a great experience. The series even manages to tie in the largely forgettable Batman Beyond series and give it some relevance to the bigger narrative scheme.

Justice League : The Complete Series, handsomely encased in a tin container, includes every episode from Justice League (2001 – 2004) and the follow-up series, Justice League Unlimited (2004 – 2006), despite just being called ‘Justice League’. This includes 91 episodes over 14 discs – and packaged in a much narrower set than all four previous DVD sets. These DVDs reproduce all of the bonus features that were originally included in the originals, except for ‘And Justice For All’, a mini-documentary about the transition between the two related series. This is replaced by a completely new documentary called ‘Unlimited Reserve’, which covers a lot of the same ideas anyhow. Even the images on the DVDs themselves are identical to the original releases, so you’re not missing any detail, really.

This whole set, which spans an insane 2062 minutes (which I include because the box says so, despite being a tremendously impractical way to measure time), can be purchased for around 70 bucks – less than half of what the original four sets would set you back.

It’s probably the best investment in an animated series you could make today, because they’re pretty endlessly rewatchable, have some amazing voice talent (seriously, Scrubs’ Dr. Cox as The Atom!), and hell, they’re just really good. It’s nice to see them all so respectfully gathered into one mega-set, especially because they’re so sequential and relevant to each other. Plus, as a 28 year old male with cartoons on your bedroom shelf, having them in a tin is slightly less repellant to the opposite sex.

My Saturday mornings are doing everything they can to draw me back in.

Those were mornings of pancakes and Count Chocula (which did not happen simultaneously until I could make my own dietary choices), and hours of staring into the box that would mold me into the slightly deranged, completely harmless human that I am today, painting alarmingly realistic versions of Popeye and with a heart full of robots.

This month sees the release of a ton of great cartoons from the past 50 years, all very much connected and all important to the very evolution of the animated art form. They’re also all continuations of series I’ve gushed about here before, and thus, vital steps towards completing my sacred quest of finding every meaningful childhood cartoon and never leaving my warm bubble of familiarity. Made of couch cushions and my old Super Mario Bros. towel.

Let’s go in chronological order, by way of airdate. First, we have the second volume of Gigantor, which completes the entire 52 episode run by providing the final 26 episodes. With the upcoming release of the animated Astro Boy movie, this has never been more relevant – and as far as animated robots go, the barrel-chested, rocket-packed, remote-controlled Gigantor is one of my favorites, if only for aesthetic reasons. A bulbous, giant, metal man with spiked wrists and a gladitorial-helmet shaped head is just the definition of what robots should be.

E1 Entertainment does an awesome job, once again, with packaging up this series from 1964. The four discs are numbered with respect to the first set, labeled 5 through 8, and all housed in a very handsome fold-out cardboard case. The companion guide is the most excellent part of the collection, and something that so many DVD sets neglect to include. It describes the titles and plot points of every episode included, and groups them with the storyline they belong in, making it easy to follow along. Top this off with a vintage Gigantor ad that ran in newspapers and it’s a perfect package.

In the bonus features, Fred Ladd returns to discuss his role in bringing Gigantor into the US. There’s also a photo gallery of (now deceased) Gigantor creator Mitsutero Yokoyama, who totally quit his job at a bank because he didn’t have enough time to draw. That man is someone to model my own life after. Finally, issues 7 through 12 of the more recent Gigantor comic book are included on the DVD. The limited animation, the warm greys, the neat bad guys and great, classic robots make this complete collection a very awesome thing, and they’re given a great deal of respect. We’ve all seen dollar store DVDs of old cartoons that have lapsed from copyright, so seeing this set treated so well is exciting.

Twenty years later, in 1984, the popularity of Gigantor and the whole robot genre would eventually coalesce into The Transformers, proving the timelessness of robots, and especially robot toys. In this spirit, we have Transformers : Season Two, Volume One released this month from Shout! Factory, who once again knock packaging out of the park.

Once the Transformers had latched their metal hooks into the collective psyches of young boys everywhere with the first season, the series saw a change. To say that it ‘fell victim to’ the motivations behind Saturday morning cartoons of the ’80s would seem to imply that the animation suffered, but that’s not the case. The show was picked up for syndication and the number of episodes had to be increased to 49 per season, but because of the nature of syndication, the clearly linear storylines were abandoned for a more one-shot kind of attitude to the stories. A whole mess of additional characters were tossed in without any real explanation, but very obviously to provide a market for toys that Hasbro wanted to release. It’s this kind of business-centric mindset that dominated a majority (if not all) of these 1980s cartoons, from Snare-Arm Swamp Thing action figures to GI Joe vehicles that looked like giant toys, because they were designed as toys before they ever had a purpose in the plot of the show.

It’s important to bear in mind that these ARE cartoons, and not things of gripping importance, and the madness is actually quite embraceable. A little wriggly, but embraceable. Season 2.1 includes 28 episodes across four discs, in two plastic cases packed in a slipcase, and with a great episode guide also included. Just like the release of the first season, the DVD set endeavors to replace all of the missing clips that were cut from previous DVDs, restoring the DVDs to exactly what we saw on TV, making this the definitive edition of the First Generation shows. After season two completed, the Transformers Movie would be released, setting the stage for even larger changes in the Transformers universe.

Let’s fast forward to 1994 to another team of heroes. We’re halfway through the run of the popular X-Men animated show, which drew its stories directly from the comics, with suitable modifications for TV. Still, the tales told were fairly ambitious, with a good deal of them spanning four or five episodes – the equivalent of a long animated movie, and many more needing at least two episodes to be told. These two DVD sets, comprised of two DVDs each (but sold separately), contain the 29 more episodes of the 76-episode series, leaving us at episode 62.

While these two volumes are much more nicely packaged than the first two (with holographic slipcases and the works), this is where the episode numbering gets incredibly confusing. Like, DaVinci code confusing. This is in no small part to episodes airing completely out of order due to being pre-empted from their original air times, finding a weekday air date, and leaving some even airing in the middle of a completely different season – despite being highly sequential! Kids were handed episodes full of Cyclops mourning the death of Jean Grey in the middle of completely different adventures, two years later, and this was due to problems with the animation that was produced. Because of this, it’s impossible to really package these as seasons, so these sets begin during the third season, and cut off somewhere in the middle of the fourth, packaged according to the original air date – no matter how screwed up it was.  What’s important is that we eventually score every episode. Wikipedia can help us reassemble them in the right order later.

It’s no secret that the X-Men comics of the 90s were an incomprehensible mess of time travel conundrums that resulted in Cyclops being his own step-sister, crossovers with other comic books, the meaninglessness of comic book ‘death’ becoming a cliché, and writing that assumed way too much the the readers ability to give a damn after a while. I kinda see these cartoons as a succinct collection of footnotes to that garbled period that existed before the X-Men comics started getting really accessible with Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, much later. These DVDs include The Dark Phoenix Saga that every Marvel fan knows, trips into the Savage Land, and even obscure characters like Silver Samurai and Leech. Not unlike the sudden arrival of Transformers characters, the X-Men action figure line of the 1990s thrived on these otherwise forgettable characters popping up into the animated stories, so I don’t doubt the intentions of any of this.

While I wish that the first two volumes also had shiny slipcases that remind me of the Marvel trading cards of the same era (or hey, even a few reprinted trading cards themselves) for some consistency on the shelf, these DVD sets (although bare bones and without guides or bonus features) are a great addition to reclaiming an entire Saturday’s worth of toons. One more disc and we should be set with the entire collection!

With the original Plastic Man cartoon coming out next month, I’m pretty much just waiting for Earthworm Jim or the final episodes of The Tick to show up. Great DVDs all around, and if I hide them from potential girlfriends, I should be okay.

US culture has gone through its fair share of ‘retro’ periods, but none has been quite so enduring and tenacious as our revisitation to the 1980s. I believe that this is because our attachment and willingness to return to our innocent childhoods in the 80s is directly proportional to how dissatisfied we are with the way the world operates today. That, and Men Without Hats were pretty amazing.

The recent 25th anniversary of GI Joe surely brought my generation a bit of cognitive dissonance. While our general unhappiness with the government seems to dominate our mindset (until recently), GI Joe also represents that same government. Of course, GI Joe actually represents the government what we wish we had – America’s secret fightin’ team faces off against hissing terrorists with a penchant for stealing the Statue of Liberty and emerge victorious, mitigating damage to the point where the whole situation ends with a hearty laugh and the bad guys sulk away, soundly humiliated. Those guys got stuff done, dammit.

Do we need all of these re-envisionings of our childhood heroes into super-exploding, larger than life, realistic movies? Absolutely not, but maybe the eleven and twelve year olds of today do. Cel animation just doesn’t charm like it used to.

Shout! Factory’s release of GI Joe Season 1.1 has all of this, plus gigantic rub-on tattoos. Unless your kid has serious glandular problems, it’s pretty obvious that these are meant for the adult collector. These would dwarf lesser arms. This is just one of many indications that this set has been made for the collectors.

All 22 episodes remain firmly intact across four discs, complete with animation blips, ‘we’ll be right back’ bumpers and credits that feature the original Hasbro logo. It’s as close to the original airings as possible, which collectors will definitely appreciate. The set also includes a booklet with handy episode synopses, which might help you pinpoint that favorite episode across one of the many 5-episode arcs. Given how often we have to suffer through poorly ‘remastered’ versions of things, this is awesome.

DVD bonuses include a three-part interview with one of the original authors, which runs for about 20 minutes in total. While an insight into the process of writing something both narrative and toyetic is interesting, it’s a little dry and definitely for dedicated fans.

Of special interest to me is the original 1963 GI Joe 12” figure presentation that Hasbro showed to press and investors at the 1963 Toy Fair. As a Toy Fair attendee, I am very comforted by the fact that Hasbro’s been boring the living snot out of people with patronizing presentations for decades, and that it’s not just me. I loves ya, Hasbro, but 2 hours of Powerpoint? I got a cramp in my everything and I never wanted to see another toy again.

The DVD also presents some original, and oft parodied (warning : link NSFW!), ‘Knowledge is Half the Battle’ PSAs – six in all. Future anthropologists will surely wonder about the IQ of the 20th century, what with animated kids swimming in thunderstorms and eating glass and playing in traffic.

With this release of GI Joe on DVD, we’re one step closer towards completing the holy quartet of 1980s boy cartoons. We already have handsome editions of Thundercats and Masters of the Universe, so with Shout!’s GI Joe and Transformers reissues, both pure in their content and presentation, we’re almost there.

And, appropriately, happy Fourth of July.

Even without ever having seen Gigantor as a young kid, we all knew the theme song. It was just one of those cultural things that stuck in the collective consciousness (at least locally) like the 1960s Spider-Man song, and sung while tearing around the yard and beating each other up.

The first exposure that I actually had to Gigantor was last year, during a few sleepless nights when [adult swim] decided, in their signature random style, to air really old Japanese cartoons at 5 AM. There was something absolutely comforting about the weirdness of it, and the shades of grey, the haze, and the idea that it has been around since 1953 – but one thing is really obvious. You don’t look at Gigantor and immediately think ‘this is a great cartoon’. You probably think the opposite.

Gigantor is a cartoon series with well over 400 episodes created during its initial run in Japan, which spanned 1953 to 1968. It wasn’t until 1966 that about 50 episodes were re-dubbed into English and edited to omit certain violent situations, making it more suitable to US audiences. Robot ‘Tetsujin-28′ (literally, ‘Iron Man 28′), was renamed Gigantor, kid ‘Shotaro Kaneda’ becomes Jimmy Sparks, and so on. Everything is subsequently made a little more goofy, and US audiences are exposed to some early Japanese animation (though the show arrived in the US after Astro Boy). Thus began a general dumbing-down of anime that continues even today and cripples its ability to tell a compelling story for general consumption – but I digress.

The animation of Gigantor isn’t complex or beautiful, but it’s absolutely masterful from a minimalist perspective. You’ll be hard pressed to find a scene that involves more than six frames of unique animation, the animators usually opting to re-use a loop of three or four cels to simulate action, or panning across something to simulate movement. It does so much with so little that it’s really worth a study for anyone interested in animation – not unlike Jack Kirby’s ability to animate an entire scene with the expressions, shadows and angles he drew into singular comic panels, Gigantor tells an animated story in no uncertain terms – though Kirby was far from minimalist in his details depictions of things, the same principle of succint, economical storytelling is there.

It’s easy to see the influence of Gigantor on later anime, especially with the general aesthetic of the characters in shows like Lupin the Third, so it’s an important show, even if it pales in comparison to today’s cartoons. It has story arcs that last through multiple episodes, recurring enemies, and more thematic coherence than any cartoon of its day. The 4-disc set includes commentary on three early episodes by Fred Ladd – the man responsible for bringing Gigantor to the US and re-writing the show to appeal to US audiences and sync with the English language. The set also includes a thorough 30-minute interview with Ladd, who discusses his role in making Gigantor appear on US television, and a 30-minute interview with animation historial Fred Patten, who discusses the nature of the original Japanese show. They’re definitely thoughtful extras to include.

Also included on the DVD itself are the first 6 issues of the Gigantor comic book, published by Antarctic Press in 2000. Since the whole series lasted 12 issues, one might presume that the remaining 6 issues will be included in the second Gigantor DVD set, due out in September.

It’s a handsome set, slipcased and with a book describing the 26 episodes included. Collectors note that this is essentially a re-release of the set that Rhino released (and has since discontinued) in 2002 – same extras and all, with a biography replaced with the aforementioned comic issues.

While so many different shows influences animation in so many different directions, Gigantor is somewhere at the core of the earliest seeds of this stuff, and watching it feels like an intellectual study of the whole art form – and it definitely couldn’t be presented any better than it is here, true to the source material and respectfully encapsulated. Giant robot television at its best.