Thursday, June 01, 2006
Editorial: DVD - What's Left? Part 2
Ralph Bakshi, a veteran animator best known for the X-Rated feature Fritz the Cat, was trying to pitch some new cartoons to CBS, but the network was uninterested in developing new characters. "Not really interested in developing new characters," he was told. "Do you have any established properties?" He didn't, but decided to bluff. "SHORE! I got MIGHTY MOUSE!"
Bakshi, for the most part, handed the reigns of the show to a young animator named John Kricfalusi, who produced a cartoon completely unlike anything that had been produced for television over the previous 20 years. The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse didn't look like an animated sitcom, it looked like a cartoon. Characters' eyes bugged out, their bodies contorted into impossible shapes, they exploded out of the screen. And it was genuinely funny. Like, laugh-out-loud, piss-your-pants funny. One recurring character was Mighty Mouse's friend, Batbat, a mild mannered bat who dressed up like a bat to fight crime. Another episode featured supervillain The Cow taking on The League of Super Rodents, an army of superhero spoofs, with "Three legs tied behind my back and my tongue taped to the ceiling."
Its run didn't last long. The cancellation after one season is generally chalked up to a conservative watchdog group that objected to a scene where Mighty Mouse snorted the powdered remains of a crushed flower, a visual drug gag that lasted maybe 2 seconds and which would have flown over the heads of any kids watching, but which was enough to send parents into a caring frenzy during the height of Just Say No hysteria. But the truth is, something this weird probably didn't have a long life expectancy on a network schedule in the first place. It probably survived as long as it did by having PeeWee's Playhouse, a similar adult-comedy-disguised-as-a-kid's-show, as a lead-in, but PeeWee's career was about to be cut short by scandal itself.
Although a second season was apparently completed, only a single episode aired, featuring a Scooby Doo parody that ended with Mighty Mouse being "unmasked," only to reveal "nothing in here but some veins and tendons." In a freak screwup of marketing, Mighty Mouse and The Cow action figures showed up at Burger King 6 months after the show had been cancelled. Now all that's left are sketchy memories, although you can get a glimpse of the greatness, preserved in low-resolution for posterity, here.
Ignored though the show had been, its influence could be felt throughout the cartoon world over the next few years, as Kricfalusi went on to birth Ren & Stimpy, changing the face of TV animation, and shows like Animaniacs and Freakazoid at least made Saturday mornings better than they had been in the days of Smurfs, Snorks and Shmoos. Soon, Cartoon Network would be developing a stable of twisted cartoons, Fox would have it's biggest hit with an animated sitcom, and Batman: The Animated Series would prove more satisfying to most fans than the live action movies it spun off from.
Kricfalusi, for his part, hated most of the new breed. "Tiny Toons took everything we tried in Mighty Mouse that didn't work," he said in an interview with the Onion AV Club. "They took all our mistakes, and created their own style around them." This writer would have to agree, but the generation of kids that got to watch Tiny Toons instead of the thousandth reworking of Scooby Doo might not. At any rate, there is a definite line that can be drawn at The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse. Before TNAoMM, TV animation was a uniform wasteland. It is difficult to look at the timeline and not see TNAoMM as a turning point, the Nirvana of televised animation. And although Ren & Stimpy is undoubtedly more popular, I still prefer the more chaotic Mighty Mouse cartoons, which are free of the "gross-out" humor of most Ren & Stimpy episodes.
And as such, you would think a DVD would be in the works somewhere. For its historical significance, for the popularity of John Kricfalusi, for the increasing popularity of bizarre cartoons, a DVD release seems like a no-brainer for the folks at CBS, Viacom, or whatever company owns the rights (and I can't find any evidence online that it is a rights dispute that's holding it up). There is, of course, an internet petition, if signing one of those makes you feel better. But we need a release of this series badly. A barebones collection would be fine, and at this point it's more than I expect, but when you've got two characters as outspoken as Bakshi and Kricfalusi involved, it would seem an enormous waste not to get them in a room together to record a commentary track.
Sources and Resources:
Onion AV Club interview with John Kricfalusi
Harry McCracken interview with Kricfalusi from 1988
New Adventures of Mighty Mouse episode guide at TV.com
ASIFA-Hollywood Biographies on Ralph Bakshi and John Kricfalusi
Ralph Bakshi's Official Site has a gallery of Mighty Mouse images
And John Kricfalusi's blog is always a good read!
Read or Post a Comment
I just vaguely remember this...but I'd love to get a set and check it out.
Fantastic article.
Thanks!
Quite well done and informative, good job.
Real fond memories of this. I can still recall the theme song from MM. I really hope this gets the home video treatment someday.
Wonderful write-up, Z.