The History of "Robots"

This edition of The History of... is about an animated movie that I have a pretty complicated history with.

I first found out about Blue Sky Studios' Robots when my family went to see Shark Tale in theaters. In the lobby, there was a banner featuring the characters from the movie. And... uh, to be honest, the characters freaked me out*. Not the villains, who are supposed to be a bit creepy, I mean the good guys. I'm not sure why, they just DID. So as a result, I avoided the film for years. Learning that the DVD had a short film starring the character with a large posterior called Aunt Fanny's Tour of Booty didn't exactly put the film on my "to-watch" list either.

I started warming up to the film after hearing people praise it online and watching the Blockbuster Buster's (extremely negative) review of it. That was, I think, 2014. It took me until 2022 to actually sit down and watch the film for myself. And y'know what? It was pretty good! It's no Ice Age, but what is? I feel silly for avoiding the film for so long now, honestly.

So, to make up for my misjudging the movie, let's take a deep dive into its production process and history. I normally only do this for films that were box office bombs, which Robots wasn't, but apparently there's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff to talk about and the film's a Cult Classic, so what the heck?

Concept art of Rodney's parents building him.

So how did Robots get started? Well, instrumental in the film's creation was its producer, William Joyce - no stranger to working with animated robots, as he also created Rolie Polie Olie. He first became aware of Blue Sky Studios' work when he saw Joe's Apartment. Remember that movie? It wasn't animated. It was about a guy named Joe who moves into an apartment that he discovers is filled with friendly talking cockroaches. Blue Sky Studios animated the cockroaches for the movie.

In the book The Art of Robots, William Joyce said, "They created a Busby Berkeley-style dance number featuring cockroaches. It was incredibly inventive and broad, yet completely believable, and I thought, 'If these guys can be this original, funny, and clever, I've got to see what else they can do.'" Thus, he met up with Chris Wedge and they began developing an adaptation of his 1993 book Santa Calls. A test animation of that was produced, but nothing came out of it.

I think I've actually read this book. I found it at a local library.

So instead, they started thinking about robots. They didn't have an idea for a story and characters yet, they just thought it'd be cool to have a film with an all-robot cast. "When we started to draw them, or even look at the pop culture history of robots, the only robot that was really interesting to look at was the robot from Metropolis. Everything else was basically a soup can," William Joyce said. They went to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which was having an exhibition about robots, and that gave them the inspiration not to do "what everybody thinks as the [look of the] future", but something "deeper" and "simpler". They started looking at machines.

Here's the best way I could put it: y'know how, in my Did You Know? post about WALL-E, I mentioned that Andrew Stanton said they wanted to "play with both really high-end technology and really low technology"? His exact words were, "WALL-E, I always call a tractor, EVE, I always call sort of like a Porsche. She's the highest, most expensive, no expense spared kind of project that the Buy 'n' Large corporation could use to make a probe droid... WALL-E is much more 'nuts and bolts' and you can kind of get how he works from afar." The filmmakers of Robots wanted the characters to be less EVE and more WALL-E. Basically, everything in the movie looks like it was made from household appliances. Rodney resembles an Evinrude outboard motor, one building looks like Chris Wedge's waffle iron, and another is a coffee pot.

Concept art for Rodney.

As the film's art director, Steve Martino, put it, "In the typical cartoon, you'll have a jet-propelled robot, and all his mechanical apparatus is hidden. All you'll see is smoke as the robot takes off. We thought it would be more fun to strip away the coverings and show the real mechanics. So if somebody is going to fly, put him in a pod, spring-load it, and fling him across the city. That way the audience gets to see the setup, the anticipation, and the result."

The robot world was organized into three distinct sections based on three distinct periods of technology: the steam era, the combustion era, and the modern era. The steam era, based on the Industrial Revolution, is the Chop Shop. The combustion era, based on early automobiles and engine-driven objects of the twentieth century, is the neighborhood where Fender and the Rusties live. The modern era, with its streamlined materials and the mechanisms mostly hidden under composite metal, is Bigweld Industries and the robots who run it.

After that, the search began for the film's writer, someone who "worked from character first". They eventually read the play Fuddy Meers and thought that its writer, David Lindsay-Abaire, would be a good choice. Chris Meledandri, one of the higher-ups at Blue Sky, said, "David was the one that really got our Robots story started. He wrote a sweet, funny draft that nailed a lot of the tone I had in mind for the movie." Specifically, Chris wanted the film to be a musical with the tone of a 1930s screwball comedy. David Lindsay-Abaire watched those movies, came up with a lot of funny lines, and even wrote a song. Eventually, however, it was decided not to make the film a musical. Blue Sky wouldn't make their first musical until Rio. David was joined by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. While they previously worked on City Slickers and A League of Their Own, this was the first animated film they wrote for.

Concept art for Rodney's arrival in the creatively named Robot City.

It's not easy creating an entire world from scratch. Chris Wedge said, "It was very intimidating at the beginning, because for a long time we had no idea what the limits of the world were and how fantastic we'd be able to make it. But as the work collects, the movie world starts to talk back to you. It's really a process of discovering things. You wade into the pool first, and then everyone jumps in."

So, who was the hardest character to design? Believe it or not, Rodney. According to William Joyce, it took two years for them to get his design down. As he put it, "He's an amiable ordinary fella, he's not Arnold Schwarzenegger and he's not Tom Cruise. We didn't want him to be too muscular or perfect. We wanted the audience to be able to put themselves in his shoes instantly and easily." Cappy and Ratchet were pretty hard, too.

Concept art for Piper.

Aside from that, designing the characters was pretty easy. ANIMATING them was another story. "This is the hardest thing I've ever animated," animation supervisor Mike Thurmeier lamented. "You don't get anything for free. The models look great as static images, but there's no flab jiggling around or tails and ears to follow through. You have to work incredibly hard to get a really good expression or mood." They wanted to make the robots really feel like they were made of metal but still have them be warm and expressive. Using that old technique of squash-and-stretch was difficult, for instance, because metal doesn't squash and stretch much at all. Early animation tests just looked too stiff and mechanical. "We knew we had to find a way to break the rules without breaking the character," co-director Carlos Saldanha explained. To help with that, the riggers built hidden extension rods into the characters' arms, legs and spines, allowing the characters to make goofier poses without making it look like metal was stretching.

Giving the robots detailed textures was hard, too. The traditional method of texture mapping, where 2D images are painted and then put on the 3D models, wasn't working, so they developed a new procedure to create a multi-level texture - for example, a core metal base topped by corrosion, primer, paint, and oxidation. To create the Chop Shop workers, the filmmakers created libraries of existing body parts that could be mixed and matched to create "Franken-bots".

Here is the original animation test for the movie (the director character here had his character design reused for Jack Hammer in the movie):

Robots was first announced to the public at the American Museum of Natural History's IMAX theater in June 2003. In addition to Ewan McGregor, Halle Berry, Mel Brooks, Drew Carey, Amanda Bynes, Stanley Tucci, Jim Broadbent, Dianne Wiest, Harland Williams, Jennifer Coolidge, Paul Giamatti, and Dan Hedaya, it was also mentioned that D.L. Hughley, Jamie Kennedy, and a pre-Modern Family Sofia Vergara were among the voice cast. I don't know which characters they were supposed to voice, or why they wound up leaving the film. There was also, strangely enough, no mention of Robin Williams or Greg Kinnear - maybe they joined the film after that?

"[Joyce's stories] have a golden era of Hollywood nostalgia to them," Chris Wedge said. "The robots aren't futuristic or spacey transformers. They ooze personality and personify objects that we know in our world, whether a car, an outboard motor or a washing machine."

I watched the DVD commentary of the film to see if it gave more information about the film's development that wasn't online, but there wasn't a lot. I did find out a couple things, though. For instance, at one point the film's plot was apparently going to be "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington meets The Three Musketeers meets Robin Hood", but with robots. Also, Rodney's name was "Dart" for a while.

Concept art for Fender, Crank, Diesel, and Lug.

John Powell was brought in to do the film's score (he would go on to do the scores for several other Blue Sky films). The filmmakers told him that they wanted to have the music sound like it was being done by the "Robot Philharmonic". "Part of the trick of putting a movie together with a theme like this... is to try and make everything feel connected," Chris Wedge explained on the DVD commentary. So instead of strings and violins, they used brass instruments. And who was brought in to help John with the score? Blue Man Group! Remember those guys? I think they're still a thing, but they were super-popular in the 2000s. Fitting that they were involved, seeing as they're something that freaked me out a lot when I was younger too (no offense to any members of Blue Man Group reading this).

Some of the music heard in the movie was replaced after scenes were done, though - apparently the higher-ups at FOX wanted more pop songs in the film.

I don't remember THIS scene being in the movie.

Since there are a lot of comedic actors in the movie, there was a lot of ad-libbing. ESPECIALLY with Robin Williams. Y'know the scene where Rodney and Fender try to sneak into the Bigweld Ball, and Fender is posing as the strangely-accented valet of  "Count Von Brokenzipper"? Robin did the scene about eight times, in eight different dialects. Fender's iconic "Singin' in the Oil" song was ad-libbed by Robin as well.

Perhaps the hardest part of making the film was the editing process. Apparently, there is a director's cut, but it's never been released. Among the stuff that got cut was some more development for Cappy and Lug, an extended version of the scene at the Bigweld Ball, there was an entire character cut out of the film, too - Dr. V. Needle, a mad scientist robot who was going to give Bigweld a lobotomy under orders from Madame Gasket.

A screencap of Dr. V. Needle.

To promote the movie, there were, of course, tie-ins. The first one to sign on was Sunbeam - if you bought a specially-marked Sunbeam toaster oven, toaster, mixer or iron, you could get a toaster oven that imprinted Piper's image onto your toast, or a cookie cutter in the shape of Rodney. There was also a contest where kids ages five to sixteen could write an essay about a hypothetical invention that could make things easier for their family, with the grand prize being a four-day trip to New York City, five hundred bucks, a tour of Blue Sky Studios, and the chance to meet the film's director. Robots also got its own cereal, and you could get toys of the characters in boxes of Kellogg's cereals and Burger King Kids' Meals. There were Robots Pop-Tarts, U.S. Postal Service put Rodney and Fender on its cancellation stamp, there was even a limited time flavor at Cold Stone Creamery called "Rodney Copperbottom's Crazy Crackling Cotton Candy Concoction".

I never ate these, so I have no idea how they tasted.

Unlike with Quest For Camelot, all that promotion paid off. The film made $262.5 million dollars on a $75-80 million dollar budget. Reviews were mostly positive. The main reason for Robots' obscurity is that, unlike Ice Age or Rio, it never got a sequel. An article from around the time that the film was released on DVD claimed that Chris Wedge was considering doing a sequel, but nothing came out of it. Probably for the best, honestly... Blue Sky's sequels were not their best work. I often find myself wishing that Ice Age had just been a standalone film.

If you can find Robots on a streaming service, give it a watch. You'll have a good time.

Sources:
- https://web.archive.org/web/20210418223204/https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/06/10/foxs-robots-revealed
- https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/robots-pushes-animation-envelope-20050916-geirtp.html
- https://www.chiefmarketer.com/robots-the-movie-brings-150-million-in-promotional-tie-ins/
- The Art of Robots

* I know, it's tremendously ironic that I thought Robots had creepy character designs while I was in the lobby waiting to go see Shark Tale. Nothing in Robots is as creepy as Will Smith Fish.

Let's Watch This: "Frog Kingdom" (2013)

NOTE: Please do not take any of the little nitpicks in this review (or any of my other reviews, for that matter) seriously. I write these reviews in the hopes of making people laugh. Those nitpicks are really just dumb little observations that I'm attempting to make jokes out of, not complaints that add to whether or not I like something.

NOTE #2: No disrespect is meant towards anyone who worked on the movie I am reviewing today. I'm sure they are all very nice and talented people.

NOTE #3: If you like this movie, that is great. Go ahead and like it. I'm not judging you.

There are probably better things I could be doing with my time than watching direct-to-video schlock like this. But I knew the job was dangerous when I started this blog... okay, "dangerous" isn't the right word, but you know what I mean.

This is another animated movie from another country that we, the United States, found out about and said, "We want it." Directed by Nelson Shin and Melanie Simka, the film was originally released on December 28th, 2013 in China, but took until June 30th, 2015 to be released in the US.

Frog Kingdom is, as you might have guessed from the disclaimers at the beginning of the review, crap. Why do I say that? Let's get the review started, shall we?

It's a beautiful morning in the city of Frogville. The frogs of Frogville are all getting ready for the Froglympics, which are (as its name suggests) like the Olympics but for frogs. The ruler of the frogs, the creatively named Frog King (voiced by Keith David), is not pleased to learn that his daughter, Princess Froglegs, has run off again. Sorry, Frog King, but she's a princess in an animated movie. Being rebellious is kind of mandatory for her.

First complaint: the lip-syncing in this movie is really off. I know those are the risks you take when you give an animated movie from another country an English dub, but it's very distracting.

I'm gonna try not to make too many Amphibia references, but I find it funny
that Keith David voiced an amphibian king in this movie and then voiced an amphibian
king in that show too.

Why has Princess Froglegs (voiced by Bella Thorne) run off? Because the winner of the Froglympics gets to marry her, and she doesn't want to get married. Her solution? She and her best pal, Bestie (Dallas Lovato)... I guess whoever wrote this English dub wasn't very creative when it came to names... will enter the Froglympics disguised as males and win it themselves. Call me crazy, your highness, but I don't think you're gonna fool anyone into thinking that you're a guy. For one thing, you're wearing a dress.

And who names a frog "Froglegs" anyway? I've never heard of a person named
"Humanarms".

As Froglegs and Bestie explore the market, we are introduced to our OTHER lead character, Freddie (Cameron Dallas). He and his tadpole buddy Boogie (Nathan Barnatt) are selling wings - not chicken wings, since chickens are much too big for frogs to cook and eat, but rather insect wings. Then ANOTHER character shows up - a frog riding on a turtle who dubs himself Prince Froggie Ababwa. No relation to Prince Ali Ababwa, of course. He's here because he wants to compete in the Froglympics, but Freddie tells him he has no chance.

"But I've faced the galloping hordes! A hundred bad guys with swords!"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you sent those goons to their lords. Now make like a fly
and buzz off."

Freddie and Froggie get into a fight over Freddie's pet housefly, who Froggie wants to eat for breakfast. Eventually, Froggie takes Boogie hostage and threatens to make him go "swirly down the toiley". Wait, is he going to drag him into a human household, climb up a human's toilet - which would be much larger than him - and flush him? Or is he implying that frogs have little frog-sized toilets? Either way, Freddie tricks him into letting Boogie go, and they make a run for it, Froggie in hot pursuit aboard his surprisingly fast turtle.

As for Froglegs and Bestie, they arrive at the Froglympics and sign up. Their flimsy disguises actually work, with nobody even questioning how these two frogs supposedly grew facial hair. "Let the qualification round begin!" the Frog King shouts. First, we get some frog boxing, an event easily won by this amphibian who has clearly been taking frog steroids.

I know simply putting the word "frog" in front of words like "boxing" and
"steroids" isn't funny. If YOU can think of a funnier joke to make here, I'd
love to hear it.

Next, it's time for frog ping-pong... with the ball being an EYEBALL. Okay, ew. Why are they using an eyeball? Is it a FROG's eyeball? Where did they even get it?

We also get frog pole-vaulting, frog fencing, and frog archery, but the Froglympics are suddenly interrupted by an evil toad and his toad minions with their machine guns and bees, but their interrupting the games is interrupted - interruptception! - by Freddie, Boogie, and Froggie. "I guess Prince Ababwa lost his magic carpet when he divorced Princess Jasmine," the announcer suggests, saving me the trouble of making another Aladdin joke myself.

Froggie continues to chase Freddie and Boogie around, and as a result Freddie manages to win the frog high-diving event. This makes the toads (remember them? They're still here) MAD! They head back to their evil lair to tell their boss, a snake, about it. Why does this snake want to ruin the Froglympics? Because he wants revenge on the Frog King and Queen for... something he's not going to tell us about. Sheesh, they were spitting out exposition left and right a few minutes ago, but now they can't be bothered to give us a LITTLE backstory? 

By the way, one of those toads is clearly a poison dart frog... which are, as their name suggests, frogs, not toads.

Snakes get no respect in animation. Yeah, some of them are venomous, but you
shouldn't paint ALL snakes as evil just because of a few bad apples.

The Frog King gets a letter from his daughter telling him that she doesn't want to get married so she's getting out of there ASAP. So he assigns a frog named Inspector Noggin (Gregg Sulkin) with finding her. And what does Inspector Noggin do? He makes a reference to Pinocchio. Yeah, something tells me this guy is gonna be about as competent as Inspector Gadget (see? I can make pop culture references too. Doesn't make me funny).

Then we cut to all the contenders in the Froglympics marching onto the field. A photo op has been set up where they can kiss a painting of the princess and get a photo of it. This irritates Froglegs, especially when Freddie makes the painting kiss his butt. So she throws the camera at him and calls everyone out for thinking it's funny. Good on ya, Froglegs.

"She's muh waifu!"

And believe it or not, Froglegs STILL has everyone fooled with her pathetic disguise. Even after she almost calls herself the princess, nobody - not even Noggin - puts two and two together. The frogs in this movie are so stupid, it's practically offensive to real frogs.

Then a lizard shows up and gives Freddie a flyer for some sort of "froggy boot camp". He, the frog who's clearly on steroids (Drake Bell), Prince Froggie, the Richard Simmons Frog, Boogie, the frog with sunglasses and what looks like a mowhawk (Brandon Hudson), and the frog with six eyes (which is just as if not more disturbing as them playing ping-pong with an eyeball before) are all on board with that.

Seriously, WHY does that one frog have six eyes? And why are four of his eyes
in his STOMACH?

Froglegs mopes about how there's no way she can beat those other frogs... I dunno, I think she could at least beat the one who inexplicably has six eyes... and then she and Bestie decide to go to the boot camp themselves. A boot camp which, according to Bestie, looks more like a five-star hotel. Problem is, the rooms are all booked up, which means Froglegs will have to share one with... take a wild guess...

"U MAD, FROGLEGS?"

After another unfunny sequence involving Noggin, the frogs wake up the next morning and meet Captain One-Eye (Rob Schneider), your typical drill sergeant who doesn't know the meaning of the phrase "use your indoor voice". But hey, he DOES feed them an extremely large breakfast, so he can't be all bad.

In fact, all he seems to have them do is eat and sleep. I've never been to a boot camp, but I'm guessing none of them are actually like this.

"I want to see those plates cleaned, you maggots!"

That night, Freddie does some sleepwalking and walks into the strange tarp-covered thing that we saw some lizards wheeling into the camp in an earlier scene. When he enters the machine, he finds himself in... Happy Feet?

"Cute and cuddly, boys! Cute and cuddly!"

After Freddie's acid trip, it's revealed that the machine's purpose is to trap frogs in blocks of ice. We previously saw the snake use this machine on one of the toads. Suspicious, isn't it?

Fortunately, being frozen in a block of ice doesn't prevent Freddie from continuing his sleepwalk, and by the time he wakes up the next morning, the ice has melted. So, yeah, I'm not sure what the point of that was. Anyway, Froglegs demands to know why Captain One-Eye is trying to fatten them up. Instead of answering, he force-feeds her cheesecake, and she kicks him. So he punishes them all by dragging them out to the desert so they'll be nice and crispy for the lizard he's totally not going to feed them to. Yeah, spoiler alert: he's in league with the snake. I don't know why the snake needs to go through all the trouble of having them fattened up and baked in the sun when he could just show up, grab them in his coils, and gobble them up one by one, but just go with it.

Fortunately, after Captain One-Eye leaves to fix up some frog-marinating sauce, Freddie discovers that the desert is actually a beach. There's water close by. And thus, everybody has some fun in the water. "Ain't nobody gonna be servin' frog legs today! Not on MY watch! This ain't no French bistro!" Froglegs snaps.

Apparently there exist little frog-sized speedboats. Who knew?

The snake is very angry when he finds out that ain't nobody gonna be servin' frog legs today. Speaking of frogs getting eaten, Froglegs and Freddie run afoul of some "venus frog traps" and after that they randomly start to like each other. They even go for a ride on the back of a bat.

"I can show you the world..."

Next, the snake gives One-Eye some of his venom and tells him to use it on all those puny frogs in Frogville.

"Oh, right. The poison. The poison for the frogs. The poison chosen specifically to kill
the frogs. The frogs' poison... that poison?"

"Yes! That poison!"

It seems that all the frogs have to is SMELL the venom and they're out like a light. Fortunately, Freddie's pet fly finds him and Froglegs and goes all Lassie to tell them that the other frogs are in danger. Oh, and Noggin is there too. He has a whole army with him, and he thinks those two frogs on a bat might know something about the missing princess.

They manage to save the other frogs, but will be they able to save themselves from the snake?

The animators of Rango never should have allowed these guys to copy their homework.

Most of them get away, but Freddie isn't so lucky. The other frogs want to make a run for it, but Froglegs gives a big speech about loyalty and bravery and blah-blah-blah. Meanwhile, Noggin builds a robotic duplicate of the princess so the games can go on as planned. Wow, who knew frogs were so good with technology?

Back with the snake, he gives us some explanation as to why he wants revenge. Years ago, a mighty war was raged among the kingdom of frogs, led by his parents. But the frog king and queen took them down. Then he hypnotizes Freddie, as snakes in cartoons are known to do.

We cut to the Froglympics, with everyone, even Freddie, there. Froglegs realizes that One-Eye is controlling Freddie and demands, "What did you do with that frogolicious frog?!" Oh, and the robot may or may not be evil now too, because it lures them into a trap.

Hello, nightmare fuel.

After Froglegs manages to KO the robot, they have to deal with crocodiles. One of them eats Freddie. "Even though I hated you, I still loved you," Froglegs sobs. But what's this? Freddie getting eaten by the crocodile snaps him out of his trance... I don't know how, in case you were wondering... and he emerges from its mouth.

They go back to the Froglympics just as One-Eye is being dubbed the winner. Noggin now thinks that One-Eye is the princess in disguise. Jeez, this frog makes Patrick Star look like Albert Einstein. But the Froglympics aren't over yet - the event wraps up with a friendly game of Frog Quidditch (the fact that it's a knockoff of Quidditch is even lampshaded). By the way, I notice nobody finds it at all weird that the robot princess is competing in the game. If she was allowed to compete all along, why did Froglegs even need to disguise herself?

"Eat your heart out, Michael Jordan!"

Froglegs wins the game, which means that she won the entire Froglympics. Ha! Suck it, One-Eye! But then the snake shows up... wow, he sure took his sweet time getting there to enact his revenge... and he's all "I'M GONNA EAT YOU ALL!" and has One-Eye suck the frogs up into his weird machine that freezes frogs in blocks of ice. Freddie, Froglegs, the king, and everyone not already stuck in an ice block fights him in a battle scene that I'm sure was intended to be cool but is hard to take seriously when the characters say things like "It's time to pay the froggies!" and "You're a bad, bad king!".

So what was the point of hypnotizing Freddie again?

After a fight that goes on for what feels like an HOUR, Froglegs manages to trap the snake in his own ice block machine, freezing the stupid serpent solid. I suppose I should say "I WAS FROZEN TODAY!" here, but I won't.

Now that the snake has been defeated, Froglegs reveals that she's the princess. "I'm sorry. Your life is yours to live as you wish," the Frog King tells her. "You can marry who you want." Boogie hooks up with the robot princess... even though A) he's a tadpole and B) she's a robot. And Freddie and Froglegs... actually DON'T get married yet. Freddie heads off to do some more wandering, but says he might return. Huh. That's something I wasn't expecting them to do. Okay, I'll give 'em credit for not going the cliched route...

What's the Verdict?

...but that doesn't mean I'm going to give this a positive review.

Frog Kingdom blows. It doesn't even feel like an actual movie, it feels like a gag dub of a movie you'd find on YouTube. The lip-syncing is extremely off, characters frequently speak without even moving their mouths at all, and most of the dialogue is cringe-worthy. I didn't even mention half of the stupid jokes in this film. There are references to Superman and Indiana Jones and even Vanilla Ice of all people. Yes, yes, I know what these things are, it's still not funny.

The plot is disjointed and stretched out far too long - so many scenes and plot points are dragged out, then resolved in the blink of an eye (Freddie getting eaten by the crocodile? Yeah, that was totally needed) or even discarded without explanation (Freddie getting captured by the snake and Froglegs urging everyone to help save him... only for the snake to hypnotize him and just let him go off-camera). The characters suck too. Froglegs is just another generic tough, rebellious princess who don't take no crap from anyone. Freddie is just annoying and can't go five seconds without making a stupid wisecrack. They barely even have a romantic arc. The villain is tremendously lame, between the goofy voice and the incredibly stupid lines he spews out you can't take him seriously at all. He feels like a teenager in high school trying to be scary as he's stealing your lunch money. Everyone else is either dull, annoying, or gross.

Combine all this with some mediocre voice acting and character designs that range from okay to ugly and you've got another film that's not worth your time. Maybe this was better in the original Chinese, I don't know, but somehow I doubt it. Ah well, at least there weren't any sequels...

You have got to be kidding me.

Let's Watch This: An Episode of "The Shnookums and Meat Funny Cartoon Show"

NOTE: Please do not take any of the little nitpicks in this review (or any of my other reviews, for that matter) seriously. I write these reviews in the hopes of making people laugh. Those nitpicks are really just dumb little observations that I'm attempting to make jokes out of, not complaints that add to whether or not I like something.

NOTE #2: No disrespect is meant towards anyone who worked on the show I am reviewing today. I'm sure they are all very nice and talented people.

NOTE #3: If you like this show, that is great. Go ahead and like it. I'm not judging you.

Well, here we go. This is another cartoon that is usually only talked about online when people want to complain about how bad it is. Mostly, they complain about how it's just a knockoff of Ren and Stimpy. I'm not even a huge fan of Ren and Stimpy, so I have my doubts that I'm going to like a cartoon that parrots it.

What on Earth happened to The Disney Afternoon? It gave us some of the most iconic cartoons of the 1980s and early 1990s... and then after 1994, it started spawning crap like this and Quack Pack. The Shnookums and Meat Funny Cartoon Show was the creation of Bill Kopp, whose other claim to fame is the far more well-liked Eek! The Cat. Unlike the other Disney Afternoon shows, this one only aired once a week (on Mondays, specifically). It premiered on January 2nd, 1995 after five cartoons starring Snookums and Meat aired as part of a previous Disney show, Marsupilami (which itself was a spinoff of ANOTHER previous Disney show, Raw Toonage). Thirteen episodes of the show were made, each one consisting of three segments...

- Shnookums (voiced by Jason Marsden) and Meat (voiced by Frank Welker), a cat and dog owned by a couple simply known as Husband (Steve Mackall) and Wife (Tress MacNeille). They do stuff.

- Pith Possum (voiced by Jeff Bennett), a superhero possum who fights crime.

- Tex Tinstar (also Jeff Bennett), a cowboy whose segments are serialized sort of like Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Believe it or not, the idea for a show starring a cat and a dog was first pitched to Disney by Greg Weisman of Gargoyles fame. After Bill Kopp got involved and the shorts for Marsupilami were made, Disney decided to greenlit a whole Shnookums and Meat show to cash in on the success of Ren and Stimpy. Bill claimed in a couple interviews that the show wasn't inspired by Ren and Stimpy, but the similarities are pretty hard to ignore (a lot of the same artists worked on it, for what it's worth). Maybe those similarities could've been forgiven if the show was at least funny, but - spoiler alert - it wasn't.

Although the show got decent ratings, Disney eventually kept the crew in the dark for a while before giving the show the axe. They didn't even do much to promote the show before that - Gargoyles got tons of merchandise, whereas all Shnookums and Meat got was canned pasta from Franco-American.

But hey, at least it's SOMETHING. Wander Over Yonder never
got its own pasta.

Was Disney embarassed by the show? It would explain why it apparently never got a home video release (and it's not on Disney Plus either). But if they greenlit it solely to cash in on the success of Ren and Stimpy, why would they push it aside so quickly? That seems like a dumb idea. You make a show that's similar to another extremely popular show in the hopes of getting that same success, and then you don't promote it and are confused when it doesn't do as well as the show you're trying to cash in on?

Well, whatever the reason, The Shnookums and Meat Funny Cartoon Show exists whether Disney wants it to or not. So, we're going to watch the first episode of the show. I was hesitant to do one of the early episodes because I feel like if I do there's a fifty-percent chance that somebody will tell me the show gets better as it goes on, but what are you gonna do?

The first segment, "Weight For Me", stars Shnookums and Meat.

We start off with Husband reading a magazine about incredibly buff cats and dogs. Apparently, in this world, it's common for cats and dogs to lift weights and have gigantic muscles. What, has Alpo been putting steroids in its pet food?

Shnookums and Meat aren't like most cats and dogs. They look like this:

The next time Jon is nagging Garfield about how fat he is, somebody should show him
a picture of these two. Then he'll know that there are cats much fatter than his.

"All these two do is lay around, sleep, and take from the food world!" Husband complains. He declares that if Shnookums and Meat don't go outside and "shed some poundage muy prontimo", he's going to replace them with physically fit pets. So Shnookums and Meat make it their mission to get in shape. I hope they do, I find their overly-flabby stomachs disgusting to look at...

Fortunately, it's slightly less disgusting in a still image. Slightly.

First, they do some push-ups... and fail at them. Then they try some sit-ups... and fail at them too. Shnookums' attempt at lifting weights is a massive failure too. Honestly, at this point it might be easier to get some liposuction.

Then a commercial appears on the TV for the "Loungerizer", what looks like a seat on an airplane but can apparently help you lose weight. It even works on elephant seals, apparently. Here's what the model in the commerical looked like before they used the chair:

And here's what she looked like after:

I call shenanigans. First of all, am I supposed to believe that what looks like an airplane seat caused this elephant seal to change species? Second, female elephant seals don't look like that. Ergo, that must be a MALE elephant seal in drag.

Despite my skepticism, Shnookums and Meat are convinced, and they order themselves a pair of "Loungerizer"s. They quickly learn that it's not a good idea to set them too high, unless you WANT them to come to life and start pummeling you.

In Shnookums and Meat, the chairs sit on YOU!

After setting it to "medium", we see just how the "Loungerizer" works: it has mechanical hands that move your body parts for you while you just sit there. Believe it or not, it actually works. Soon Shnookums and Meat are roughly the size of a barge. And they have chest hair too. Eugh...

Why do muscle-bound cartoon characters usually have really tiny heads?

There's just one problem: they're so muscle-bound they find it difficult to move. It takes Shnookums an extremely long time to pick up a protein drink - and even then, he can't even open it. "We'll take a sauna trim-down just to get some mobility back, and then we'll be perfect!" Shnookums exclaims. Conveniently enough, their owners just so happen to have a sauna in their house that they can use. But wouldn't you know it, they wind up getting locked in the sauna, and by the time their owners come home and let them out, they look like this:

Oof. I've seen pipe cleaners fatter than that.

Husband force-feeds them food until they're incredibly fat again. So basically nothing was accomplished. I do love cartoons where nothing is accomplished. Next segment...

I've heard that the Pith Possum and Tex Tinstar segments of the show were a lot better than the Shnookums and Meat segments. So I'm cautiously optimistic as I go into "Phantom Mask of the Dark Black Blackness of Black" (in spite of the stupid name).

Narrator Jim Cummings tells us that Pith Possum was originally an ordinary laboratory possum until an experiment turned him into a superhero. His secret identity - all superheroes have one - is Peter Possum, copy boy for a great metropolitan tabloid. He stands up for truth, justice and the forest critter way.

"I am the terror that crawls in the night! I am the something that affects your other
something in a negative way! I am PITH POSSUM!"

What challenges await Pith Possum today? Well, the Easter Bunny (Jess Harnell, if I'm not mistaken) is being released from a mental asylum... jeez, I guess Peter Cottontail went down a dark path after the events of his special. Maybe that's why it took so long for them to make a sequel.

This Easter Bunny isn't a cute, cuddly little lagomorph. He's a demented rabbit who's whipped up a serum that'll turn him into a huge, carnivorous beast. Why does he want to be a huge, carnivorous beast? If he hates his job delivering Easter eggs, why doesn't he just let another rabbit take on the Easter Bunny mantle and find a new line of work? Oh, right. Because he's EEEEEEEEE-VIL!

They told that rabbit "Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids!" one too many times. Now he's out for blood.

After the Easter Bunny drinks the serum, we cut to the tabloid where Peter Possum works. Forest animals are hard at work on typewriters. The only employee there that ISN'T an animal, despite her name, is Doris Deer (April Winchell), the apple of Peter's eye. I guess he's hoping she's into interspecies dating.

Doris is sent out to get the scoop on the giant mutant Easter Bunny running around the city. When Peter hears about this, he becomes Pith Possum and calls up his dimwitted raccoon sidekick, Obediah (Patric Zimmerman). Then he jumps out the window, completely forgetting that he can't fly. Something tells me this guy is going to make the superheroes from Sidekick look competent.

This reminds me: no, I am not going to do a review of Fanboy and Chum-Chum. So please
don't ask me to.

The now gigantic Easter Bunny and his army of Easter eggs with legs are robbing a bank. As he leaves the bank, Doris climbs into the bunny's Easter basket just before he walks into his giant Easter egg-shaped aircraft and takes off. Dang it, Doris, you're not supposed to LET yourself get captured. You have to wait until the villain decides to kidnap you himself.

Anyway, Pith Possum and Obediah arrive at the police station, where Commissioner Stress (Brad Garrett) tells them what they know: the Easter Bunny has already struck various places around the city, and they think his next robbery will be at the museum now containing the world's most precious collection of pinecones ever gathered in one place. What would a bunny want with pinecones? I dunno, just go with it...

And what's a gorilla doing in a presumably North American (judging from the other
animals we've seen) forest?

Sure enough, Pith Possum and Obediah arrive at the museum just as the Easter Bunny is about to squish Doris' head. Because the Easter Bunny is so much larger than Pith is, it's not much of a fight. But eventually Pith uses a carrot filled with some sort of exploding liquid to take out the rabbit. Doris repeatedly kisses Pith. Word of advice, girls: don't kiss a possum. It's probably a good way to get rabies.

Meh, still a better love story than Bee Movie.

The narrator then tells us that the rabbit seen in this cartoon isn't the actual Easter Bunny, he's an imposter, and that he's serving his time at a mental asylum and making "egg-cellent" progress. I believe he eventually learned his lesson, turned a new leaf, and became the spokesrabbit for Nesquik.

We are now in the Wild West, the frontier of promise and hope, the land of the singing cowboy. But this Tex Tinstar segment has nothing to do with singing cowboys because that would apparently be really boring.

No, no, our story is about the villainous Wrongo (Brad Garrett), leader of a group of outlaws known as the Wrong Riders. He's that charming fella featured in the previous screencap. He's got a score to settle with Tex Tinstar.

Okay, positive thing: this guy looks pretty cool.

In town, Tex Tinstar is telling everyone about the Wrong Riders' a-fixing to ride in and cause trouble... which prompts everyone except him to make a run for it in increasingly ludicrous ways (one of them gets on a PLANE). Sure enough, the Wrong Riders show up, and Tex and Wrongo have themselves a showdown... which Wrongo wins by pulling the "Look over there!" trick on Tex.

Soon, Tex is tied up and subjected to some sort of Rube Goldberg-ish trap. As Wrongo puts it, the rope that holds Tex up will be burned through by a candle. When he falls, he'll land on a trampoline, which will send him flying onto a ramp that will send him into a pen full of rabid badgers. And then a torch will fall over, igniting a trail of gunpowder, which will light a cannon. The barrel that Tex is in will roll to the cannon, and his head will be stuck in it, and then the cannon will fire, the blast igniting the waterproof fuses of the dynamite surrounding Tex's head. The cannon will then shoot him through the roof of the barn and down into a giant tank full of sharks. The sharks will eat Tex, the dynamite will go off, and his remains will fall into an envelope, which Wrongo will place on a boat bound for Indonesia. Needlessly complicated? Maybe, but that's what makes it funny.

Even Tex looks confused by all this.

And I have to admit, I was starting to get into this. Like I said, this whole plan of Wrongo's is actually pretty funny. How would Tex get out of such a strange situation?

Guess what? They don't show us! The narrator (also Jim Cummings) tells us to tune into the next episode, and that's it! The episode just ends! WHAT? You're gonna throw a CLIFFHANGER at us? The segment just started and it's over already? Figures. The one segment in this show I actually kind of like, and it doesn't even have an ending.

Side note, I know this is a minor thing, but why was this segment called "A Fistful of Food Stamps" when it had nothing to do with food stamps?

What's the Verdict?

The Shnookums and Meat Funny Cartoon Show is mediocre at best. The only thing I kind of liked about it was Tex Tinstar, that segment was at least sort of funny in spite of its incredibly abrupt ending. But the Shnookums and Meat and Pith Possum segments sucked. None of the jokes in those segments were funny, and in a show where the main goal is to make you laugh, that's the biggest problem. The characters are dull as dirt, I couldn't tell you anything about Shnookums or Meat other than "they're idiots". The animation is fine and the voice actors are doing their best, but that's not enough to make the show watchable. Honestly, why couldn't the whole show have just been about Tex Tinstar? I think that would've been a lot better than just one short Tex Tinstar segment and two long unfunny segments before it.

The same year that this show came out, Disney also released the Timon and Pumbaa show - which was very similar in tone and style, but had much funnier jokes and felt less like a Ren and Stimpy wannabe than this. My advice? Watch that instead. Heck, watch 2 Stupid Dogs instead. I haven't watched an episode of Cow and Chicken in years, but I'm guessing that show is a better use of your time than this too. Was the pasta even very good?

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