Cartoons

Geek Punditry #148: The Mount Rushmore of Halloween Cartoons

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By the time this is posted it will be the afternoon of Oct. 31st, which of course is the day that all of us – people of all shapes, sizes, religions, creeds, and soda preferences – come together and celebrate that most important of occasions, the birthday of Vanilla Ice. For many of us, though, it’s also Halloween, and at this VERY moment (assuming you read this as soon as it’s posted) I am scrolling through the options on my Plex library trying to decide which cartoons to watch with my son to get us ready before it’s time to take him trick-or-treating. This is harder than you may think. You see, while there are plenty of creepy cartoons to choose from, on Halloween itself I like to limit myself to those cartoons that actually take place ON Halloween…and the number there is smaller than you may realize. Christmas, as I always say, is easy. There are a thousand Christmas specials and hundreds of thousands of Christmas episodes of various TV series. Halloween, though, for all its popularity, doesn’t have quite as many to choose from. In an odd way, I sort of blame that on the universality of the holiday. You can put on any ghost story or monster movie and get a Halloween feel, which means there’s less of an impetus to evoke the holiday itself.

But I wanna evoke, dammit. I wanna get my impetus out and evoke something. So as you put together the goodie bags for the trick-or-treaters, carve your turnips into Jack-O-Lanterns (or pumpkins, for you provincial types), and iron the wrinkles out of your Dracula cape, what are the best cartoons to put on in the background? I’ve looked at the list and picked my top four. There will probably not be any surprises on this list, but that’s not the point – in the pantheon of Halloween cartoons, these are the greatest, the most iconic, the most seasonal. In my humble opinion, of course, which is the only one that actually matters here, since this is my blog.

Here we are: the Mount Rushmore of Halloween Cartoons.

“The Great Pumpkin flies out of the Pumpkin Patch and brings us an OBSCENE amount of merchandise.”

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966)

I told you up front there weren’t going to be any surprises, and it would be disingenuous of me to pretend otherwise. This was the third special based on Charles Schultz’s Peanuts comic strip (following A Charlie Brown Christmas and the lesser-known Charlie Brown’s All-Stars) and is considered by many to be the best of them all. On the night it first aired, a whopping 60 years ago this week, it was watched by 49 percent of American homes that were watching television. That means that if you lined up everybody in America on Oct. 28, 1966 and asked them if they watched Charlie Brown the night before, nearly HALF of them would ask you who the hell you were and how you got the authority to make them all line up like that.

We all know the story, of course – on Halloween night, Charlie Brown and the gang are making their preparations to go trick-or-treating…all except for Linus, that is. The wisest of the characters in Schulz’s strip, Linus has somehow conjured up an entire mythology surrounding the Great Pumpkin, who chooses the “most sincere” pumpkin patch to rise out of on Halloween night and give presents to all the children who are there waiting for him. The special raises a number of theological questions, most glaringly that of how one measures the sincerity of a pumpkin patch, but that’s not the point. Little Linus, dauntless in his faith, heads out to the pumpkin patch with Charlie Brown’s sister Sally, spurred on by a crush on him that no doubt would have gotten her into serious trouble if these characters were ever allowed to grow up and go to college. 

As Linus and Sally freeze in the pumpkin patch, the rest of the kids go trick-or-treating. The neighborhood adults all for some reason have rocks just to give to that round-headed Brown kid (you can tell it’s him because his ghost costume has too many holes), and Snoopy puts on his World War I Flying Ace outfit to have an imaginary dogfight. 

The special is a classic for a reason. From a standpoint of loving the characters, this is one of the most perfect encapsulations of the Peanuts gang and who they are – Charlie Brown is down on his luck, Lucy yanks the football away from him, Snoopy’s imagination is in overdrive, and of course, Linus and Sally’s story showcases them better than any other. The animation is gorgeous and the music, by Vince Guaraldi, is nothing short of iconic. The version of “Linus and Lucy” – which most people just think of as the “Peanuts theme” – is perhaps the greatest version Guaraldi ever recorded, adding in a flute part that perfectly mirrors the main theme. And you genuinely care about the characters. After the special aired, the studio actually started getting packages of candy in the mail from viewers who were upset that all Charlie Brown got when he went trick-or-treating was a sack full of rocks. That means that if you lined up everyone in America on Oct. 28, 1966, and asked them if they felt bad for Charlie Brown, nearly half of them would ask you to stop lining them up, for God’s sake, what kind of bizarre godlike powers do you HAVE, anyway?

What’s more, this was the first Halloween special ever broadcast on television, and opened the floodgates for all the others. There had been a few holiday specials before, most notably the original Charlie Brown Christmas and assorted Rankin and Bass Christmas specials, but nobody had put forth that kind of effort on Halloween before. But not only did It’s the Great Pumpkin give birth to the Halloween special, it also put a spark under the concept of Halloween itself, a holiday that had gone into decline during the lean years of the Great Depression and World War II, and had only gotten a recent bump thanks to another cartoon that we’ll mention later on in this list. But once families had an annual dose of Charlie Brown to look forward to, Halloween began to take off again. Not only is this a great special, but in a real way, it may have saved Halloween itself. And it’s also — fun fact — the film I have logged most often on Letterboxd since joining the platform back in 2014 — a whopping 18 times. Well, probably 19, by the time you read this.

“I TOLD you not to eat lasagna after 11 p.m.”

Garfield’s Halloween Adventure (1985)

Nineteen years after Charlie Brown taught us to love trick-or-treating again, Jim Davis’s Garfield told kids across America that it was okay to be scared. This special originally aired on Oct. 30, 1985, and I remember many years growing up when it was paired with the Charlie Brown special, making for a delicious hour of cartoon goodness every October. On the morning of Halloween, Garfield is woken up by Binky the Clown, the world’s most obnoxious kids’ show host (until Blippi, anyway) telling him that this is the night when he can go out to the streets and load up on candy. The prospect of free food is all it takes to get Garfield to put forth a little effort, and he decides that if he ropes Odie into going along with him he can get TWICE as much candy. The two of them put pirate costumes and head out into the night, loading up on sweets. The classic Garfield greed kicks in, though, when he decides to take a boat across the river to hit even more houses, only to get stuck on an island featuring a rundown old mansion. Inside that house is a very old man with a very, very scary story.

People mock Garfield today. The comic strip, they say, is stale and unfunny. Jim Davis perfectly formulated the comic to be as inoffensive as possible, appealing to the widest number of people, and as such sacrificed any edge that it may have had. These people are right, and I’m certain Jim Davis weeps profusely over his choices, wiping his tears with the plethora of million-dollar bills he has lying around as he stares out the window of his private jet, eating Waygu steaks off gold plates and drinking 190-year-old wine out of diamond-encrusted goblets. In the earlier days of the strip, though, there WAS still an edge, and that was especially true of the animated specials. They put Garfield’s legendary cynicism front and center, with no posturing about goodwill or making things fun for everybody, no waxing nostalgic over Halloweens past. No, this is a hero who is in it for one thing and one thing only: candy. He makes no apologies for this, and we love him for it.

But over the 24 minutes of this cartoon, that classic Garfield hunger is forced to take a back seat when we get to the mansion and we enter one of the most legitimately creepy scenes I’ve ever seen in a kids’ show. The old man weaves a story of a band of pirates who buried a treasure on that very island 100 years prior, with the promise to return that very night. Garfield and Odie are suitably disturbed and try to leave, only to find HOLY CRAP THIS CARTOON ABOUT A CAT THAT EATS LASAGNA IS FULL OF GHOSTS! And we aren’t talking about Casper and his buddies, friends, these ghosts are creepy, chilling, spectral apparitions that makes you long for the days when network television was actually willing to put images into a children’s animated special that would potentially give them nightmares the way that God intended. These nautical spooks look like the Pirates of the Caribbean ghouls, only creepier, because one of them looks like he’s going to eat Odie. 

In addition to the surprisingly effective story and phenomenal animation, the special is full of fantastic music as well. Composed by Ed Bogas and Desiree Goyette, we get three classic songs – two sung by Lou Rawls and one by Garfield’s voice actor Lorenzo Music – that are absolute bangers that deserve to be on your Halloween playlist, except for the fact that for some insane reason none of them appear to be on Spotify or, for that matter, anywhere else except for this special…which for some reason also doesn’t appear to be streaming anywhere. This is why you can’t abandon physical media, friends.

“This is an intervention, Don. We’re here to talk to you about your anger management problem.”

Trick or Treat (1952)

I mentioned before that It’s the Great Pumpkin helped bring back the custom of trick-or-treating after it kind of faded during the 30s and 40s. It didn’t do it alone, though. The tradition had gotten a bump several years before, and without the 1952 Disney short Trick or Treat, it’s conceivable that the practice may have died off entirely before Charlie Brown managed to take it off of life support in 1966. 

On Halloween night, Donald Duck’s nephews are trick-or-treating when their uncle decides to prank them, putting firecrackers in their bags instead of candy, dumping a bucket of water on them, and then sending them away laughing. Donald was kind of an asshole in these old cartoons, if you didn’t know. Anyway, the whole thing is observed by a witch named Hazel – voiced by the immortal June Foray – who decides to help the boys get a little payback. When Donald tries pranking Hazel, not realizing she’s a REAL witch, she whips up a magic potion that allows her to control Donald’s legs, and then the fun REALLY begins.

This is Disney at its peak, with some of its best animation (courtesy of director Jack Hannah), and an amazing title song by Paul J. Smith that warns the listener you need to be generous on Halloween night or face the consequences. I don’t know that Michael Dougherty was inspired by this cartoon when he made his 2007 Halloween anthology movie Trick ‘r Treat – a film with slashers and werewolves and vengeful revenants which is most certainly NOT for kids – but they share the same thesis, so I choose to believe the connection was deliberate. 

Technically, he’s still having a better Halloween than Laurie Strode.

Broom-Stick Bunny (1956)

Just four years later, June Foray would voice Witch Hazel again…but not for Disney. This time it was Warner Bros. director Chuck Jones who would recruit her for the Bugs Bunny Halloween short Broom-Stick Bunny. This is perhaps not as well known as the other three cartoons on this Mount Rushmore. In fact, it’s not even my favorite creepy short from the Looney Tunes catalogue. It is, however, the greatest Looney Tunes cartoon that is specifically about Halloween, rather than just co-starring Gossamer or a vampire or something, so it cuts to the head of the line.

In this one, Witch Hazel is conjuring up a potion when she gets a visit from Bugs Bunny, wearing a witch costume, as he’s trick-or-treating. Hazel mistakes him for a fellow witch and is disturbed when her magic mirror suggests that he (or at least, his mask) is uglier than she is, so she invites him in with a plan to hit him with a beauty potion to protect her own reputation. The cartoon devolves into one of those wild, madcap Bugs Bunny chase scenes as Hazel goes after him with a meat cleaver, because back in the 50s you COULD have a cartoon character go after somebody with a meat cleaver without being worried about “offending” somebody. The cartoon ends with Hazel accidentally drinking the beauty potion and – in a joke that there’s no chance in hell a modern kid would get – transforms into a gorgeous redhead that is actually a caricature of June Foray herself. 

This was the first time Foray did a voice for Chuck Jones, who supposedly thought it would be hilarious to cast Disney’s Witch Hazel to play his OWN Witch Hazel. Foray went along with the gag, although she differentiated the two by using a British accent for the Disney witch and an American accent for the Looney Tunes version. More importantly, this short struck up a collaboration between the two – Jones began using Foray more and more often and became a regular not only in his work, but also at Warner Bros. animation until her death in 2017. 

As always, friends, recommendations are welcome. What are some cartoons set on Halloween that you would place on your own Rushmore? 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He regrets to this day that Who Framed Roger Rabbit? didn’t take the chance to have June Foray do a Witch-Off between the two Hazels. 

Geek Punditry #120: Fighting the Easter Special Deficit

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I’m just gonna come out and say it, friends: there are not enough great Easter specials. There are a billion Christmas TV specials, and a healthy number for Halloween, but other holidays often get the short end of the stick. Were it up to me, every single holiday – including Happy Honda Days– would come with at least two specials, one by Rankin and Bass and another starring the Peanuts gang. 

However, that doesn’t mean there are NO Easter Specials, and so this week’s Geek Punditry is going to take a look at some of the very few that are out there and worth your time…and believe it or not, the Christmas Kings at Rankin and Bass actually took not one, but THREE swings at Easter Specials.

“I’m Casey Kasem, here to count down America’s top five Easter specials…”

First up was Here Comes Peter Cottontail from 1971. In this special, narrated by Danny Kaye, Peter Cottontail (Casey Kasem) is tapped to become the new Easter Bunny when the incumbent is retiring. Before he takes the job, though, the Easter Bunny is approached by a bitter bunny named Irontail (Vincent FREAKING Price) who hates Easter. What’s more, he’s got a loophole to prevent Peter’s appointment to the top post – apparently the rules say that the Chief Easter Bunny will be whoever delivers the most eggs. He proposes a contest between himself and Peter, but roofies Peter’s rooster with magic bubblegum, preventing it from waking him up on the day of the big delivery competition. Ironheart has only to deliver a single egg to win the title of Chief Easter Bunny. 

As Irontail immediately sets out to ruin Easter, Peter runs into Danny Kaye’s character, an inventor named Seymour Sassafras. Seymour hooks up Peter with his time machine, piloted by a caterpillar with a French accent, and sends him back to try to win the contest. But Irontail manages to knock them off course, sending Peter on a trip through time, colliding with every major holiday in his quest to become the true Easter Bunny.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

Anybody who thought Barry Allen had a monopoly on screwing up the entire timeline because he tries to use time travel to fix his own screw-up needs to watch this special. It’s pretty bonkers, even considering this is the studio that had Rudolph similarly travel from one time island to another in order to find Baby New Year. But the best reason to watch this special is to listen to Vincent Price himself hamming it up as the villain of a kid’s Easter special. He’s deliciously evil, and somehow absolutely perfect. I wish we’d gotten more of him and a little less of the singing French caterpillar.

Let’s celebrate the holiday by DESTROYING EVERYTHING YOUR CHILD LOVES.

Rankin and Bass’s second Easter special came in 1976 with The First Easter Rabbit. This film is a loose adaptation of Margery Williams’s children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, which I remember reading as a child and finding remarkably depressing. This version is considerably peppier. When a little girl contracts scarlet fever, all of her clothes and toys are tossed aside to be burned, including her beloved stuffed rabbit, Stuffy. A passing sprite named Calliope sees the bunny and takes pity on it, bringing it to life and whisking it off to the North Pole, where the now-living Stuffy meets Santa Claus. Santa convinces him to take on some of the responsibility for the Easter deliveries, but Stuffy winds up in battle with a sort of snow demon named Zero, because there were a LOT of those in the Rankin and Bass universe. The special has a happier ending than the book, if I recall correctly, but it’s still probably my least-favorite of Rankin and Bass’s Easter specials.

“You’ve gotta invite me in if you want me to give you some eggs, Jimmy.”

In-between the other two is the 1977 special The Easter Bunny is Comin’ to Town. In this one, Fred Astaire returns as S.D. Kluger, the mailman who told us Santa Claus’s origin story in Santa Claus is Coming’ to Town. He does it again, this time weaving the tale of an orphaned bunny rabbit named Sunny and how he grew in prominence to become THE one and only Easter Bunny, even overcoming the machinations of an evil bear named Gadzooks who hates ALL holidays. This one is almost a beat-by-beat knock-off of the earlier Santa Claus special. It’s not just the same idea, it’s almost the same PLOT. I suppose a little kid doesn’t notice, but as an adult who spends – I’m going to be honest here – entirely too much time analyzing the structure of children’s animated specials, it stands out like a fireworks display. But what I find amusing is that, despite this being the Easter special most directly copying one of the Rankin and Bass Christmas specials, it’s the ONLY one that doesn’t include an appearance by Santa Claus.

“Oh no, not THIS again…”

I’m more enamored with a non-Rankin and Bass special, one featuring the star of the recent cultural phenomenon The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. I refer, of course, to the 1980 TV special Daffy Duck’s Easter Egg-Citement (or sometimes just The Daffy Duck Easter Special). In this era, there were several Looney Tunes compilation specials – a new cartoon frame story wrapped around classic cartoons from the Looney Tunes catalogue. I like this one mostly because it’s a sort of take on the greatest Daffy cartoon of all time, Duck Amuck. Not unlike that earlier masterpiece, in this special Daffy finds himself at odds with the animator of the cartoon itself. This time, he’s trying to get things suitably in the season for Easter, but stuff keeps happening. As with all of these compilation shorts, the best thing about this is revisiting the classic cartoons…but this isn’t bad.

Not pictured: Lucy, being SERIOUSLY pissed off.

Perhaps the most famous Easter special of them all, though, is the 1974 epic It’s the Easter Beagle Charlie Brown. With Easter approaching, the Peanuts gang is caught up in a series of semi-related storylines, kind of like a Robert Altman film. Peppermint Patty is determined to teach her sidekick Marcie the proper way to dye Easter Eggs, but one misunderstanding after another keeps throwing things into chaos. Snoopy is trying to help his buddy Woodstock build a new birdhouse. Lucy, meanwhile, is planning to win the big Easter Egg hunt by hiding the eggs herself, carefully documenting the location of each. As all of this is going on, Linus constantly tells everyone that they’re wasting their time, because the Easter Beagle is going to take care of everything. As usual, everyone dismisses him except for Sally, although even she’s somewhat skeptical, still remembering the fiasco that happened at Halloween.

There are a few things about this special I find particularly interesting. I’ve always thought it was funny that Linus – the wisest and most philosophical of Charles Schulz’s characters – has such a fundamental misunderstanding of not one, but TWO major holidays. I also like the callback to the Great Pumpkin special, one of the few such callbacks in the major Peanuts specials. Similar to Linus, Marcie is usually painted as the voice of reason whenever Peppermint Patty starts going overboard, so seeing her constantly screw up their efforts to do something as simple as preparing Easter Eggs is actually really funny. But perhaps the best gag in the whole cartoon comes when the gang goes down to the store to pick up some more eggs (following Marcie’s most recent debacle) only to find the whole place already decorated for Christmas.

As you can see, if you’re looking for a truly legendary Easter special to share with your kids…well, the pickins are a little slim. We need more. And I’m not even sure where to find most of these specials these days – I own most of them on DVD, but I don’t know if those DVDs are still available. You can possibly find some of them on YouTube, and the Charlie Brown specials have been in the nefarious domain of Apple TV for a few years now, but other than that, we’re really at quite a loss. So my special message, to the animation studios of the world, is to give us a few more great Easter specials next year. Let’s have the Addams Family grappling with a holiday so dedicated to pastels, let’s see Batman chasing down the White Rabbit on the streets of Gotham City…shoot, I’d even settle for something with Minecraft. I don’t really know much about Minecraft, but I’m led to believe there’s a chicken involved, which certainly implies the presence of eggs.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Sorry to cut this short, but he’s got his own eggs to dye. 

Geek Punditry #81: Whatever the Era

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During the school year, I spend most of my time around teenagers. I teach high school English, and as such I am constantly exposed to the youth of today, with their thoughts and their ideas and their imaginations and occasionally their aromas, because some of these kids pay as much attention to the personal hygiene lessons in health class as they do when I’m trying to get them to understand 1984. But it’s July and school is not currently in session, and the only teenager in my usual orbit is my 13-year-old niece, Maggie, so the only teen ideas I am exposed to are mostly about something called Five Nights at Freddy’s.

♫“Thank you for bein’ a frieeeeeend…”♫

When I AM surrounded by the kids, though, one of the battles I fight a lot is attempting to convince them that just because something is old doesn’t mean it has no value. Shakespeare is the most frequently-cited example of this: yes, the language is old-fashioned and frequently archaic, but once you get past that the stories are pretty darn timeless. Romeo and Juliet is about a couple of kids YOUR AGE (or often younger, as I teach 11th and 12th graders) who want to date but their parents hate each other. Othello is the story of a man driven to homicidal envy because the girl he likes married someone of a different ethnicity. Hamlet is about a college kid whose father is murdered and then his mom marries his uncle, which everybody can agree is pretty messed up and will make Thanksgiving very awkward. When you boil it down, the greatest works of the past are just as relevant today, except that they’re too deep to discuss in-depth in a 15-second TikTok video.

Helping kids to see this, to understand the value in works of the past, is part of my job. In fact, in many ways, it’s my favorite part of my job. Don’t get me wrong, reading a well-written essay from a kid who struggled to put a sentence together at the beginning of the year is a badge of honor, but if that essay is explaining what they think the whole Green Light thing from The Great Gatsby is about in a way that makes sense…well, that’s like winning an Olympic medal. And most kids, I find, are pretty open to this, once you can find the right path in. It may take some trial and error, but I sincerely believe that any young scholar can find the value in the classics if you try hard enough.

I wish the opposite was true of their grandparents.

Tag someone you know in this picture.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the creation of a new over-the-air broadcast network, MeTV Toons, dedicated to showcasing classic animation 24 hours a day. It’s a great idea and one that I truly hope to be able to watch if the New Orleans affiliate – which finally launched just TODAY – would boost their damn signal a little bit so I could pick it up from my house. But that’s not the point. In that previous column, I also talked about a few online communities that have sprung up around this new network. The communities are thriving now. The largest of them, which was at 17,000 members when I wrote the previous column a month ago, has ballooned up to almost 65,000 people. And as is expected, there’s a lot of talk about the cartoons and what people’s favorites are and how much they’re enjoying the network, which I love. There are also a minimum of 750 posts a day from somebody who doesn’t understand how to watch the network, because apparently many of these people, who I would estimate are largely in their 50s and 60s, have completely forgotten how antenna television works. But the worst part of this community are the entirely-too-frequent posts that exist not to talk about the classic cartoons, but to complain about modern ones.

“I hope they don’t start making NEW shows. That’s what ruined Cartoon Network.”

“They shouldn’t show anything from later than the 70s. All of that stuff sucks.”

“You know who’s a fan of Powerpuff Girls? Hitler.”

And so forth.

I find it incredibly frustrating to read through this stuff, for a few reasons. First of all, and most importantly, is the sheer negativity of it. The world has enough negativity in it, and I hate the fact that Social Media – an invention that SHOULD have been used to bring all the people in the world together – has instead merely given us different ways to tribalize ourselves and spit venom at anybody who’s not part of Our Group. And second, it’s just not true. I can’t fathom the mindset of somebody who can turn on an episode of Help!… It’s the Hair Bear Bunch! and then claim with a straight face that this is the apex of animated entertainment.

Where the culture of Western Civilization apparently reached its climax.

The thing is, guys, both my Bard-averse teens and their Cartoon Network-hating parents and grandparents are suffering from the same problem, and it’s a problem that most of us have to overcome in some form or another. We are exposed to certain media when we grow up, and that media fundamentally contributes to the structure of our preferences in our brains. In other words, the stuff that we like when we’re young is the blueprint for the kind of stuff we like throughout our entire lives. If one of my 11th grade students tells me how much their mom hates the music she listens to, I suggest she ask her mom what HER parents thought of New Kids on the Block, and what THEIR parents thought of the Beatles, and so forth. Every generation firmly, steadfastly, believes that music reached its absolute pinnacle during their own formative years, even though it’s obvious that the best decade for music was the 1980s.

The same is true for everything: movies, TV shows, books, fashions, food, sports, and of course, cartoons. The big difference between my kids and their parents is that by and large, I find the kids FAR more likely to expand their horizons and look at work from another time. My students were in diapers when The Office was popular or not even born when Friends was a hit, but they’ll binge those shows and come to school talking about them. But trying to get one of these Toon-haters to give a chance to a modern cartoon like Bob’s Burgers, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Gravity Falls, or the finest cartoon of them all, Bluey, is a challenge that would make Sisyphus ask if he can just go back to pushing that rock up the hill.

Sorry, guys. I’m being told by the Facebook group that none of you are as good as… *checks notes* ‘Yakky Doodle.’

I know I’m generalizing here, and that’s not really fair. There are most certainly older people willing to give more recent works a chance. I know, I’m one of ‘em. And there are a lot of people like that. My uncle Wally, who happens to be an animator, would frequently talk to me about Animaniacs in the heyday of that particular cartoon – which was after his time, obviously, but one of the favorites of my time. He obviously PREFERRED the classics of his youth like the Looney Tunes and the Hanna-Barbera all-stars, but he was (and still is) always willing to give the new stuff a CHANCE.

The problem with the MeTV Toons group – like any other group – is that the most obnoxious people also tend to be the loudest. They’re the ones that complain, the ones that whine, the ones that come in with a sense of entitlement because the network has the TEMERITY to show Captain Planet instead of a 23rd rerun of The Flintstones for half an hour. 

Is it true that there are a lot of bad cartoons these days? Sure. But that’s true of ANY field of creative endeavor in ANY era. As sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon once observed, “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” For every Scooby-Doo that was turned out, there are a dozen Hanna-Barbera cartoons that died after one season. Looney Tunes gave us the work of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the Road Runner and Coyote…but it also gave us Merlin Mouse and Cool Cat.

I swear, these were actual, official Looney Tunes. Google it.

Hell, even my beloved Willie Shakes is considered the greatest writer in the history of the world…but name five other writers from the late 16th century. Unless you’ve got an English degree, chances are you can’t. There’s just as much good stuff being produced now as there ever was. The reason the past seems “better” is because it’s only the good stuff that gets REMEMBERED. If you lock yourself in to the work of your own formative years, you will miss out on a wealth of great storytelling, great music, great ART. And if you’re okay with that, I can’t change your mind, but at the very least you need to RECOGNIZE that bias and not make blanket statements about everything that’s from outside of your time period, because that’s not fair to anybody. 

I have a challenge for you, my friends. Right now, I want you to identify your formative decade. Are you an 80s kid? 90s? What was the time period in which you did the majority of your growing, say from first grade through twelfth? For most of us, that is the period where these preferences and feelings are most firmly established.

Okay, have you got your decade identified? GREAT. Here’s the challenge then: this week, I want you to go out and find something from OUTSIDE that decade that you think is worth watching, reading, or listening to. I don’t care if it’s from before your time or after, but I want you to find something from a different time period that you think is worthwhile, something that you can get excited about, something you want to tell people to check out. And then I want you to come back here – or hit me on Facebook, Twitter, or Threads – and tell me WHAT you read or watched and WHY you like it. 

There’s plenty of great stuff out there, guys – from any era. The trick is just to figure out where to look.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He considers himself an 80s kid, but he has just as much love for The Honeymooners and The Good Place as he does for Mama’s Family. Wow, that’s a weird list.

Geek Punditry #77: Tooning In

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In 2024, there are an awful lot of us who don’t bother with live TV anymore. With the exception of sporting events (and increasingly even those) virtually every new show you could want to watch is available on at least one of the major streaming services, so the days of making sure that you’re home at 8 o’clock on Thursday so you don’t miss the new episode of Friends are long over. In my house, though, there is at least one exception to that rule: Saturday night. On Saturday night, unless there’s some pressing reason for us to be out of the house (or to watch a competing sporting event) the Petit TV is tuned to New Orleans’s WDSU Channel 6.2, the local MeTV affiliate, for the greatest TV event of the week: Svengoolie. Svengoolie is the last of the great horror hosts, the heir to the empires of Elvira, Chilly Billy Cardille, Vampira, and New Orleans’s own Morgus the Magnificent. Every Saturday Sven serves up a classic horror or sci-fi movie replete with his own brand of comedy and information, cracking jokes and telling us about the history of the film in a single breath. 

America’s greatest natural resource.

And it is because I watch Sven every time that it’s humanly possible that I knew about the announcement of another new network that hopes to lure viewers away from their streaming services and back to the antenna: MeTV Toons. Whereas the prime MeTV network serves up seven days of reruns of classic TV comedies, dramas, westerns, and the like, MeTV Toons – launching this Tuesday, June 25 – promises to do the same thing with classic animation. At launch, the network will provide a home to such luminaries as Looney Tunes, Rocky and Bullwinkle, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, Popeye and Pals, and even later shows from the 80s and 90s like The Smurfs, The Real Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice, Captain Planet, and many, many more. 

The long nightmare days of a world without Atom Ant will soon be over.

The response was shockingly positive. The network hasn’t even launched yet and there are already at least two Facebook fan groups dedicated to the station, one of which is approaching 5,000 members and the other topping 17,000 as of this writing. There’s a neat little community appearing here, and once you filter out the 14,000 members who have joined to ask if the network will be available in their area because they don’t know what Google is, there’s a lot of conversation ABOUT classic cartoons, the ones that will be on the network at launch, and what other pieces of animation history fans hope to see make an appearance in the future.

Of course, not everyone in the group is positive. That’s nearly impossible. Of all the different Facebook groups I’m a part of, there are only two that I’ve never known to have any sort of toxic presence: the Bandit group for Bluey fans sharing their journey through fatherhood I wrote about a few weeks ago, and fans of the Movie Crypt podcast, proving once again that horror movie fans are some of the kindest and most loving people you could ever meet in the real world. Some of the toxic comments in the MeTV Toons groups are complaining about the lineup, because the fact that they spend a half-hour a week showing Police Academy: The Animated Series is evidently a cardinal sin amongst a certain sect of the populace. Others are complaining because the network is not available in their area – which is a complaint I sympathize with, as for a while it didn’t look like we would get it in New Orleans at launch. I was flailing around the internet like a Dickensian waif until it was announced that it will be on Channel 41.6, which filled me with childlike glee. But even when I thought we weren’t gonna get it, I was smart enough to know that nobody in the Facebook group had any control over that and acting like everybody there broke into my house and crapped in my Cheerios wasn’t going to solve anything. 

But the complaint that really got my attention was the one guy who asked why, in this age where “everything is available streaming,” anybody would care about launching a new pre-programed broadcast network. I’m going to address the two major flaws in his logic, starting with the more obvious and then moving on to the one that has more personal meaning to me. 

First of all, let’s talk about the notion that “everything is available streaming.” The fact is, friends, that’s simply not true. As much as we might like it to be the case, there are large swaths of our television and cinematic history that are not legally available on any streaming service, or even for purchase digitally or physically. Sometimes it’s a rights issue. The original Muppet Babies cartoon from the 80s, for example, cannot legally be found anywhere, and likely never will, because that cartoon made extensive use of movie and TV clips from a half-century of Hollywood output. At the time, there was no thought behind it except for obtaining the rights for broadcast. Nobody was considering the afterlife of these shows. Now, in order to sell or stream an episode of Muppet Babies, the Walt Disney Entertainment Conglomatorium and Tiki Lounge would have to track down the rights holders of each and every movie or television clip ever used on the show to obtain permission to use it again, and in perpetuity. Disney clearly doesn’t think the effort it would take to do such a thing would be worth the likely return on their investment, and as much as I hate to say it, I think they’re probably right.

I dare you to find one historical injustice greater than the fact that this episode is lost to the world.

But Muppet Babies wouldn’t be on MeTV Toons anyway, since Disney has their own deal. What about the shows that will? Well, a quick glance shows that the Police Academy series isn’t available to stream anywhere. Captain Planet is available to PURCHASE from sites like Amazon or AppleTV, but not as part of any streaming subscription. And although there are limited (and often out-of-print) DVDs available for the likes of Underdog, Beetlejuice, and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, if you’re hoping to stream them on Netflix or any similar service, I’m afraid it’s a non-starter. And even for things that ARE available to stream – well, as we’ve seen in the last year, something that’s on Paramount+ today is not guaranteed to be there tomorrow. 

Obviously, some things are worth fighting for.

I’m not going to go through the entire MeTV Toons schedule, but you get the point. There are a LOT of things that aren’t available to stream, whether it’s because of rights or because the copyright owner doesn’t think it would be worth the expense to put it out there or for any of a thousand other reasons. A network like MeTV Toons will likely shift their lineup often, especially for shorter-run series (for example, Wacky Races is on the schedule, and that series ran for only 17 episodes), so this will be a chance to give a bit of life to lots of cartoons that otherwise have been forgotten. People love to be dismissive of animation because, historically, Americans have viewed it as something that’s “just for children.” The number of adults eager for MeTV Toons would seem to disagree – and even if it DIDN’T, so what? The Hobbit was written for children. So was The Wizard of Oz. The sublime Paddington movies were made for kids. That doesn’t make a creative endeavor invalid, or mean that it isn’t something worth preservation.

So let’s move on to the second assumption of this question: why a pre-programed broadcast network? Who cares? Why not put all of these shows on a streaming service? Hell, you could even make it an ad-supported service like Tubi, which reported viewer numbers recently in excess of a lot of the premiere, paid streamers like Disney+. That seems doable, doesn’t it?

Well, yeah, kinda. And were such a service to exist, I would be first in line to sign up for it. But don’t discount the allure of a pre-programmed schedule. Apps like PlutoTV and RokuTV have built up a huge following by streaming pre-programmed channels of entertainment, supported by advertising, for free. I’ve written before about how much I love PlutoTV so I won’t get in too deep, but the fact that I can just say, “I wanna watch Star Trek” without having a specific episode in mind, then have TWO PlutoTV channels to sate my hunger…well that’s damned appealing. 

“What do you want to watch? Kirk? Picard? Sisko? Janeway?”
“Yes.”

Pre-programmed TV is easy. Not mindless, mind you, but EASY. We live in a world where SOMETHING is demanding our judgment at every single moment of the day. It starts with something simple, like ordering coffee. But what kind of coffee do you want? What size? Hot or iced? Want a shot of flavoring in that? How about a shot of espresso? Whipped cream? Cherry on top? Paper straw that’s good for the environment but useless for drinking or plastic straw that actually functions as advertised but that will cause the barista to assume you murder turtles in your sleep? What name do you want on the cup? Any snacks? Okay, great, that completes your order, sir. Cash, card, or blood donation? Great. Want to leave a tip?

If we have taken something as simple as buying a cup of coffee and turned it into a process that requires a dozen decisions before the angry barista wearing a “Justice for Donatello” button gives you your order, what happens with something IMPORTANT, like buying a car or choosing a job? I’m a teacher, and there are studies that indicate the average teacher has to make 1,500 individual decisions over the course of an average day. Numerically, this is a higher number than most DOCTORS. (Although admittedly, the decisions doctors have to make are usually more intense than whether or not I’m going to let Jimmy go to the bathroom when I don’t believe he really has to go.) I cite this number any time my wife doesn’t understand why I’m begging HER to pick what we have for dinner, for God’s sake, I don’t care WHAT it is I just DON’T WANT TO DECIDE.

Ahem. Love you, baby.

The point is, apps like PlutoTV offer something that a typical streaming service does not: easy entertainment. If I don’t know exactly what I want to watch, I can spend hours scrolling through the choices on Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, Max, Shudder, the Criterion Channel, ESPN+, Screambox, BET+, Prime Video, Shout Factory, Freevee, AMC+, Disney-Minus, Nick at Night Terrors, and Cap’n Willie’s Streaming Emporium-o-rama before finally giving up and putting on a rerun of Gilligan’s Island. Streaming is GREAT if you already KNOW what you want to watch, but sometimes all you really want is to stop thinking and get in some comfort viewing. PlutoTV and RokuTV are built on this premise. It’s worked so well, in fact, that bigger streamers like Shudder, Prime Video, and Freevee have all added “channels” to their streaming model, and rumor has it that Disney+ is considering the same thing. Sure, it’s kind of weird that we abandoned cable for streaming only for us to want to turn streaming back into cable, but sometimes you’ve got to let something go before you realize how much it means to you.

This is what comes on when you activate your Fire stick in Hell.

The point is, MeTV Toons is another outlet for this kind of entertainment, and it’s promising us something that none of the other sources have offered, and by that I am of course referring to Peter Potamus.

“Hello.”

But there are plenty of other things on that network that I would LOVE to see show up in rotation. KNOV 41.6 starts airing on Tuesday, I intend to park my TV on that channel and leave it there.

At least until Saturday night rolls around, anyway. Ain’t nothing gonna take me away from Svengoolie. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He is hoping against hope that MeTV Toons will find a way to show The Racoons, because he has to find out if that show is as weird as he remembers or if he just had a fever dream that lasted for much of his childhood.