A Wisconsin Yankee in Walt Disney's Court

Last we spoke of Gimme Gimme Octopus, rumors abounded over the too-violent-for-DVD “lost” episode, supposedly involving ol’ Kure Kure being beaten so badly by the other puppets that he suffers debilitating injuries. It turns out to be not so bad, and not nearly as weird as the baby episode. Takora and his squash-shaped buddy do get pummeled by the rest of the cast, but they only turn up with cartoon lumps and bandages at the end.

But check out this one– the baby is back, taking more abuse than in the last one! Again, there’s the question of whether it’s a baby or some kind of representation of Kure Kure. When the others hit it it seems to affect him, but is it from empathy, or is it a voodoo doll? Is it alive? The girl hugs it and carries it off at the end, as if it were as alive as any of the rest of them. It’s pure, vintage Japanese gold any way you look at it.

I mentioned Yo Gabba Gabba last post, which probably isn’t familiar to anyone without a two-year-old running around the house. It’s probably the equivalent of what The Electric Company was to the ’70s, a “hip” learning show for kids with trendy design and a nod to pop culture.
The main part of the show features the guy in orange bringing out his boom-box case that holds little art-vinyl toy versions of the monster characters which he places in a miniature table-top environment where they come to life in Banana Splits fashion and have little sing-song adventures with some sort of moral or social lesson attached. Other segments are cartoons (with one by Evan Dorkin of Milk & Cheese fame), visits by rappers, indie bands, or hipster movie stars, and a guy from Devo teaches kids to draw.
It’s all pretty fun and the kid loves it, but mainly just the costumed monster parts. I liked the design of the sets and the characters with the urban pop-art kind of feel to it, and thought that they had something pretty original and strange until I came across this video from a 1960s or early ’70s Japanese kid’s show, translated as “Gimme Gimme Octopus.” Take a look:

Holy Christmas! Yo Gabba Gabba is lifted from this pretty much wholesale, albeit in a watered-down sense. But all the design elements are there. This particular episode is said to be one of the strangest– where did the baby octopus come from? Why does the walrus have it? Why are they fighting over it and abusing it? What happens to it at the end? Apparently the only weirder episode is an infamous lost reel where the rest of the animals beat the adult octopus to the point of brain damage.
Like anything else obscure, infantile, and/or Japanese, there’s plenty of info on the web if you search for Kure Kure Takora, including nerdish rundowns on the characters and what they represent, and plenty of video of other episodes.

Semi-regular updates should be coming along again; I’ve got various excuses. but I spent a lot of my late-night writing time going through the Simpsons season 11 DVD set, a ritual I go through with every new release, even if I’ve seen every episode 5 times.
The Simpsons was past its peak by this point; it had pretty much given up any vestige of its family sit-com roots and become a wacky hijinks show. The stand-out example, as pointed out self-consciously by the characters themselves, is the episode with the horse they rescue from a carnival. Early on, they did a sweet episode about Homer buying a pony to appease Lisa, and working two jobs but finally giving it up as a financial impossibility. Here, the old cliché with the broken down nag who’s actually the fastest racehorse ever is dragged out, then an absurd “the jockeys are really elves” plot is thrown on top of it. It’s a different show than it was the first 8 or 10 seasons.
The stand out events are Apu having 8 babies, which has some nice moments (I like Apu flipping out about the banana bread Marge brings to help them out– “What you you thinking?!” he screams as he’s trying to feed 8 kids at once like a human sow) but it goes off the deep end with the babies ending up in a zoo with Butch Patrick. “What were you thinking?” indeed. On the other end, Maude Flanders is killed, which just seemed callous and pointless in itself but it’s actually a pretty good episode and deals with the issue tastefully and in character, with a few good gags thrown in.
The other highlights are Homer’s 300 game (for the Ron Howard and Penn & Teller guest-bits, among other things), The tap-dance school episode that I always thought was funny, and the Behind the Music-parody season finale which predicted the end of the line for the show.
It’s 10 years later, and who knows when they’ll quit. It got worse, then got better, they made a movie and a theme park ride (which I’m like 10 miles from but haven’t seen yet) and the fast-food toys keep coming out. Speaking of, I need the Bart from the above set if anybody has an extra…

The only bad part about the new Futurama DVD-movies is the wait, and the wait, and then it’s over in 90 minutes and you’re waiting again. I’d rather have it meted out in weekly doses by a network, but we’ll take what we can get.

Bender’s Big Score only had one weakness– the “twist” ending that everybody saw coming. Not that it was bad, but maybe it could’ve been disguised better. Otherwise, the continuity of the convoluted plot was as consistent as it could be, considering cartoon time-travel was involved. References to old episodes flowed seamlessly, and it all fit together so neatly at the end.

The Beast With a Billion Backs doesn’t have any of that internal consistency. Without giving anything away, the initial threat just seems to go away with no repurcussions, and the climax and denouement each have some explaining to do, to paraphrase Ricky Ricardo. None of this detracts from the movie too much– it’s a cartoon with talking robots and lobster people, after all– but it could have been as tight as the first movie. Still funny, and still filled with great bits, but if anyone wants to explain how every being in the universe fit on Bender’s pirate ship I’d like to hear it.

One of my favorite cartoons to never make it to DVD boxed set infamy, 3-South apparently ran on MTV in the early 2000’s (I missed it whenever it ran, and I don’t feel like wikipedia-ing at the moment.) Most of the 15 or so episodes are available in parts on Youtube and elsewhere– if anyone can get me decent DVD copies let me know.

Why they couldn’t have run this for a couple of seasons, at least, is beyond me. Well, besides the fact that it was drowned in a sea of reality shows and whatever other garbage they play on MTV these days. It’s too bad Adult Swim didn’t pick it up to give it another chance, the way they saved Family Guy and Futurama.

Besides being such a great show, the surprisingly appropriate thene song, lifted from the Flaming Lips, is pretty catchy too.