Request 2: Megababies vs Wacky World of Tex Avery

Mega Babies is copyright to the Tremblay Brothers, Landmark Entertainment and CineGroup. The Wacky World of Tex Avery is copyright to Brody Dowler and DiC Entertainment. The images shown and topics in essay below are meant strictly for editorial and educational (.........sigh....) purposes.
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Hurrah, my second request! I was graciously presented with 2 suggestions by ~10-9-8, 'The Wacky World of Tex Avery' and 'Megababies'. While originally separate ideas, and wildly different shows, I decided to combine them for a comparative look at both. They both are shows I had an equal amount of light viewing, and I saw them at the same time, during the late end of the 90's. I also feel about them both pretty much the same way...both of these shows are seriously flawed. Unfortunately, due to there being nothing else of animated worth being on during these shows air times for me, and a lack of cable providing (some of the time) arguably more intelligent or creatively subversive cartoons, I watched them anyway sometimes as a kid, if only for the shock of their novelty. In fact, they are in my opinion, and a great many others, as well as among the creators themselves, an absolute embarrassment. They quite honestly act as a visual symbol of the dying of the 90's animation mindset, and the new soon to be dawning of the 2000's. They are a perfect review to make, as I have just previously addressed in my last two main articles what created the dawn of the 'Avant-Garde' style cartoon show, (and their sub-trope of the Gross Out ) and the main first pioneer of both the Gross Out Show and the modern day Avant Garde show at the same time, Ren and Stimpy. The Gross Out Show, and the Avant-Garde shows, as I like to label them, have many crossovers, but they ARE NOT exactly the same. It's kinda like that squares can be rectangles, but rectangles cannot be squares rule in math....You can have in other words, a decent Avant Garde-style show without any or most of the Gross Out Show aspects. Often more likely though, as in the case here, you've got a problem of a Gross Out show not only PRETENDING it is visually edgy, subtle, relatable, unique and rebellious, in other words, 'Avant Garde', but its producers truly think this is due to the very sake alone of it being a 'Gross Out.'..and it isn't. Moreover, not just any gross out show, but one of the worst in visuals and content than anybody else on the air period. When Nickelodeon came onto the scene, all the kid's cartoon blocks on every channel sort of went through a kind of miniature 'Arms Race' during the 90's, to see who could get away with the most radically insane outlandishly grotesque, action packed, testosterone huffing, glue sniffing idiocy the most, all without pissing off the censors. It produced some gems, as far as the shows who focused more on being themselves, and less like everybody else went: the shows that more or less focused on the level of the animation quality, and character development. But like with anything, most of the time we got pretty much garbage. This produced over-saturation of the market, with lesser and lesser intelligent and heartfelt material. Much like Boy Bands, Pop Divas, Grunge, Rap, Hair Metal, Dubstep and every other big genre of music or art trend or toy trend; whatever your personal opinion for any specific genre actually is; you all know as readers full well the experience of how once ONE thing hits it big, suddenly the entire world is flooded with shittier upon even shittier wanna-be's doing the exact same. To make matters worse, usually without ever realizing (or caring) about originality or what truly made the original hit so likable or powerful in the first place.

....And, in my opinion anyway, these two cartoons are perfect examples of that. They are quite possibly, two of the worst samples of garbage to be ever fed to children in the West..if not two of the worst samples of what was fundamentally wrong with the 90's as an era, at least as far as children's media was often concerned. We overlook the bad things in shows we have nostalgia for, but in reality, when we take a hard look at it, a lot of content that we grew up with had absolutely NOT A DROP of soul in it. It was noneducational, nauseating, violent, and stupid. Granted, that can still provide awesome entertainment, but a lot of the time, it wasn't funny, it was just junk. Freedom of Artistic Speech versus Putting a Lid on Offensiveness will of course be a battle in the media that shall be fought endlessly until (hopefully) the end of time. And I hope that neither side in the end comes out with too much victory. I am sure most people will agree that we need some bit of both Wise Censorship AND Wise Freedom. We should watch what we say to our kids, but we also might wanna when it's an important or really clever funny message, try to sneak around the lines, and be Creative and/or Subversive. It's often sometimes better to not be prudes and just allow the writers to do what they do best: It just comes down to circumstances of the culture at the time and the age demographic being targeted. But then there's the idea, as seen in these shows, that the idea of being Subversive, (or to use a better word here, CRASS) at least in kid's media, is what the whole thing should be about. And that could be fine, except if you're going to go that cynical route, you'd better deliver it in a really clever, funny, and cool magnificent way. But these 2 shows in general opinion just don't. And we'll see why, in a minute. If you did not grow up with these shows, or recall them in any way, consider yourself blessed...(but again, as in every essay here, understand this is all OPINION ONLY. So if you actually do happen to like either show or know people from the animation staff of these shows, please understand this is not an attack on you or on them personally as people, it's simply a matter of my personal tastes, and it seems to be shared by a large number of people. But you are still not 'wrong' if you disagree, and are free 100% to enjoy them.) They do contain some interesting things, but a lot more many shared major bad aspects... However, it is not just their similar problems that make them interesting targets. It is their contrasts too. They each have opposite goals and different reasons for flopping. So let's examine them:

First, we have MEGABABIES. Megababies is by far the more gruesome show. It has stuff that makes 'Ren and Stimpy', 'Rocko's Modern Life', and 'Invader Zim' look like 'Barney and Friends.' This show isn't gross...it's revolting. In every waking second, we see gags related to snot, spit, belching, guts, vomit, farting, peeing, blood, and crapping. EVERY waking second. There's no breath between gags and dialogue. And every muscled character (which includes pretty much everyone, even the babies) shows off sausage thick blood vessels in every part of their body when it tenses up, to the point they burst. There's no question this is probably the most sickest over the top potty humored kid's show in all existence, outside of Japan anyway. So what's the story? Once upon a time, there were 3 ordinary babies, and their nurse Camp Lazlo. Oops I mean NURSE Lazlo. Sorry. One day for absolutely no reason whatsoever the planets align, and lightning hits the earth. (what??...) The lightning somehow travels up a building, enters the elevator, then the top floor, fries the incubation ward, and the babies inside, and then when the nurse tries to pull the shorting out plug, she gets electrocuted herself...because of this, the magic lightning or whatever causes her and the babies to instantly mutate, and grants them superpowers and super intelligence. (.........WHAT?) The babies and their nurse now use their superpowers to battle robots, aliens, and gangs of evildoers: Powers like Super Snot Ammo, and Super Fart, and Super Belch and their most commonly used shared power, the Super Crap. No I am not kidding. They project themselves by the force of their own crap. I wish to god I was making that up. It is like a bad South Park episode, with all the clever parts and funny parts removed. It's not the grossness of this show that makes it so bad:...it's the fact that it doesn't bring a single other thing to the table. The animation overall is just lazy and terrible. It looks like someone doing a Cow and Chicken episode, while on drugs. It has attempts at times to be seriously detailed and cool and edgy looking. But most of the time, it looks like cheap drunk middle school doodles. It has none of the glossy lavishness or perfect humorous timing of 'Ren and Stimpy' or 'Superjail!' and none of the really funny voice acting or satire and pop culture jokes found in things like 'Beavis and Butthead' 'Family Guy' and 'Rocko's Modern Life'. It is just gross, lazy, and unpleasant. The voice acting is generally bland, when it isn't outright scripted and terrible sounding. Not only that oftentimes it feels horribly dated: "Yer just jealous because I'M the more RADICAL awesome dude!!!"....ugh. Just...UGH. *headslap* Honestly, did my generation REALLY have to talk like this?? This show was created by the same people who developed Swat Katz, and I can see here in the promo where some of the quality may have originally lied, with the battle sequences and the monsters.....This was a silly and moronic idea of a show, but tell me if you don't think at least as your typical senseless boy's show this isn't visually cool: www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3FlGn… The music, monster design and cinematic angling feels really dramatic and interesting. But the actual show itself, it has none of this level of artistic detail or raw pace seen here in this promo ad. It only drags through very flat and boring typical plots....with just added in snotballs all over the place. I feel like a show like this belongs more if it stayed truer to this vision somewhere on the early MTV channel, than on Fox Kids Network.

All of the main characters are flat and boring. They whine and argue and do dumb things. I only care minorly for Lazlo, as she has a funny pseudo-Swedish accent, and its neat to see a badass action heroine who is neither thin, young, or attractive in any way. And on occasion, she says very rare but extremely funny things: "Buck! You better come down right now, before I geev you a time out that would choke a Shetland pony!!!!" But other than that, she's a very incidental character. Mainly she just shows up at the end of every episode to provide the deus ex machina, namely the bottles, which act like superfuel for the babies, like canned spinach does for Popeye. All in all, this is a show that knows it's a sellout from the very beginning. It isn't funny, it isn't well written, and it isn't well animated. The exact opposite can be said for Swat Katz, which went out for the exact same MEGAEXTREMEEEE kind of 90s style, but focused more on the character's relationships and conflict of interests, and on the animation quality. It goes to show how the same person/people can be capable of producing god awful insensible crap, but also really excellent work at the same time, and you can't judge someone by merely one work in their history or portfolio alone. This can be applied to all artists. We've all done things that were either to just pay the bills or we really didn't for whatever reason put as much thought or passion into them as we should have done or had extended into other projects. But that doesn't mean we have to be this way constantly.

Then we have the second show, 'The Wacky World of Tex Avery'. This show had a very different look and a very different goal: While 'Mega Babies' tried to cash in on the popular trends of hit shows then in the Present, WWOTA wanted to pay homage in the totally opposite direction: to the PAST. Tex Avery for those of you who don't know (and shame on you all) is one of the great masters of animation. He is responsible for the creation of Bugs Bunny, Droopy Dog, Howlin Wolf/Red Hot Riding Hood, Screwy Squirrel, and many others. His shorts still hold up as hilarious today, and he is still studied lovingly in animation schools and by theorists and comedy writers. He is responsible for cartoons' deviation during the Golden Age away from the strict Disney model. He didn't invent but enhanced the idea of characters having full awareness they were in a silly cartoon, and what anarchic fun would happen if they were sick of the rules. You would not have simply almost any decent humorous cartoon on the planet if it weren't for this guy, in other words.

'Wacky World of Tex Avery' however was nothing but in title alone related in any way to the real Tex or his characters: In each episode, much like the Looney Tunes shows, there were 3 shorts back to back, and reoccurring story arcs with certain characters. Each short's world remained separated from each other, but there were moments of cameo and crossovers. They had things like 'Einstone', the world's first caveman inventor, 'Pompei Pete', a little Roman man who had been buried alive in the explosion of Pompei and had come back to life in modern times, and now worked as a janitor, Baby Huey, which was based off the old Harvey comics franchise, and many others. The title character was also named Tex Avery, which is pretty confusing, if a bit clever at the same time, being a cowboy, and that being a pretty darn good name for a cowboy too. Tex and everyone in their own divided episodes mainly did the same thing every time, defeat their arch enemies, get the food or gal they'd been seeking for. Not a very different thing from most cartoons of the time it was honoring, but it didn't do much else. So in order to sugar coat these very bland plots, it added a LOT of gross out humor. It had a LOT of disgusting things, but it had not as much potty humor as it did innuendo and ugly violence humor. Things like skulls, brains and teeth were often punched out, and vile liposuction being used to wither up morbidly obese characters, I often found very disturbing. Not to the point it astonished you or made you laugh, like the way 'Adventure Time' does. Just....plainly disturbed you.

I don't know. Somehow this show just doesn't bring any smile to my face. Or to anybody's faces really. It's just...there. Which is a real shame. It had potential....But maybe it would have been best to just let legends die in peace and never try to resurrect them again. Sometimes like Frankenstein, it just comes back all wrong, lacking a soul. It is way more upsetting to see these characters get into unpleasant and violent situations, because when you watch something that looks like the 'Megababies', you expect them to. They look like Ratfink's candy colored butt dumplings. You expect them to do nasty horrible gross stupid mean things, because the characters are all designed to look stupid mean and gross from the start. We know from the opening number what kind of a show this is: A gross out action show. Meanwhile, kid viewers at the time weren't likely familiar with who Tex Avery was, but they were probably familiar with his style of characters, the soft rubbery kind of big eyed 'dolls' who look like the critters in Looney Tunes, and Tom and Jerry. They're cute. Or at least approachable. The Looney Tunes characters do violent stuff often at times, but they never with the gags showed terrifically black humor at any point. Never did you ever see Tom when he got hit by an ax show off any of his inner organs....that's a subversion played by Itchy and Scratchy in the Simpsons, and it works, because it's a joking dark satire for adults. But when you do it for a real kid's show though, the effect is very jarring. And extremely Uncanny Valley-ish. "Ren and Stimpy" works like this, but the reason that it works and "Wacky World" doesn't, is because as I said in the R/S article that they knew in the well written episodes how to take 'breathes' in between the jokes. When you do nothing but show a constant barrage of pain to gentle looking, goofy or cute characters, it doesn't feel funny:.....it feels meanly unnecessary and dumb.

Why? Because at the heart of it all; we could not care less what the characters are going through- Like "Megababies," we don't feel any sympathy for the cast: They're all too flat. We know nothing about them. They're all so rude and ugly and dumb we don't even care. "Invader Zim", "Misadventures of Flapjack", "Ren and Stimpy" and "Adventure Time" all have dark casts and cruel humor, but are usually seen as strong because they all at least contain a back-story, or somebody among them is likeable. And when they want to disgustingly stun or scare the pants off you they hold NO punches back. The main reason why these shocking moments hit so hard is because WE CARE FOR the protagonists...We feel sympathy for when they get into peril, because at least some of the time, they seem like interesting or likable people. So we react when bad things occur out of suspense, and when gross things occur out of surprise. In bad shows like these, crass gross idiocy is the main shtick of EVERY unsympathetic character 24-7. And of course in this sort of a 'loony Tex Avery' style cartoon, we already know everyone turns out okay, because slapstick has to happen. So why should we even be invested?

Here, they go for quantity over quality of slapstick gags. 'Wacky World' just is only barely wacky feeling in watching bad Anachronic humor, by having then popular modern cynical humor set against a happy-go-lucky retro animation style from the Golden Age: Imagine watching Laurel and Hardy discuss things about sex, or the Moe of the 3 Three Stooges mocking Snookie. Oh wait, that actually happened. That exactly sums up what this feels like: not the most foul taste ever left behind in your mouth, (we'll leave that to shows like 'Wild Grinders'. )but it definitely makes you not want to chew it and swallow.


Both these shows present an interesting dilemma, how does one try to honor something you really admire or like (or just wanna cash in on) but also maintain one's own original content and image? Well, that's hard to achieve, but not impossible. The real problem lies not with trying to emulate something, or being original, its trying too HARD to be one or the other. When you focus on the messenger, and not on the message. Just trying to write things that are funny, and making good characters, should matter more than whether they physically resemble a cast from a show that was extremely successful and popular either right now in the present or 70 years ago. There can be things or tastes you may want to expose younger audiences to, but to use a cartoon show as a platform to just say: "Check out how great this idea/pop culture trend/style is!" instead of just telling them a good entertaining well written story, is just bound to get you most of the time failure. Unless you're hailing from Japan. Then you're a guaranteed billionaire. Oh well. Nevermind.

Please feel free to submit your comments and any animation requests below. Thank you and have a nifty day!