I'd say so.

Which book?

I'd be really interested in a book-length study of that period - attempting to assess what people involved were thinking, what audiences at the time thought and what people now think in retrospect.

Because those are all, almost always, right down at the bottom of the Disney list for many, many people. But their admirers and defenders are very vocal, and most made a fair bit of money. Is it just that they don't "feel" right, or resonate as widely..? Are they actually sub-standard in plot or promotion or anything, or... what?

I'm still yet to see Atlantis, Emperor and Treasure, and we watch a lot of Disney! Lilo.. is an odd one, because it's a weird mash-up (aliens/dysfunctional family) and all-around odd subject material (an orphan child about to be taken away? Orphans are very Disney; real repercussions and problems are not!) while the execution and script are not entirely as great as many others. But there's also the setting, which adds a whole different layer... (plus the secondary character barely talks).

I disagree. There's typically ~6 minutes of animation per show with the rest being live action. I'd consider the weekly animated piece a short (like watching a Looney Tunes short) and count them that way.

I, too, am interested in the book title.

Try Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated; of the original's descendants it's arguably the greatest. It's dark, serialized and has some great guest performers.

I have only watched the movies and not any of the episodes of "Monty Python" so I can't give a definitive answer, though if forced, I'd say no. If you truly believe that there is enough animation, you can count it. You do also have one wildcard.

It's been quite a while since I had last watched this, and I was surprised at how dark the forest scene was. I shouldn't have been, but after a while, you forget the little details. I loved how detailed the cottage was, with all the carvings. Knowing that this was all hand done is amazing.

I thought the same thing with the title card, about the ending being rushed. I suppose they wanted to cut 20-30 minutes out of the movie that didn't really need to be there and that was the easiest route (though, a scene showing how the Prince found out about Snow White would have been nice). It is just that everything was so nice and detailed and then, it was like, nope, no time, let's cut to the chase!

I found out today, you don't really know how much you'll miss Netflix till you go without it for a day or two. My Netflix payment came due today, but my payment won't be posted to my credit card till at least tomorrow.

Just watched "Batman: Under the Red Hood" as a rental from Amazon. While it wasn't bad, I'm glad I only rented it. It seemed strange to have none of the voices I had grown accustomed to. No Kevin Conroy as Batman, and no Mark Hamill as Joker.

My sense of things at the time was that for Joe Sixpack, it simply came down to CGI feeling fresh and hand drawn animation feeling old. A big part of that was the expanding use of CGI in live-action movies and video games. There was a sense that CGI was the future, you know? It was just harder for Disney to convince the average movie-goer that they were still relevant.

DreamWorks also stole some of Disney's thunder around that time simply for being one of the few animation studios with legit financial standing to explore things outside the Disney aesthetic. The best microcosm: Shrek was a huge hit and it was both CGI and perceived as anti-Disney. Sure, DreamWorks's actual track record is spotty at best, but there was a sense that at least they were something new and different.

I'll never really understand why Lilo & Stitch isn't a top-tier Disney film. The humor is sharp, the characters well developed, and the emotions provoked are strong. The finale is a bit too tidy, admittedly, but seeing everyone come together to really support Nani, Lilio, and Stitch is one of the most satisfying codas in the entire Disney canon.

So far, just over the weekend, without even consciously trying, I managed to see anime from every decade from the 1960s to 2010s. The real masterpiece is, of course, "Rose of Versailles" (1979) about Marie Antoinette and the events leading up to the French Revolution. Possibly the best anime drama series I've ever seen. I'm up to ep. 20 (I started the series during last year's challenge).



But the most pleasant surprise has been "Rainbow Sentai Robin" (1966), a black-and-white series about a cyborg superhero team in the vein of "Cyborg 009" (both series were created by the same man). Even though the episodes I have are in Japanese without subs., they're full of action and emotion and fairly easy to follow. There's also a dark, melancholy tone to it, enhanced by the music, that is a lot more effective, to me, than series that had more of a comic element. I have four tapes containing episodes of this show.

I liked the film but not having Mark Hamill voice the joker was a huge mistake. It took me right out of the movie.

I dropped cable last summer, so I could see something like that causing an issue at home. I don't have Netflix but the equivalent would be the internet going out.

After watching super hero cartoons yesterday and earlier this morning, I decided to take a break and look at what was on TV. I came across my first Disney movie of the Challenge. I watched "Mulan II", on Disney Jr. I enjoyed it, and thought it was a very heartwarming movie.

I'm going to have to see if they are replaying this. It's one of the few sequels I don't have. I didn't upgrade Mulan the last time, and they had it with that. (having looked, doesn't look like it's on any time soon )

I watched "Planes" today for the first time. I wasn't expecting greatness but I thought it was better than the reviews made out. Typical underdog comes from behind to win story.

Also spent about an hour watching shorts for the checklist. Watched "Harpya" and it was one of the weirdest shorts I've ever watched. And I've watched quite a few!

Planning on watching "Home on the Range" sometime tonight. Know that is supposed to be a bit of a clunker as well, but so far this challenge I've been lucky in that the clunkers have turned out to be watchable.

Thanks for the recommendation! I feel it's much better than the original but I like how they keep referencing to the original series. It's like they decided to do a version of Scooby-Doo that tries to answers the "what if" about the characters personal lives

I'm a huge fan of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated for both those reasons and many others. It draws a lot on Lovecraft's themes and mythos and merges this with other Scooby-Doo series as well as the Hanna-Barbera catalog. I think my favorite references were to the sadly cancelled 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo which featured Vincent Price and an ongoing objective. A modified version of Price's character shows up in Mystery Incorporated for a few very fun episodes.

Frankly, I'm just a big Scooby-Doo fan. With the exception of the live-action films, Shaggy and Scooby-Doo Get a Clue and a few of the direct-to-DVD films (Scooby-Doo and the Goblin King was particularly awful), I like most things Scooby related. There's something about those characters that makes me want to hit the road and solve mysteries with them.

I watched my fair share of Scooby growing up, but I think I missed that incarnation. However, "13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo" was my favorite! I loved Vincent Price before I even knew who he was and this was probably one of my first introductions to the man. I bought the DVDs when they first were released and only then realized that they never "finished" the ghost hunt which made me sad. I had thought that since I was only seeing random episodes here and there that I was just missing a couple that weren't aired frequently.

My other favorites are the ones with guest stars like Batman or the Harlem Globetrotters. They're so campy that they're just fun.

Did watch "Home on the Range" last night. Probably my least favorite of the Disney "classics" line, but I did chuckle in a few places. I think Roseanne's voice fit her character, and I liked Judi Dench in there too-but man, what a weird combination!

I think that two of the big "problems" stem from the mundane (yet still not familiar to most) reality of the Earth situation. Problem 1: the normalcy of the main characters. Aside from setting up the pain-in-the-neck bullying other girl, there seems to be less of a sense that the main characters are either "heroic" or "imperiled" enough to root for, as in a typical Disney film. Added to which, the older sister probably isn't a desperately good surrogate parent - which is normal and 'real', but somewhat against the expected spirit of escapist fantasy animation. Problem 2: the more-realistic sense of danger. While things like fear of death or discovery drive many (Disney) cartoons, they're counterbalanced by the tacit assumption that either it won't happen, or won't matter. On the other hand, fear that a family will be broken up seems from the evidence presented both likely and final.* Which - broadly, for me - overshadows the humour and ultimate resolution.

There's a mini 'villain problem', too, because there really isn't one: a fairly incompetent "hunter" and a justified government agent. Both of whom eventually wind up being OK.



*I suppose maybe I think the emotions provoked are really too strong, because there's no back-up comfort zone.

Animaniacs is still hilarious. Perhaps a little spotty and outdated in part, but really.... there's the brilliant satire and spoofs, including fairly clever takes on things like Les Mis and West Side Story, but they're side-by-side with mini history lessons and references to surely some of the most obscure and unlikely things to wind up in a children's programme. They mock WB properties constantly, but also lampoon Alien and The Sound of Music, etc. Fourth-wall breaking, visual gags including changing and mocking subtitles, but also belching to classic music and occasional blue jokes that would sail over most heads. I'm sure I'm only understanding a quarter of the references and gags, but it's still great! (The Wheel of Morality is particularly hilarious.)

Super Friends is.... either awful or sublime. The superheroes are utterly useless, and the dog is the cleverest on display half the time. Casual sexism abounds, and I do wonder why they felt the need to write in two useless teenagers rather than just use Snapper Carr. A stripped-down JLA really highlights the uselessness of Aquaman, but also underlines constantly the relative pointlessness in this incarnation of everyone-but-Superman. The villains and plots so far have been laughable, and at forty-odd minutes, it's way too long. Plus... is it not just a total rip-off of Scooby-Doo? Right down to noises and interplay...

Most odd, perhaps, are the villains in episode two who demand a million dollars. And then, to tie up the Justice League, utilise their submarine, abandoned fairground, boxful of kryptonite and secret hideouts. Which presumably is why they're low on money...!

While I enjoyed the various incarnations of the Super Friends, the first season was the one season I could not stand, so I know exactly where you are coming from in that respect.

Earlier today I watched a half hour episode of a South American Cars knock off, called The Little Cars: The Great Race on one of my Roku channels. While it wasn't great by any means, as knock off titles go, it was watchable.

IMHO almost all attempts in the 60s & 70s to bring DC comics superheros to cartoon form were pretty bad. It took Batman: The Animated Series to change my mind about DC animated material being consistently bad. In all fairness, my opinion of Marvel animated material isn't much better. In my eyes almost all "superhero" cartoons were pretty awful until B:TAS. Since it came out there have been several "good" ones.

I agree with the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? comment. But Hanna-Barbera were notorious (at least to me) with their constant re-use of scripts, voices, musical cues, sound effects, and more in their series. To me they were the kings of recycling as all they seemed to do was change the names, locations, and animal types of characters to get a new series from old scripts. Because of that practice, by the early 70s I got to where I'd not bother with a *new* cartoon if it came from Hanna-Barbera. Of course the practice was very successful and many other animation studios copied it, further cementing my dislike of "modern" cartoons (i.e. 1970 and newer). And that's sad because HB are also responsible for some of my all-time favorite animated series - but most were produced before their big recycle production method truly began.

Aquaman isn't useless if you're using him right. He can make Sharknado.

Agree with both of your statements. For me, Batman: The Animated Series is probably the best Batman adaptation.

I was a huge fan of Hanna-Barbera growing up. (Thank you, Cartoon Network people for Boomerang and later the Boomerang channel.) However, it seems to me that they would throw a bunch of shows at the wall, see what stuck, and then create numerous emulations of the shows that found an audience. There are lots of Scooby-Doo clones.

The book is called Monty Python's Flying Circus: An Utterly Complete, Thoroughly Unillustrated, Absolutely Unauthorized Guide to Possibly All the References.

Unfortunately, one wildcard wouldn't cut it for an entire series, but I've now left the book at my parents because it was too big for my luggage so I guess I'm waiting for comedy month after all!

I was in the mood for some Darkseid Super Friends episodes, so I skipped ahead a few seasons to the Legendary Super Powers Show incarnation.

Thanks! I'm curious to get your impression of the tome. The single review on Amazon wasn't too positive - mainly based on the way the material is organized. A quick "look inside" shows there's *lots* of interesting and informative material but, like the single reviewer, I think it would have been better organized by presenting the information in chronological order as it appeared in the show. As presented, it truly looks like a book for someone who knows the sketches forwards and backwards and who's looking for more perspective. I'll be picking up a copy of this one at some point for its wealth of information.

After a bit of research/reading I purchased a copy of:

Monty Python's Flying Circus: Complete and Annotated...All the Bits

What sold me on this one instead was this from the description:
It doesn't have as many, or as detailed, notes as Monty Python's Flying Circus: An Utterly Complete, Thoroughly Unillustrated, Absolutely Unauthorized Guide to Possibly All the References, but having the original script annotated is a big attraction. I'm curious to see where the aired versions deviated and what was left out.