Certain aspects of childhood should never be revisited, the most dangerous of which being favorite animated television programs. It is better to remain mildly fond of them without having viewed them in recent memory. Unfortunately, this instance is not an exception.
Tiny Toon Adventures: Season 1, Volume 1 consists of the first thirty-five episodes of the series, in relative airing order. My own interest in this show is purely for the fact that a good portion of the show’s staff ended up working on Nickelodeon’s The Ren and Stimpy Show. While nothing in modern (or classic) animation can compare to that show’s tale of Shakespearean proportion, Tiny Toons remains a case of where the history is more interesting than the actual subject.
Long short version of what happened: for Bugs Bunny’s 50th Anniversary, Warner Bros. wanted to revive its studio product for television with an entirely new half-hour format, in junction with Steven Speilberg’s Amblin Entertainment. It would follow the adventures of the prodigies of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, etc. (Most likely being prodigies to not upset the very active Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones. Full blown bastardizations of the Warner characters were not done until these two were too dead to protest.)
The first people producers Jean MacCurdy and Tom Ruegger hired for Tiny Toons were mostly associated with John Kricfalusi in one way or another (from Ralph Bakshi’s New Adventures of Mighty Mouse). Among them: Bob Camp, Eddie Fitzgerald, Bruce Timm, Jim Smith, Jim Gomez, Kent Butterworth, Mike Kazaleh, Chris Reccardi, Tom Minton, and Mike Fontanelli. After, Ruegger invited in many of the writers who had worked with him at Filmation and Hanna-Barbera, like Paul Dini, Gordon Bressack, and Earl Kress, as well as improv-comics with a vague association to cartoons (Sherri Stoner, the live-action reference for The Little Mermaid). Much of the rest of the staff was filled with veteran artists like Norm McCabe, Tom Ray, Owen Fitzgerald, and Art Leonardi.
So what happened was that the John K. types went into the project thinking this was their kind of humor, and then it turned out there were a bunch of people coming in who were promoted above them. “We thought we were going to be able to do real, Warner type cartoons,” Bob Camp told me awhile ago. “But then it turned out to be the same old, you know, crap.”
But a lot of these writers had been trying for years to do something different and new within cartoons. The kind of cartoon they dreamed of doing was not compatible with what the others dreamed of doing. More specifically, the artists were trying to revive the spirit of classic cartoon-making, whereas the writers were always out to do something very topical. Such an environment could never possibly create a decent product, and it didn’t.
None of the foreign studios used for the show successfully brought the gifted layout and storyboard artists’ work to the screen. Anyone with an inkling of knowledge of how much talent (regardless of whether they ended up on Ren & Stimpy or not) went into the art preparation will immediately see that none of it is reflected in the final product. Appearances by the classic Warner characters only further exposed the poor quality and the whole concept’s pretensions.
Fans’ harshest criticism seems to be reserved for Kennedy Cartoons, the Toronto and Philippines based studio run by Glen Kennedy, who attempted to emulate the Rod Scribner/Jim Tyer style, only succeeding in turning every character into a pigeon-toed palsy patient, utilizing the most inane of broad cartoon animation clichés. Tokyo Movie Shinsha only managed to give their episodes a bland gloss. The remaining studios’ animation resembled the work of a blindfolded amateur. Backgrounds and color styling fared just as bad overseas, favoring the garish and obnoxious. None of the voice artists seemed to be particularly well-trained either (judging from their more recent work, maybe it’s just lack of talent), with of course the sole exception of Don Messick. (Is it no surprise that the character voiced by him, Hampton the Pig, and the one that doesn’t talk, Furrball the cat, are the only relatively endearing characters on the show?)
In essence, the real root of all the conflict is Speilberg, a man described by much of the studio’s staff as having no idea what made his favorite cartoons great. (Perhaps if he had known, the shows would have received a better budget.) Tiny Toons‘ concept pretentiously tries to justify itself as a worthy heir to the Warner cartoon’s throne. For all of the assumptions and references, though, the Warner cartoons’ “influence” is only window dressing for something that’s, in general, as shallow as any cartoon TV show that proceeded it.
In retrospect, the artists were right, as evidenced in the two seasons of The Ren & Stimpy Show, which took the classic Warner cartoons seriously as an art and influence. (The show’s sole failing was professional immaturity.) The Warner television shows done after Tiny Toons receded into even more ‘topicality’, and lacked the endearing failure quality of before, with such programs as Animaniacs (a.k.a. Monty Python for the Mentally Impaired), which tries to be smart and sophisticated, but just comes off as dumb and pompous.
Warner Home Video continues to hold its title of “Worst TV-on-DVD Mastering” with this release. All of the shows are interlaced, and appear to actually come from VHS masters. (There are many instances of red flickering at the very bottom of the screen.) The sole bonus feature is a pointless ‘history’ of the show. Very few artists are shown (Eddie Fitzgerald says he was interviewed, but is absent from the program), though there is a very long bit of Ruth Clampett talking about how her father made his Warner cartoons in the 1930s and 1940s. This, along with the extensive clips from classic Warner shorts, only further exposes the shallowness of television animation in general. In all, it’s a shoddy presentation that I wouldn’t wish even on a show that I don’t like.
From now on though, I think the Buster Bunny magnet on my parents’ freezer in their basement will suffice as a reminder of watching those cartoons on television as a child. Click here to order Tiny Toon Adventures: Season 1, Volume 1
