A while back, the folks at CN once rapped (!) that "Comedy's their heart and action is their soul". Well, CN of late must have fallen victim to a succubus or something, because these days their "soul" is all but nonexistent on the network (The Secret Saturdays bit the dust, Sym-Bionic Titan is in the process of being shuffled around the channel's lineup, The Super Hero Squad Show has been banished to early Saturday mornings opposite the Farm Reports and the remaining episodes of Batman: The Brave and the Bold are currently floating in limbo; basically, unless the action cartoon has the words Star and Wars or Ben and 10 in the title or is based on a toy-selling anime like Pokemon, Beyblade or Bakugan, Cartoon Network isn't all that interested in it. One can only speculate how long the honeymoon is going to last for Young Justice), while their "heart", comedy, seems to be the favorite child of the network. Specifically, a particular type of comedy.
Lately, CN seems to be pigeon-holing their comedies, sticking themselves in a queenie groove with their recent slew of yuk-fests: nearly all of them center on a weird and wonderful pair of hyperactive, hyper-kinetic, quirky duo of best buds who a) come in pairs, b) talk like ironic surfers, c) live in a trippy, surrealist landscape and d) make shiftless and dumb seem kind of cute.
Examples are numerous: there's Adventure Time, in which a spazzy, noodle-limbed 12-year-old with a white teddy bear hat and his kooky shapeshifting talking dog sidekick right wrongs, save the populace and generally screw around in a post-nuclear Oz-like fantasy realm chock full of mutant princesses, talking critters, living mountains, candy people, skull-faced wizards and a monarch of ice with personality problems beyond the dreams of most analysts. Regular Show (I love that title) focuses on a pair of 23-year-old slacker dudes who just happen to be a 6-foot-tall blue jay and a raccoon, who create all sorts of inter-dimensional mayhem whilst avoiding boredom at their jobs at a city park, which is owned by an incredibly naive jolly old timey fellow with a lollipop for a head and run bu a surly and frequently agitated living gumball machine. Robotomy (which, according to rumors, has already had its' last hurrah on the network) stars (starred) a pair of misfit high-school aged robots who lie somewhere between the ins and outs of the social circles of an all-robot planet known as Insanus, whose all-robot population lives to brutalize, maim and obliterate all other forms of life, including their fellow robots.
I find this to be something of an alarming and somewhat disheartening trend. I don't have a problem with this genre of comedy as a whole; it's great when it works (I'm a avid fan of Regular Show; Robotomy offers some good laughs once in a while, but overall it kind of falls flat and I don't really care for the characters or setting, and Adventure Time just doesn't do it for me; overall I find it more strange-funny than hilarious-funny. I admit that I do kind of like Jake the dog, but the rest of it is just blah' to me), but just because these 'dudes in Wonderland" shows work and are earning ratings doesn't mean that every comedy show that CN puts out should follow this genre. I know I sound like I'm 80 when I say this, but back in my day, Cartoon Network's animated comedies had a diversity to them: you had a show about a boy genius with a secret high-tech laboratory hidden within the bowels of his suburban house who regularly tussles with aliens, superheroes, monsters and his giant mindlessly destructive goon of an older sister; you had a show about a buff, dumb Elvis-soundalike macho-man with a soaring blond pompadour who tries--and fails--to pick up every chick he sees; you had a show about 3 super-powered kindergarten girls who regularly save their constantly imperiled city from wacko supervillains and mosnters; you had a show about a blubbering pink cowardly dog who regularly keeps his owners safe from all sorts of supernatural weirdos in their home in the middle of nowhere; you had a show about a cow and a chicken who were sister and brother and whose parents were a pair of living torsos with no upper halves who indulged in Ren & Stimpy-lite antics along with a curiously naked (and perversely proud to be so) devil figure known only as the Red Guy; you had a show about a trio of quirky and oddly drawn preteens who tried to scam the other kids in their cul-de-sac neighborhood out of their money so they could obtain giant jawbreakers--we had faces then! I'm not saying these 'trip-tacular dude-bros' comedies are bad, but a little variety wouldn't kill Cartoon Network.
The other thing I find bothersome about this current crop of CN comedies is: THEY'RE ALWAYS JUST ABOUT DUDES. I get that CN is currently trying to aim itself at a predominantly (if not exclusively) young male audience, but come on. How about showing the girls and ladies some love? My ONLY beef with the otherwise stellar Regular Show is how its' cast is a total sausage-fest. (There is a female character, a cardinal--or is she a red jay?--named Margaret whom our hero Mordecai has a crush on, but she hardly counts as a character; she's mainly a walking plot device engineered to persuade Mordecai into doing things he probably shouldn't.) The only female characters of note to appear on Adventure Time tend to be giggly princesses who are eagerly awaiting a kiss from the boy star, Finn. Robotomy's only female character of any importance is high-school fembot Maimy, another character who serves mainly as the unattainable object of one of the main character's (in this case, Thrasher's) affections, but she at least has some amusing moments and wrings some laughs out of me for being more shallow than a kiddie pool.
This trend gives me reason to be concerned about the comedies CN has in store for us in the months to come. Witness the upcoming British/US CN co-production The Amazing World of Gumball. I'd like to provide a clip for you to see, but unfortunately, the show's producers are being incredibly tight-lipped about the show. The only clip I could find was a micro-second piece of animation on a trailer for Cartoon Network Europe, so you'll have to contend with these 2 images:
As you can see from the images above, this show promises to be another psychedelic trip-fest. It stars a 11-year-old blue anthropomorphic cat (the titular star of the show; though his dad and little sister are both pink rabbits) and his best friend Darwin (a goldfish who sprouted legs, but unfortunately, suffers from a goldfish's poor memory and recall) who live and frolic in a quasi-American suburb called Elmore which is populated by any and all manner of being; like Living Island on the Krofft Brothers' H.R. Pufenstuf, any and everything in Elmore can and often does come alive or just is alive, filling your screen with such bizarre beings as a UFO with legs or Gumball's blue cat mum (this is a British import, we must remember) who sells rainbows for a living or an angel who can transform into a live-action super woman. Here's hoping that Gumball doesn't turn out to be another dude's only fest (though the show's producers claim that the heart of the show is about Gumball's suburban family, so this could be the CN show which breaks this mold), and that there's some genuine hilarity and jokes alongside the weirdness (But again, the buzz on Gumball has been positive for the most part, so I'm trying to keep my hopes for this show high.) Gumball has the potential to be the next SpongeBob Squarepants or the next Fish Hooks, only time will tell. It's very, very easy for this formula to be done wrong, and painfully wrong. Example: take a gander of this show which has apparently been greenlit by Cartoon Network, a thing from Paper Rad (no, I don't know who or what that is, nor do I care), called The Problem Solverz. ('Cause plurals are always cooler when you spell them with a 'z' instead of an 's'.) Here's a link. Watch at your own risk.
Wow.
What can I say, but...
What a Steaming. Load. Of. Crap.
Where to start? The visuals are eye-piercing. The colors are bound to give some people seizures. The character designs are FIERCELY ugly. That one brown creature is shaped like a butt, is the same color as a turd and has a nose that looks like an erect penis; I actually felt dirty just looking at him. The token human character looks like the result of a tryst between a sharpee and a Tiki idol; he's so heinously ugly that if he were an animal, you'd have him beaten to death before he got the chance to breed. And there's even less plot and storyline here than on Adventure Time. (The only bit I chuckled at was when the robot refused to sample the girl's prototype ice cream because she had already licked it.) And once again, it's all dudes on the team. Yet this....THIS...is supposedly going to become a series on Cartoon Network. I don't want to write The Problem Solverz off as just a soulless clone of Adventure Time, but it's not doing a lot to say otherwise to me. How on Earth did Chowder get the ax but this piece of moose excrement get greenlit? We must be living in the Crazy Backwards Universe, where cats chase dogs and boy bands play instruments.
If this is what passes for entertainment on CN now, I have an idea for an animated pilot I'd like to pitch. It's about a barefoot fairy named Rainbow Roxie and her BFF Starlee (a lovable green skinned Martian girl) who live in an enchanted laundry hamper in the castle of a weightlifting ball of lint named Argyle the Violent. They own a marshmallow car and have all kinds of crazee adventures in the wacky land of Wysiwyg. I think it'lll be a hit.
CARTOON NETWORK EXECUTIVE: Are you crazy?! Its' stars are girls! Now get out!
*Slams door*
