2 posts from 2006
- January
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- September
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- December
I guess I've been watching more toddler TV than is good for me lately. Or good for the little guy. Still, brain-rot or not, this is what we see:
- Backyardigans / Wonder Pets - two of the best of the new bunch. Clearly made with more love and attention than they need be.
- Barney - the ongoing success of Barney can only be blamed on a billion prozac-eyed parents who simply do not care about their children.
- Sesame Street - surprisingly better now than it ever was. (Edit: it's taken me till just this week to realize how Big Bird works. For years I just figured he'd been in some awful accident leaving him with this one withered arm and twisted spine.)
- Teletubbies / Boohbah - two modern classics guaranteed to keep a 2-year-old amused. Try to stick to the original BBC Teletubbies as the redubbed PBS version is dumbed down for the American audience.
- Clifford The Big Red Dog / Arthur / Caillou - simplistic animated marinade for tiny brains.
- Dragon Tales - deserves to be singled out for being such low quality bollocks. Exibits many of the warning signs of being a Christian cartoon without being overtly religious.
- Veggie Tales - nasty preachy god-bothering tripe based around a group of vegetables. Vegetables. Like anything more exciting might offend someone, although one of them is a tomato and so technically a fruit. Wait till his veggie pals find out. He'll be lynched. If he had a neck. Anyway, avoid this like a plague of boils.
- Yoho Ahoy - bloody brilliant.
- Plasmo - saw this once by accident and I've been trying to find it again ever since. Possibly they'll never repeat it or release a DVD because Plasmo's nemesis is a claymation vagina. (Edit: Plasmo is available on DVD in Australia.)
Back in 2001 we were still living in Midtown Manhattan and I was drawing the second issue of the Vertigo version of the DC classic "Angel And The Ape". I'd transAtlantically transplanted to New York about a year before and this was my "I Love NY" book. As the anti-procrastination strategy of the time dictated I'd never leave a blank page for the next morning, so before hitting the sack on September 10th I inked up the first panel of page 4, an establishing shot of the New York skyline.
By the next afternoon the apartment was filled with refugees from the DC offices, unable to leave Manhattan, zombified, watching CNN and eating pretzels. I retreated back to the drawing board and finished the page.
In the interests of "taste" the World
Trade Centre towers were patched over before the issue saw print, which
now seems an even more crying shame than it did at the time.
