Plastic Man - The Complete Collection

Originally created for Quality Comics by Jack Cole, Plastic Man had the ability to alter his body into any form he needed. After a cameo in Super Friends, Ruby-Spears Productions put him in his own Saturday morning cartoon series airing from 1979 to 1981. While this set doesn’t actually contain the “complete” animated adventures of Plastic Man, the 35 episodes contained herein are the from the first season when the show was known as The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show.

In these cartoons Plastic Man (Michael Bell, who Super Friends watchers will recognize as Zan the Wonder Twin) appears to be some type of government agent assigned missions by a woman known as the Chief. He travels the world battling villains and is aided by the bad luck-inducing Hula Hula, a Hawaiian fellow based on Lou Costello. Considering how often he gums up the works, it is surprising Plas would continually work with the guy. Also on the team is  Penny, who has a crush on Plas though he is oblivious because he is into the Chief. However, it will pay off for Penny because in the second season she is married to Plas and they have Baby Plas. Although those adventures aren’t collected here, you can see what Baby Plas looks like because the last three cartoons feature the opening credits for the second season, known as The Plastic Man - Baby Plas Super Comedy Show.

Fans who remember The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show will likely be disappointed to find only the “Plastic Man” adventures. The series also featured cartoons starring Mighty Man & Yukk, a tiny superhero and his ugly dog; Fangface, a werewolf who solved crimes with a group of teenagers a la Scooby Doo; and Rickety Rocket who was similar to Speed Buggy.

Told in either 22-minute or 11-minute segments, the stories are all basically the same with Plas saving the day. What’s interesting is he doesn’t always pick the most expeditious form to change into to solve things. As an adult, the lack of conflict and surprise could be overlooked if the humor was funny enough, but it isn’t. Plastic Man is much better suited for very young children.

The collection contains two special features, though their locations are incorrectly listed on the liner notes. “PLAS-tastic: A Brief History of Plastic Man” (14 min) appears on Disc 1 and is an informative piece about the character, but the television series gets minimal coverage. It also deals with a pilot that didn’t get picked up and the character’s appearance on Cartoon Network’s Batman: The Brave and the Bold. “Puddle Trouble” the aforementioned pilot, developed by Andy Suriano and Tom Kenny (voice of SpongeBob Squarepants), is closer to the spirit of the original comic. It’s actually pretty amusing so it’s surprising no one went ahead and made a series out of it.

Opening credits:

The Jetsons - Season 2, Volume 1

Following the success of The Flintstones, Hanna Barbera took the same basic premise of transporting a traditional sitcom in time but sent it into the future by 100 years, creating The Jetsons, who resembled the typical American family. George Jetson and Jane, his wife, had two kids (“his boy Elroy/ daughter Judy”) and a dog named Astro.

After airing in prime time from 1962 to 1963, the 24 episodes ran on Saturday mornings for years. Two decades later, the series’ on-going popularity spawned new episodes for syndication, first airing in the fall of 1985. This three-disc set presents 21 episodes from throughout the second season, though not ordered by airdate.

This new production finds the premise of the show more directed towards an audience of children. The science-fiction aspect was played up more in the stories and computers are much more prominent. The Jetsons family also had a new addition in the form of an alien named Orbitty, a small gremlin-type creature with springs for legs that changed colors to reflect its mood. While decent enough for kids, as an adult I didn’t find the stories to be particularly funny or memorable.

The entire cast is reunited for this new round of production, including legendary voice talents Mel Blanc (George’s boss, Mr. Spacely) and Hanna Barbera regulars Daws Butler (Elroy) and Don Messick (Astro), which is great for continuity.

The Jetsons' original opening credits were used with a slightly different arrangement of the theme song. A difference in the animation can be seen, particularly in the brightness of the colors. I was disappointed that the closing credits were changed from the original series where George takes Astro out for a walk on the sidewalk treadmill

On disc 2 there is the lone Special Feature of the set: “The Jetsons Return to the Future” a much-too-short, eight-minute documentary about the new series with people who worked on the show and animation historians. For an animation fan, it is the most interesting item of the set.

The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show - The Complete Series

Thomas Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again. With the advent of the Saturday morning shows of my youth making their way to DVD, I have discovered some are still enjoyable to my adult sensibilities while others leave me disappointed and scratching my head over the suspect tastes of El Bicho Past. Sad to say, The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show falls into the latter category. While I never reminisced about the show with friends, once I saw the title I instantly remembered it as a zany sketch show that I enjoyed as a kid.

Bill, Mark, and Brett were The Hudson Brothers, a minor pop trio that had a TV variety hour on CBS Wednesday night during the summer of 1974. The combination of musical performances and comedy sketches was very similar to Sonny and Cher, and Tony Orlando and Dawn, which was no coincidence as the same production company made them. For some reason, the show morphed into the half-hour long The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show airing on Saturdays.

The show had a basic template. The brothers opened the show and encountered Fabulous Freddie, a child actor who posed as Vice President of Children’s Programming. After offering a treat to the brothers who would politely decline (“No thanks. We’re trying to cut down”), they would lip-synch a song. Next up was my favorite segment of the series: Rob Hull and Emu. Even over thirty years later, their bits still are impressive because Hull’s puppetry skills make Emu realistic and it’s hard not to laugh at the sheer silliness and havoc Hull creates. After the break, the “Razzle Dazzle Wrap Up” presented a series of sketches, some of them recurring like Bill trying to read from “Book of Strange Things,” a group of Frankensteins who create people of different occupations, and “Sam Bear Private Eye.” The show closed with the brothers not wanting to end the show and a net would have to drag them out.

Supporting the Hudson brothers was a cast of regulars that featured Billy Van, from the hysterical Hilarious House of Frightenstein, and Murray Langston, who would go on to become The Unknown Comic from Chuck Barris’ The Gong Show.

What’s amazing in these sixteen episodes is the limited amount of content. Minus the commercial time and accompanying bumpers, the opening and closing credits, and the repurposed introductions to sketches, the show only runs 15 minutes. The lip-synch and the overuse of laugh tracks and audience response is dated and hard to take, especially when the humor is nowhere near the level of the canned response.

Although he said he liked it, nine-year-old Sobrino Poco Loco only smiled, but he never laughed. His favorite sketch was “The Adventures of Chucky Margolis” because Chucky and his friend Allen “both act dumb and funny.” He also enjoyed the bear, the multiple Supermans, and the little boy (Freddie) who he only eats candy, but thought it was weird when they dressed up like Elvis as The 3 Galoshes.

There are a few special features. “The Best Sketches of The Hudson Brothers Show” should be a kick for TV fans as McLean Stevenson, Ken Berry, Stephanie Edwards, Ronnie Graham, Andy Griffith, and Danny Thomas guest star. However, if these are the best sketches, and there are some good ones with Karl Marx (Griffith) as the fourth Marx Brother and a father frustrated with his sons, The Parker Brothers, always playing games, the worst ones have to be pretty bad. There are also three Chucky Margolis sketches.

Certainly safe to leave a kid in front, but adults may want to rent it rather than buy to see if the series lives up to their memories of it.

Freakazoid! - Season 1

After a bad spell through the 1980s of lame cartoons created to sell toy merchandise, Saturday mornings in the 1990s offered better options than sleeping off Friday night’s debauchery. While the major networks reprogrammed the timeslots, in part due to competition from cable, FOX stood its ground and made dragging yourself out of bed mandatory with shows like X-Men, Spider-Man, The Tick, and Life With Louie. The former WB had its own offering over the years, but the only thing that caught my attention there was the zany Freakazoid!

Batman: The Animated Series producers Bruce Timm and Paul Dini first developed Freakazoid! as an action superhero series, but executive producer Steven Spielberg wanted more wacky comedy in the vein of his other cartoon series Animaniacs. Timm left and producer Tom Ruegger was brought over from Animaniacs and with his writing team turned the series into non-stop nonsense. Dini stayed and provided a few scripts.

Freakazoid! spoofs superhero anthology shows presenting stories about our main hero and occasional vignettes of other characters like Toby Danger (Johnny Quest) and Fatman and Boy Blubber (Batman and Robin). Each episode is littered with pop-culture references and silliness abounds at break-neck pace. The series has to work better for adults because there’s a lot of topical material that hasn’t aged. Young kids today, or even back then, likely won’t know who Tom Snyder or Kathie Lee Gifford is, but they should enjoy the goofiness of Freakazoid running around making a shooshing noise to simulate flight and Scream-o-vision, which allows the audience to take part in the episode when “Scream” flashes up on the screen.

The scripts are complete anarchy as the characters not only break the fourth wall, but executive producer Spielberg makes a number of appearances as do the Animaniacs, Paul Harvey is cut to often so he can provide exposition, and Jack Valenti who provided his own voice explains the rating system. There is no logic in this world other than going a gag.

The show isn’t as funny as I remember. It’s quite possible that the grogginess from an inadequate amount of sleep and the effects of the night before still in my system increased my pleasure or at least affected my memory. The show is amusing, but I found myself more often puzzled by what I was seeing rather than laughing out loud as I watched with my pal, Fantasma el Rey.

Fourteen episodes are available on two discs, one with material on both sides. Extras include three commentary tracks with Ruegger, writer/voice of Freakazoid Paul Rugg, and writer John McCann. They found the show much funnier than we did. There is also a short feature that provides a history of Freakazoid! and parody promos of the series.

The major flaw in the release is video image doesn’t look good. Compression artifacts appear throughout. Warner Brothers usually takes great care with their animation releases, but since this series only has a cult following, presentation likely wasn’t a priority, and they just rushed it out to the market, which is unfortunate.

The Tick vs. Season Two

The Tick started as a comic book superhero spoof from NEC Comics. Our hero’s abilities include nigh invincibility, super strength, and drama power, which causes his abilities to increase during dramatic moments. His commitment to protecting The City along with his flair for expressive yet bizarre speeches compensate for his lack of intelligence. The best catchphrase he could come up with for heading into battle was “Spoon!” due in part because he was eating breakfast at the time. He has no secret identity and always wears his costume, if that blue suit is actually a costume.

In 1994, he first appeared on FOX Saturday mornings joined by his sidekick Arthur, an accountant with a moth suit, although some mistake him for a bunny, that grants him the power of flight. Other superheroes that populate The City are Die Fledermaus, American Maid, and The Sewer Urchin, parodies of Batman, Wonder Woman, and a cross between Aquaman and Rain Man.

The series is very outlandish and hysterical. There is no telling where the plot is going. It is a universe where anything can happen, and does, because the writers make it all plausible. The viewer doesn’t think twice when the Tick carves a sidekick out of wood when Arthur falls for a girl or when the Tick and Arthur get framed after they lose their arms to the villains Venus and Milo, who place them on robots and conduct a women’s wear crime spree. One of the funniest and oddest moments of the entire series is when Charles, a young boy who wants to be the Tick’s nemesis a.k.a. the Brainchild, kidnaps the Tick and renders him powerless by turning him into a two-headed bird that speaks French. The show's format is played with in the COPS-parody episode “Heroes.”

Voice actor Townsend Coleman perfectly captures the different aspects of the Tick’s personality, from his bravado to his breakdowns. Rob Paulsen took over this season as Arthur from Mickey Dolenz.

Season Two ran Saturday mornings on FOX from Sept 1995 to February 1996. Combined with the first season of Life With Louie, they made for the funniest hour of Saturday morning cartoons, well worth getting up for. Like the previous season set, Season Two is not complete as an episode, #15 “Alone Together,” is not included. No doubt a Tick fan will eventually make it available online in some form. Both omissions were written by future the Venture Bros. creator Christopher McCullough. Coincidence?

Amazingly, the set has no bonus features, which isn’t surprising as the Season One set didn’t either. It is disappointing though as Disc Two only has 85 minutes of content, so there’s plenty of room to have created something for fans of the show that will buy it. It’s surely the work of a super villain.

The Tick Season Two Trailer

THE GHOST BUSTERS

The Ghost Busters was a live action Saturday morning kid’s show in 1975 by Filmation, well before Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd battled The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man on the silver screen. The show reunited Forrest Tucker and Larry Storch from F-Troop. They played Jake Kong and Eddie Spenser and were assisted by Tracy the Gorilla.

There were 15 shows produced and they all had the same plot. A couple of ghosts would appear in the local graveyard and take up residence in the local castle. Tracy and Spenser would go to a store to get their assignment, which was a taped message inside some ordinary object like a cream pie, a plotted plant, or a mounted deer head. A recurring gag had the message self-destruct in Tracy’s hands a la Mission Impossible after five seconds, usually leaving him slightly charred.

The ghosts’ plans usually required someone who resembled Spenser or was as dumb as he was. After some requisite running around inside castle (i.e. two sets), the plans were always foiled, usually by something Tracy had in his bag. Kong would then return them to wherever they came from with The Dematerializer.

Some of the ghosts were generic bad guys, pirates and Vikings, while others were specific, The Canterville Ghost and The Red Baron. Most of the big movie monsters made an appearance: Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, and both Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For some reason, they were identified as ghosts rather than monsters, but I doubt the kids the show is aimed at would realize that. Besides, when one of the heroes is a gorilla who can drive a car and carries around a seltzer bottle, laughs are a high priority than logic.

The show got a lot of well-known actors as guest stars: Billy Barty, Jim Backus, Ted Knight, Joe E. Ross, and Howard Morris, creating a Groovie Goolies reunion with Storch. In two different episodes, Huntz Hall appeared as Gronk. He was an assistant to a witch and to Merlin. There was no acknowledgement of this.

The Ghost Busters will be good for young children and nostalgic Gen-Xers. It might be too silly for everyone else as the comedy is gags, puns, and slapstick. Even though there are monsters, nothing scary happens. The video quality is adequate. Nothing was done to improve it, and one episode had some digital artifacts.

Special Features include interviews with producer Lou Scheimer and Bob Burns, the “trainer” for Tracy the Gorilla, photo galleries, and an episode of the animated version of Ghost Busters, which came out after the success of the movie. With a DVD-ROM, the scripts for all 15 shows are available.