MeTV Toons

Geek Punditry #187: We’re All a LITTLE Looney

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It’s taken almost nine years, but my son is finally getting into high culture, and by that I mean he’s started to watch MeTV Toons. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check your local listings to see if this glorious over-the-air broadcast network is available in your area. MeTV Toons is a 24-hour channel that shows nothing but cartoons, mostly from the 30s to the 80s. If you’re looking for the greats of Hanna-Barbera, like the Flintstones, Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, or even more obscure shows like the Hair Bear Bunch or Peter Potamus, you’ll find them there. Miss the Saturday mornings from when you were growing up? They’ve got Smurfs, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Real Ghostbusters, and The Super Mario Brothers Super Show. In the wee hours of the morning you can find things like Silverhawks or Speed Racer, and on Sunday nights they have the obscure 70s animated sitcom Wait ‘Till Your Father Gets Home (starring Tom Bosley) and what I believe to be the most recent cartoon on the docket, the 90s cult classic Freakazoid.

It’s basically the home of everything good in the universe.

But by far, my favorite things on the network are the blocks of classic theatrical shorts. On any given weekday, you can turn on the network starting at 7 p.m. Eastern and get treated to a full five hours of the likes of Tom and Jerry, Popeye, Mr. Magoo, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Betty Boop, Woody Woodpecker, and of course, the greatest cartoons in the history of animation, the Looney Tunes. A few weeks ago, out of the blue, Eddie decided he wanted to watch these cartoons instead of (or at least in addition to) his standard marathons of modern shows like Blaze and the Monster Machines or Peppa Pig, and I couldn’t be happier about this transition. 

How I look at the screen when MeTV Toons is on.

I’ve seen the vast majority of these cartoons before, of course, but watching them again never gets old. I have been reminded frequently over the last few weeks that Bugs Bunny is the greatest comedian of his generation, that Porky Pig kind of got screwed over when Daffy Duck took over as the star of Warner Bros studios, and that Chuck Jones was a creative genius on the level of Rembrandt and Shakespeare. If you want to argue with me about that, you better come armed with something that won’t make me think Duck Amuck is a work of human achievement equal to, or perhaps surpassing, the moon landing and the chocolate chip cookie. Spoiler: you can’t do it.

Let’s see that DaVinci poser do something like THIS.

All that said, the greatness of these cartoons of the past has been filling me with a degree of sadness as I remember that Warner Bros today doesn’t have the slightest idea what to do with these toons. There are certainly creative people making an effort. Cartoon Network’s The Looney Tunes Show from 2011 was a great modernization of the characters, casting Bugs and Daffy as the stars of an Odd Couple-style sitcom. HBO Max’s Looney Tunes Cartoons similarly brought back some of the classic chaos of the golden age. But both of these efforts ended prematurely, and fans of these greatest of all cartoons are left dangling, thirsting for more. 

Twice in this decade alone, Warner Bros has chosen to make and then SHELVE feature-length projects starring the characters: Daffy and Porky’s science fiction film The Day the Earth Blew Up, and the animation/live action hybrid Coyote Vs. Acme starring Wile E. Coyote, John Cena, and Will Forte. Fortunately for all of us, the two movies were saved from the scrap heap by Ketchup Entertainment, which released The Day the Earth Blew Up last year and will be gracing us with Coyote Vs. Acme in just a few weeks.

Based on the novel by John Grisham.

In their heyday, the Looney Tunes’ biggest rivals were the stars of the Disney animated shorts, and although Bugs and Mickey can duke it out for the title of most recognizable cartoon star on the planet, these days I don’t think that analogy works anymore. Whether you like all of their products or not, Disney has never allowed the likes of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy to languish the way Warner Bros has Bugs, Daffy, and Porky. No, these days I think the better comparison for the Looney Tunes is another Disney property, the Muppets. 

Both of these pantheons of characters are classic entertainers with old-school sensibilities and a healthy dose of chaos. And in both cases, despite the fact that there is an audience thirsty for new content, the studio can’t seem to get their act together and make it happen. And it’s not for lack of trying – if you recall a few months ago there was a new Muppet Show special starring Sabrina Carpenter. It was a blatant cry for the studio to greenlight a new ongoing series in the vein of the classic show. The special was a huge success, loved by both critics and audiences, and although the streaming numbers are never made public, all indicators suggest that it did gangbusters for Disney+. Yet for some asinine reason, six months later, they’ve made nary a peep about bringing it back as a series. If they don’t say SOMETHING about it at next weekend’s D23 Expo, we all just may throw up our hands and weep.

If Sabrina Carpenter can’t bring them back then nobody ca–wait, has anybody called Zendaya?

The Looney Tunes are in a similar situation. They’ve been around forever. Everybody knows them. Everybody loves them. But the suits can’t seem to figure out what to DO with them. And the solution is actually the same. What the Muppet Show special proved is that the Muppets are at their finest when they’re doing a musical comedy variety show with human celebrity guests. In other words, the best thing to do with the Muppets is to do the thing that made them beloved in the first place. The same is true for the Looney Tunes. And the Looney Tunes are at their best – as those shows I mentioned before proved – in short-form comedy cartoons. I like the feature films. The Day the Earth Blew Up was a lot of fun and I can’t wait to see Coyote Vs. Acme. But there’s a reason that Chuck Jones never tried to blow up the “Hunting Trilogy” of cartoons where Bugs and Daffy try to outwit Elmer Fudd into a 90-minute movie. They work best in short installments.

Part of the problem, of course, is that there isn’t as much of a demand for animated shorts anymore. At the height of their popularity, the Looney Tunes (and all those other shorts you can see on MeTV Toons) were put in movie theaters as a precursor to the main attraction. You rarely see that these days – even Pixar hasn’t done one in nearly a decade. And without putting them in front of a new movie, what do you do with a cartoon short? It’s not like creating a bingeable TV series, the formula doesn’t work with short films. 

Again, this is one of those solutions that seems pretty damn obvious if only you can get anybody with the power to do it to pay attention. Put them back in theaters. Warner Bros has a goal of 12 to 15 theatrical releases a year. That’s at least a dozen chances to put a cartoon in front of an audience. And sure, it might not have necessarily been appropriate in front of Oscar bait like One Battle After Another, but would anybody have been upset to see a Bugs Bunny cartoon before Supergirl or A Minecraft Movie? Hell, I would even love to see OLD cartoons before a new movie – they could have preceded Superman with the classic Daffy short Stupor Duck. And while it’s true that people are increasingly frustrated with the pre-show content in movie theaters, that ire is focused on the plethora of advertising and a bloated number of trailers followed by Nicole Kidman talking about how awesome theaters are to an audience that’s already in a theater. I’ve never heard anyone walk out of a movie and say “That would have been great if they hadn’t put that friggin’ cartoon before it.” (Well, except for that one time Disney screened an entire 22-minute Frozen TV special before Coco, but that’s a different story.) I think that if you advertise the short with the feature, if people know what to expect, most people will be happy to have it.

He was THIS CLOSE to beating David Corenswet out for the part.

There is some hope on this front, by the way. In June, Warner Bros screened Daffy Season, a new Looney Tunes short directed by Todd Wilderman and Hamish Grieve, at the Annecy International Animation Festival. The short was apparently made to debut during FIFA World Cup madness – it’s about Daffy losing his mind as everybody around him gets so obsessed with soccer that they turn into brain-dead zombies. As a short, the premise is hilarious. And after the short was screened at the festival, it was announced that it will accompany the theatrical release of Warner Bros’ new version of The Cat in the Hat this November. I have to admit, my interest in going out to a movie theater to watch The Cat in the Hat was pretty low, but now that I know that a new Daffy cartoon is going to be with it, it’s going to become a top priority.

This may be a one-off thing, of course. Warner Bros made the short specifically as part of a World Cup event, and throwing it into theaters is kind of a bonus that we didn’t expect. But if it does well, if it is received well, is there a possibility for more such shorts in the future? God, I hope so. Because being immersed in MeTV Toons over the past few weeks has reminded me of just how excellent so many of those shorts were, and in a world where everything feels like it’s falling apart all the time, having the delightful mayhem of Bugs and Daffy, the Road Runner and the Coyote, or Sylvester and Tweety back on the big screen where they belong…I think that could do us all a world of good.

Some pictures don’t need a caption.

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. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. 

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.