Monday, August 21, 2006

1,2,3, Cartoons!


So apparently The Simpsons grabbed the Emmy for best animated series on Saturday night. Which is pretty much crap, because, while not a connoisseur of the cartoon world, I can easily think of a few series who were more deserving of said award. So here we go again -- Listsville!

1) Family Guy -- Yeah, it's crude as all holy hell. But it's funny as all holy hell, too. And has about the sharpest writing staff in all of television. When it comes to laughs per minute, Family Guy blows The Simpsons out of the water. Insert "low-brow socio-political satire", "pop-culture savvy", or "outright/over-the-top ridiculousness" for "laughs per minute" in that last sentence, and it still stands.

2) The Venture Brothers -- A little known gem on Adult Swim, Venture Brothers is an action-adventure send-up of just about every cartoon and comic-book in existence. It's got the unbalanced, mad scientist, the hulking, secret-agent bodyguard, the loquacious and pompous master of the magical arts, and its own version of the useless Wonder Twins. And it's funny. Real funny. What hurts its chances is probably the amount of nearly incoherent in-jokes about the genres it so mercilessly skewers. Lovers of Jonny Quest, the Hardy Boys and Marvel Comics ought to find it thoroughly engaging.

3) Tom Goes to the Mayor -- I don't even particularly like this show, due to its inconsistency from episode to episode, but with the schlock that Matt Groening has been putting out over the past few years, even this hit-or-miss Adult Swim pseudo-cartoon makes The Simpsons look bad. It's definitely a twisted show. But twisted in a good way. Like Groening used to be.

So Emmy voters, it's alot like that one thing Stewie said that one time on Family Guy:

Ha! I got your hat! Take that, hatless! Now go back to the quad and resume your hackey sac tourney! I'm not gonna lay down for some frat boy bastard with his damn Teva sandals and his Skoal Bandits and his Abercrombie and Fitch long sleeved, open stitched, crew neck Henley smoking his sticky buds out of a soda can while watching his favorite downloaded Simpsons episodes every night! Yes, we all love "Mr. Plow"! Oh, you've got the song memorized, do you? SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE! That is exactly the kind of idiot you see at Taco Bell at 1 in the morning! The guy who just whiffed his way down the bar skank ladder!
Yeah, just like that....

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