Let's Take A Breather

So...what did I do this April?

Nothing much, really. Well, STUFF did happen. Easter happened, people died, some people went crazy.

I saw the Mario Galaxy movie, at least. My verdict? I liked it more than the first one. The first one had a better story, this one had more action. And way fewer random needle drops! But this was relentless. I read a review that called it "made for the Youtube Shorts generation" and I couldn't get it out of my head. A thing happens, they go to the next thing, repeat until the credits pop up. Nothing gets to breathe and lots of characters are just...there. Bowser in particular has an inconsistent arc.

But it's a treat for folks like me that love the deep cuts of Mario lore. So many times I was like Leo DiCaprio pointing at the screen to see this thing or that thing remembered, let alone on a big screen in HD. I wish we weren't spoiled on Star Fox or the SMB 2 villains, but they looked gorgeous. There were a few other cool cameos and Easter Eggs I won't spoil, but it's been out for almost a month, you probably know what they are by now.

No Wario, Waluigi, or the Koopalings, though. They're like the only major Mario characters that haven't shown up yet. They must be saving them for the next movie.

And if you're aware of Frinkiac, the site where you can look up Simpsons screenshots and make gifs out of them, someone recently made one for King of The Hill

And The Venture Bros.

Boompane and Spanakopedia, respectively, have been godsends for the meme community. But while Frinkiac worked with static images, you could make actual clips with these sites. With audio. And (just about) every episode of those shows are on there, even the Hulu reboot season for King of The Hill. That...kinda technically makes them pirate sites. Even if the clips can't be longer than a minute. So enjoy them while you can, folks.

And we were watching a Super Champion on Jeopardy!

Jamie Ding was on a 31 game streak, and was finally knocked out this past Monday. He came close to losing a few times, like in a really good one last week with Patrick. But his buzzer game was one of the strongest I'd ever seen, and a lot of his episodes looked like this Far Side comic.

Greg, the guy who beat him was a chess champion who was faster than Jamie was. Although to do so he needed a "buzz first, think later" approach. It was successful at beating Jamie at his own game, but the rest of the games he played this week, to buzz in and have a brain fart almost every single time while keeping the rest of us in suspense was...not at all frustrating to watch. It happens to the best of us, but every time? He was knocked out today by someone who was able to grab the Daily Doubles from him.

Weird Al sums it up better than I do:

And then I did have one great pickup this month:

A new cel! I've been wanting a Scooby-Doo cel forever, but they're usually pricey as hell. Old series, iconic series, iconic characters? Good luck paying for less than triple digits.

But this one I got an actual good deal on. It's from 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo. Most cheap cels from this show that pop up on eBay either have half of a character, or they're really tiny, or it's some no name extra, or it's Flim Flam. I found one that has most of Scooby (he's missing his tail), and all of Flim Flam. Well, it's no Vincent van Ghoul, but I couldn't pass this opportunity up.

The background is a reproduction, and it's not even from the original scene. It originally looked like this: 

I don't blame the seller for including a background that made the characters pop better. This particular cel is from episode 3, "Scoobra Cadabra," where for some reason they disguise themselves as used car salesmen in this scene.

The frame pops up at around 1:37 in the video.

Oh! And one of my Seattle cousins sent me this care package out of the blue

All cool stuff from the Funko HQ store in Everett, Washington. You might recall that I visited it during my Seattle trip last year.

And one of my other cousins that lives in Arizona took her family to Disneyland a few weeks ago and sent me this guidemap in the mail that I wasn't expecting at all.

You have no idea how happy I am that Disneyland still makes these. And it checks off a lot of my boxes: Disney theme parks. Guidemaps. Anniversary promotion (still in the middle of the 70th anniversary!). And Bluey!

Don't know what I did to deserve these gifts, but I welcome them.

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Flintstones Turn 60?!

This month was absolute shit. Death, depression, floods, injuries, impending doom (more so than usual).

But enough about last week, let's turn our attention towards something good:

The Flintstones premiered on this date SIXTY years ago!

It seems like just yesterday I was writing about the fiftieth anniversary back in 2010. Yes, I've been blogging for so long, my old posts now have sequels a decade later. It's weird knowing shows that you grew up on were the same ones that your parents and grandparents watched back in the day. There would be no prime time animation, or animated sitcoms without it. So, basically a blessing and a curse.

They really need to meet up with the Jetsons again. It's been far too long.

I already showed off this cel I bought a few months back, but it's worth seeing again. But speaking of cels, I recently picked up this one:

They're a pair of cels (and the drawing) from some episode of Yogi's Space Race. Hey, it had Jabberjaw on it, I HAD to get it. The drawings might be tiny, but they're really clean and clear. This sat on eBay for five bucks until an hour before it ended, but I still managed to snag them for a decent price.

I really need to get around to reading this, I keep hearing good things. It got dark, but I keep telling myself "what can DC comics do to the Flintstone that Hanna Barbera already did to it?"

It's even signed by Mark Russell, the artist, to boot! He was a nice guy.

Speaking of comics, I managed to finally snag a copy of the comic where they went to the 1964 NY World's Fair a while back. Again, I need to get around to reading this, the cover alone is really charming.

Did you know there was an episode late in the series where they actually went to the fair? The show got weird near the end, time machines were involved. Oddly enough, Gazoo WASN'T in that one.

And you might've known that the Flintstones once shilled for Winston cigarettes, but did you know that there were three different commercials? The one where Fred and Barney duck out of yard work is the most famous one, but it's still weird to see someone have a record of a cigarette jingle, 

or watching a cartoon character actually go into a tobacco shop.

Fred didn't even pay for that already opened pack of smokes. He was right to just leave Rocky out in the cold like that.

And I have to share what's one of the more baffling Flintstones projects: Fred & Barney Meet The Thing

The only time the two actually crossed over was in this intro, the show itself was a package of a half hour episode of "The New Fred and Barney Show" and two 11 minute segments of a Thing cartoon. And this version of the Thing wasn't a member of the Fantastic Four. No, it was about the adventures of young Benji Grimm in current day America, who fought crime by turning into The Thing with some help from a magic ring. Hard to believe this only lasted thirteen episodes, really.

Here's to sixty years, Flintstones, and here's to sixty more! Do kids know anything about the Flintstones these days apart from the vitamins and the cereals?

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The Great Muppet Mural

June is over. Thank God.

This month started with giant nails in my tires.

My mom's, too.

Thanks to some drunken idiot from a party next door that got too loud. Can you blame my parents for wanting them to quiet down? This was at 10:30 at night on a SUNDAY. We all had work the next day. And we got rewarded with nails meant for cement embedded in our tires. I caught one the next morning just laying in front of one of my tires.

I unfortunately didn't catch the other one until it was too late. That was a fun trip to the shop. And it turns out that my other tires were rotting so I had to get THEM replaced, too.

It didn't get much better after that, frankly.

I wanted to talk about other things, like finally completing the Smash Amiibo collection with Isabelle finally showing up after preordering it from Best Buy months ago.

Well, Joker and Hero got announced, but it'll be a while before they're released. Until then, I have them all.

I also wanted to show off two (former) Carvel stands on Long Island.

Marshall's in Massapequa. Right next door to All American, to boot. That place was NOT observing social distancing at all.

And Marvel Ice Cream in Long Beach. Thanos sale, half off!

Some day I'll go inside them. I just happened to pass it the other day.

I also wanted to talk about how I almost bought this cel from A Pup Named Scooby-Doo.

It was pretty cheap but there was a bidding war going on for it so I didn't engage. Such a shame, too, because you don't find a genuine Kennedy pose every day.

Or how I DID buy this production (not cel) drawing of Dick Dastardly and Muttley. It was made for The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera ride at Universal and it was a real trip to find it. I had NEVER seen even a cel from it until now. I had to snatch it.

The paper it was on was bigger than I expected, and the drawing much smaller.

Here's the main ride in its entirety. It looks like the exact shot shows up around three minutes in.

I honestly didn't think there were cels, since most of the ride is CGI. Fun fact: Don Bluth's company handled the animation, and it certainly shows. The CGI doesn't look as cutting edge as it did in 1990, but the animation as a whole held up pretty well.

But today I'd like to show you how June ended for me.

So this odd looking Muppet mural has been in my basement since before my family moved in. And I've lived here for roughly 32 years.

Well, today my family realized that one of the pipes in a room on the other side of the basement was leaking. Don't worry, it wasn't anything too serious, a lot of stuff had to be moved around and the only thing that was wrecked was a package of paper towels.

But my dad yanked out the insulation in the wall under the pipe and discovered that the mural was bigger than we thought.

That is what I assume is Miss Piggy in a carpenter outfit. The colors really pop because I'm pretty sure that this was the first time she's seen the light of day in around 30 years. Gonna admit, this one's gonna haunt me for a while.

I tried to pry open some insulation next to Piggy and found this:

It's kinda hard to make out, but I'm assuming that this is supposed to be Fozzie. For one, it's brown, and he's the only major muppet that isn't represented in this. It's really odd since a stairwell separates the two rooms here, so this must've been painted before it was added. That's odd in itself because the only other way in and out of the basement is through one of those passageways that open up out of the ground.

Like that, really.

And here's proof that I didn't just swipe all of this from Reddit or something, as if my hand in the third picture wasn't proof enough.

So...is my house cursed? Half of my timeline says yes, the other says no.

If I survive, I'll see you all in July.

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Let's Talk About The Banana Splits

One of my favorite shows from my childhood was The Banana Splits Show.

For those not in the know, it was a variety show that was produced by Hanna-Barbera back in 1968 that starred the titular group as a fictional rock band doing funny skits and fooling around in their clubhouse. You had Fleegle the dog (Paul Winchell), Bingo the ape (Daws Butler), Drooper the lion (Allan Melvin), and Snorky the elephant (he only honked). After Beatlemania, fake rock/pop bands were all the rage like the Archies, The Monkees, and the like and Hanna-Barbera wanted their own slice of the pie. And like most fake bands, how they sounded when they talked vs how they sung were wildly different.

Here's a music video of one of their songs.

And here's a video of some of their sketches:

See? The kids of the 60s were easily fooled, I guess. If the style of the costumes and sets seemed familiar, they were made by Sid Marty Krofft in their first TV gig. The show only ran for 31 episodes, and would've continued on if the Kroffts weren't offered a better deal to start their own show. HR Pufnstuf was made in its place and the rest was Krofft history.

Since it turns 50 years old this year, it's admittedly before my time, but I used to see it in the early mornings on TV back when I was young. I want to say it was on TBS? I know it didn't see it on Cartoon Network since my house never got it until at least 1996. The sets, the costumes, the colors really hit a bunch of my buttons and I couldn't get enough of them. It was a long stretch of time before I rediscovered them on Boomerang around, jeez, seven years ago? And it was worth the wait, it was like waiting for the bus for summer camp all over again.

But you can never forget that famous theme song:

I love that intro so much. They're just dicking around an amusement park, it's every kids dream. The first season they're running around Six Flags Over Texas (the OG!), but the second season they were doing stuff in the now-defunct Coney Island in Ohio:

The second season also made Snorky furry for some reason. But like most things concerning the Kroffts, we don't tend to ask what led to their creative decisions. And like everyone else, I wanted one of those Banana Buggies for myself.

And since that theme song is stuck in your head, I can't let that go by without mentioning the time Liz Phair covered it for Saturday Morning Cartoons' Greatest Hits, one of my favorite albums ever.

And even earlier by The Dickies.

Amazing to see people who have only learned about this show through Kick Ass.

Each episode had a variety of segments. You usually had a few short segments with the Banana Splits themselves, but they also had a live-action serial called Danger Island:

It was about a group of explorers fending off pirates with the help of a native man named Chongo. ("Uh-oh, Chongo!" was the famous catch phrase of the show) Notably starring Jan Michael Vincent and directed by a before-he-was-famous Richard Donner, this was usually the best segment in the show.

And depending on the episode, the cartoon you saw were either The Three Musketeers

or The Arabian Knights.

They were pretty much the same cartoon, but in different settings. A team of heroes, an animal sidekick and some kids fighting bad guys. In syndicated runs, some of these segments (usually Danger Island) would be replaced by shorts from the Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show. The Boomerang cuts thankfully restored everything.

In addition to those segments, sometimes you saw really bizarre ones like Hold The Bus.

I can't explain that, either. All I know is that it's one of the oldest videos on all of youtube.

In 1972 they starred in The Banana Splits in Hocus Pocus Park, their only full-length adventure.

After YEARS of looking for it, someone uploaded the whole thing to youtube and I immediately had to watch it. It was mostly animated with live-action wraparounds and sadly what you see above is only the live-action parts. I'm gonna cut to the chase, that's the best part as the rest of the movie is a boring, plodding mess.

The plot is that a little girl the Banana Splits were giving a tour to was kidnapped by a witch that lived in a cartoon forest and the band rushes in to rescue her. There's lots of arguing and dumb puns and schemes that go nowhere. The two henchmen that try to fend off the Splits end up teaming up with them, rescue the girl, and then they hold a concert. The end.

Lot of great faces though. Like this one with Drooper:

And these:

Good thing I managed to screen cap as much as I could, as I'm afraid it's lost to the ether again.

I was warned that I wasn't going to like it, and I didn't listen and I hate that I didn't listen. It's still worth watching not because it's the only time the Banana Splits have been animated, but all of the early Kings Island footage is frankly incredible. There's not a lot of good footage of theme parks before the 90s with all the advances of camcorder technology, and the footage in that cut of the movie is as crisp as you can find it.

They've had a few attempts at revivals over the years, like some shorts that aired on Boomerang several years ago:

Plus this really creepy video from Web Premiere Toons that was made during the early days of internet videos where we had to watch on a dialup connection.

The video cuts off before the audio does and I'm honestly scared by it.

And just last year, they teamed up with the Suicide Squad of all things in a comic.

I'll tell you, that story is NUTS and certainly worth the read. They're just as dumb and corny as you remember, but now they're realistic animals and they're packing heat.

How much do I love the Banana Splits despite much of it being not that good?

I currently have a poster of this hanging over my couch. Yes ladies, I'm single.

And I managed to pick up two of Funko's Dorbz Ridez of Fleegle and Drooper (my favorites) from New York Comic Con a few years ago. Since all four of them were limited to 300 pieces each, it’s gonna be kind of a hassle to get Bingo and Snorky’s since those two were never released outside of San Diego Comic Con and their going rate is around $60 each.

And that's all a buildup to my latest mail call:

Banana Splits Funko Pops!! Ever since the Dorbz were made I’d been begging Funko to make pops of these and this year they finally delivered! When SDCC came around, they announced these guys and I was so excited...until I saw that they were limited to 4000 pieces each, with a small portion of that being released to their online store...which tends to sell out their exclusives within minutes. If I know my math, 4000 is a lot more than 300 and even though exclusives with that large of a run tend to not go for much money on the secondary market, I already resigned myself to paying far more than their original $15 price tag for each of them. These were going to be another one of my white whales, like the Frankenberry pop turned into.

But as luck would have it, I was on the Funko shop on the first day of comic con, thinking the sale list that was leaked to collectors was fake, there they were available to buy. There were not many things I have done in my life as fast as I bought these, folks. I know consumerism is the devil and I almost gave myself a heart attack over literal stuff, but I managed to beat everyone to the punch. Hell, I went to a toy show the next weekend and I talked to vendors that were pretty mad that they missed it and I got to rub it in their faces.

I'll confess that Bingo was never my favorite, but his pop won me over. It look fantastic and his big grin is what draws me in. When people tell you that Funko Pops look bland and ugly, I advise you to point to these guys. These are three inches of sculpted art, and I'm sticking to that.

The main problem I have is that the writing has been consistently terrible for these guys. I know that it's not high art and aimed at kids, but it could seriously better. Like if they were given the Pee-Wee's Playhouse or the Aquabats Super Show approach of tongue in cheek surrealism, the Banana Splits could be great again! Cartoon Network clearly has the costumes still lying around somewhere, and since reboots are all the rage lately, I feel like it could be done!

And it can be like the old show, where they have different segments. Like, a cartoon, an adventure serial, some fake commercials or music videos, and some Banana Splits shenanigans. I might be an audience of one for this, but I'd be front row center watching every day! Who's with me?

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