( ^ And here I thought I knew cartoons well. I have never heard of the "Get Along Gang." )
Well, if you enjoy strange, obscure television series from three decades ago you'll
love Netflix's new show
Saturday Morning All Star Hits! It's basically a love letter to the eighties and nineties...written by its mentally-disturbed stalker who's been court- ordered to stay 500 feet away at all times. It's a "lost footage"-type show done in the style of an old VHS recording you might find in your own house, right down to the tracking lines and static, hosted by a couple of blonde surfer/stoner types--actually played by one actor made to look like twins via fast jump-cuts and split-screen effects. Weird thing is, it's based on
a real Saturday morning show which may have actually been more batcrap nuts than is the parody itself. Not only do they do a pretty good job of recreating the flat, cheaply-drawn feel of shows like
The Care Bears,
Thundercats (1985), and
Denver the last Dinosaur, but some of the actual actors of the day--Frank Welker, Cree Summer, Maurice LaMarche--lend their voices. The shows are even book-ended with fake commercials that manage to look a lot like the real thing: toys, video games, breakfast cereal, bubble gum, ads for bad movies. The cheesy dialogue and simple animation of the cartoons only serves to underscore the more jarring adult moments of violence, bestiality, alcoholism, drug addiction, and domestic abuse (like when one of the hosts stumbles during a race, and his sadistic brother laughs at him while he sits nursing a scraped, bloody knee, or when the show's credits are interrupted by breaking news of the gruesome murder-suicide of the two leads of a
Saved By The Bell parody) that occasionally crop up. It's as if the writers are saying, "Hey, you may have had it pretty good as a kid sitting in front of your TV then...but there were still horrible things going on in the world at the time, don't forget." This is exemplified by Bruce Chandling (Kyle Mooney, who also plays Skip and Traybor) and his promo for a
Bobby's World/Life With Louie-type show he has coming up on the network (and if you knew how sad the late comic Louie Anderson's life growing up really was, the joke of Chandling stumbling through his childhood reminisces is rather evident).
When doing a parody like this , you really have to go all out to beat the actual weirdness already inherent in the material. My generation had comedians, athletes, and rap/pop singers starring in their own often short-lived series--remember
Mario meeting Milli Vanilli, in the thirteenth minute of heir fifteenth minute of fame?...and stuff like
this. I guess the animators had to take care where they drew Fanny sticking that nozzle--wouldn't do to have impressionable little kids sticking bike pump hoses into their mouths or up their buttholes.
![:-]](//psfforum.com/Smileys/default/Blush.png "Blush")
No wonder an actor on
one of these shows wondered if there was maybe
something in the water at NBC....
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