Marvel at The Magic Kingdom

On Monday, August 31, 2009, the worlds of the Marvel Universe and the Magic Kingdom collided as The Walt Disney Company announced plans to buy Marvel Entertainment for slightly over $4 billion. Almost immediately, the Disneyana types were excited and the Marvel Zombies were mortified.

Will Mickey Mouse become the newest member of the X-Men? Will Wolverine become a star on Disney on Ice? Will Hannah Montana dress up like Dazzler on an episode of her series? Will they pit Marvel’s Hercules versus Disney’s Hercules? Will Pinocchio be accused of being a mutant? Will The Incredibles fight against and later with the Fantastic Four? Actually, I’d like that one to come true to tell you the truth.

Most critics of the acquisition fail to realize that the same studio that gave us Hannah Montana, Winnie the Pooh, Cars, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, and G-Force also gave us Gargoyles, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Lost, Scream, Kill Bill, Trainspotting, and Clerks. Needless to say, the initial reaction has cooled down compared to what happened upon the announcement. Now, a little clarity is in order. read more

Reinventing the Looney Tunes

Remember the Looney Tunes? If you’re old enough to remember when MTV aired music videos longer than six hours a day, sodas called Surge and Citra, and ABC actually programming a Saturday morning lineup rather than plucking repeats from their parent company’s established cable networks, then you might remember their original incarnations. You know, the crazy, borderline insane comedic characters from Warner Bros. before they got transformed into babies, sentai warriors, and, as Bugs Bunny himself said in the rarely seen ’90s short Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers, “pale stereotypes” of their former selves. becoming essentially Disney-fied pitchmen selling everything from frozen food and candies to theme parks and phone services. Though to be fair, in the past, they sold everything from useless pieces of plastic, cereals, vitamins, candies,  and fried chicken (I’m still trying to wrap my mind over the fact that Foghorn Leghorn was once a pitchman for Kentucky Fried Chicken), but they were still essentially Looney Tunes characters, and they were still on television. read more

Cartoon Network Minus Cartoons: Everything Has an End

2003 seemed like a lifetime ago now, but I remember it well. Cartoon Network, the bastion of animation goodness, relaunched their venerable Cartoon Cartoon Fridays block into Cartoon Network Fridays, a weekly show hosted by live-action hosts and musical guests. I remember talking to my friend about how Fridays was just the beginning of the end of an all-animation Cartoon Network. He laughed it off thinking I was being a little paranoid, and I felt a little at ease. We all went along our merry ways.

But then, as the years progressed, my seemingly paranoid allusions proved to be not only accurate, but also worrisome, almost to the point that I actually have fears that cartoons are going to become an afterthought at the toon house that Ted and Betty built, replaced in the hearts of the executives with lame sitcoms and ripoffs of Discovery and Sci-Fi reality shows. read more