Cow & Chicken: a review

Cow & Chicken has to be one of the weirdest shows to ever come out of Cartoon Network Studios. David Feiss is responsible for this masterpiece. He's worked on Ren & Stimpy, which shouldn't surprise anyone.

If you're not familiar with the show, you just need to see the intro to get the idea.




The theme song tells you everything you need to know  - "Mama had a chicken, mama had a cow. Dad was proud. He didn't care how". Cow & Chicken is openly committed to being ridiculous.

Essentially, it's a family comedy with a twist. You've got a family with two children, who go to school, play, do arts and crafts, spend time with friends. Their parents do everything to make sure the kids are fed, healthy and brought up well. Now, what is the twist? The children are an 11-year-old chicken called Chicken and a 7-year-old cow called Cow. The parents are human, but you only see their legs, which is addressed later in the series. Also, there's a big fat Red Guy with no pants, who effectively stalks these kids, finding various ways to scam them. Adults in the series seem incredibly stupid, or unaware of them immediate surroundings, & let kids get into danger.

It's somewhat similar to the Addams Family - we have a family with some very well established, but really odd customs and values. Except the entire world is messed up, not just their particular household. And the traditions aren't dark as such, they're just really weird. For example, as a special treat, Cow and Chicken get pork butts and taters for dinner. Now what does that mean? Well... their parents load a mini catapult with, quite literally, cooked pig butts and potatoes and the kids catch those in their mouths.

Appetizing, is it not?

If you like strange shows, this one is really fun.

Series name: " Cow & Chicken "
Foxy's rating: 
Expectations: I saw the show before I knew what to expect from it. It's more clever than it appears.
Writing: "Dumb show" made by clever people, who are being passive-aggressive to the censorship department. But all the weirdness is piled on top of a very familiar structure - a cute family comedy.
Animation: Very lively, purposely messy & inconsistent (especially noticeable with characters' teeth, which constantly change shape). Special care is taken to highlight all things gross, but those bits aren't painful to look at since the style is far from realistic. A lot of attention is also given to characters' butts.
Action:  Exaggerated, kind of slapstick
Drama: Utterly ridiculous.
Humour: On the surface we've got jokes about butts, weenies, manure and the occasionally cross-dressing Red Guy. Underneath that you'll occasionally find clever dialogue
Worth watching: I like it, so I'd say yes. If you want to watch it, prepare to give it a proper chance.


Curious fact:
Cow, Chicken and the Red Guy were all voiced by the same person - Charlie Adler.


The best episode:
I like all of them, so it's hard to say.
"The Girl's Bathroom" Is a good season 1 episode, if you want to get familiar with the show.
Also, "Cow's Dream Catcher" is pretty cool, if you like stories about nightmares.


I Am Weasel
The first episodes of "I Am Weasel" were part of the "Cow & Chicken" show, but, since it became its own series later, I will eventually review it as its own series.

This show is not for everyone. But it's really fun if you can appreciate it.

Time Squad: a review

 Time Squad is another one of Cartoon Network's fun, but short-lived and soon forgotten shows. It ran for two seasons and has 26 episodes in total (technically it's 52, since they're 10 minute episodes grouped by two).

Action takes place in the year 100,000,000 AD. The Earth has somehow managed to reach a stable utopia state -  "no wars, no pollution, and bacon is good for your heart."
And here's the technobabble -  "time is like a rope". As time constantly progresses, the past starts to "unravel". History starts messing up, which affects the future. Obviously, this needs to be prevented in order to preserve Earth in the perfect state it's in.

And that's where the Time Squad comes in with their famous motto - "Ensuring the past to protect our future."

Here's who our heroes are:
Officer Buck Tuddrussel - an infantile musclehead who wanted to be a cop. But since he was lucky enough to live in an utopia, he ended up being a "time cop" instead. Buck's talents lie solely in shooting and kicking the crap out of people. On a side note, I would guess that he's a reference to Buck Rogers.

Lawrence "Larry" 3000 - an android who was designed as a diplomat. But since the Earth's governments have formed a single nation, he has to be re-assigned. Larry is proficient at all things girly - he can cook complex dishes an average person has ever heard of, his speech and manners are excellent and he's very good at embroidery. He's also a bitter, miserable misanthropic git a lot of the time, but, once again, girly things make him happy. Larry is essentially a parody of C-3PO, which the creator himself admits to.

Otto Osworth - a present day orphan who was "adopted" by Buck and Larry despite Time Squad regulations. He's a young prodigy with a passion for history and therefore the only one in the squad who knows what needs to be done.

So is the series actually educational? On a very basic level, perhaps. But mostly it's just dumb fun. You get to watch the big names in history making idiots of themselves (to be fair, the squad does the same).

And here's my usual rating breakdown:

Series name: " Time Squad "
Foxy's rating: 
Expectations Exceeded? Not really
Disappointed: No
Writing: It isn't bad. The episodes are reasonably entertaining and the stories don't drag.
Animation: I like it. The style is simply nice and there isn't anything wrong with the motion.
Action:  Very slapstick, which is great
Drama: Fantastic at times. Anything to do with Larry is bound to be hilarious. And there are no "serious" moments at all in the series.
Humour: Very silly, but fun.
Worth watching: I'd say so. It's a reasonably fun show that's simply nice. The squad acts like a dysfunctional family and there's an interesting enough mix of characters to make that entertaining.

The best episode:
Every Poe Has a Silver Lining—The Time Squad discover that famed horror writer Edgar Allan Poe is now overly cheerful and writing children's books, and must remind Poe of how horrible the world really is.

Though you might also like this one:
Orphan Substitute—While on a mission to 2001 to stop George W. Bush from building the world's biggest ball of twine, Otto is taken back to the orphanage from which he came (as seen in the first episode) by Sister Thornly. Without Otto, Larry and Tuddrussel must once again try to complete a historical mission (this time centered on Christopher Columbus) on their own, but when that fails, they scour many orphanages from the past to find a replacement boy genius.
(episode synopses taken from Wikipedia)

Fan love:
I Wanna Break Free
The State Dinner
Oy Vey

The Life and Times of Juniper Lee: a review

"The Life and Times of Juniper Lee" is an alright show about a girl with super powers who fights monsters. It was somewhat short-lived - ran for 3 seasons with a total of 40 episodes.To me it felt dropped rather than finished.

Series name: "The Life and Times of Juniper Lee"
Foxy's rating: 
Expectations Exceeded? In a certain way, yes
Disappointed: No
Writing: It isn't bad. The stories are reasonably original. The show has its own feel to it, which makes it stand out from other CN cartoons. You'd have to watch it to see what I mean, but it's mostly the character mentality and cast choices that are quite different from what you'd usually expect from Cartoon Network. But... sometimes it comes across as "trying too hard".
Animation: Expressive, dynamic, fun and quite pretty to look at, too. The style works very well. 
Action: Plenty of it! 
Drama: It is a comedy without serious drama here. There's plenty going on and it's all in good fun. But some conflicts seem forced, some witty lines sound as if they've been read from a cue card (cause realistically, who can manage to deliver quick snappy comebacks 100% of the time?). 
Humour: Once again, on trying too hard... the word "butt" is a bit overused. Sometimes they're obviously looking for excuses to make the protagonist look cool. Sometimes they're shamelessly pandering to RPG fans, which isn't a bad thing at all when it's done right. The random monsters that appear all seem to have the same not caring, sarcastic attitude, which gets repetitive - think of the animals from Flintstones .

Worth watching: Give it a try. If you like any of the characters, the show will be more than bearable.

"In a world full of monsters and demons, June is the only one who sees them"  goes the opening theme. And it sounds like a recipe for disaster - you'd kind of expect some boring, repetitive garbage based on Power Rangers, which kind of implies the protagonist might be crazy. But the show is much more decent than that. I especially like its lack of a predictable structure (for example - hero has a normal day at school, monster appears, hero transforms, monster is beaten)


Juniper Lee is the protagonist here. She is the Te Xuan Ze - the keeper of balance between the world of magical creatures and the human world. The monsters exist all around, but they're invisible to humans. They're allowed to simply roam free and get on with their stuff, as long as they don't break any rules. And when they do, June swoops in to "kick butt", as we're constantly told.
June doesn't want to do it. She's inherited the power from her grandmother and so far it's been doing nothing but ruin her social life. And she has to put up with her loud and hyper little brother and a talking Scottish dog, who hates everything. 
Her power is super strength and agility. No transformations, no magic wands. She just fights well. Occasionally she gets to use one magical artifact or another, but that tends to be rare. 
As far as her personality goes, I find June rather likable. She isn't girly, but she isn't trying to prove herself as a tomboy either. She likes video games and plays guitar. 

The best episode:
I'd probably have to say "Magic Takes a Holiday". June's entire class goes to a performing arts camp and Ophelia Ramirez, the goth chick, gets to direct the play they're all in. 

Curious finds:
If you like Ophelia, you should like this plushie.

To sum up, it' is a pretty good show. I like the fact that it's clearly different from all other CN cartoons on many levels. Still, it's more of a "nice" cartoon than a spectacular one, but do feel free to give it a shot.

Juniper, her brother Ray Ray and Monroe the angry pug. I think this image sums up the show pretty well.

Spaced Out: a review

Have you ever heard of a show called "Spaced Out"?
No? That's a shame. I liked it. To my disappointment, it was very short-lived.
Let's break it down and rate it!

Series name: "Spaced Out"
Foxy's rating:
Expectations Exceeded? Yes
Disappointed: No
Writing: Quite decent. I was rather impressed with how varied and unpredictable the episodes were, considering that everything takes place on a small orbital station.
Animation: I'd say the style is something you have to get used as I don't think it does anything for the show apart from making it look different from other cartoons. I quite like the character designs, but the colouring just looks muddy. I can't really say the movement itself stood out to me in neither a good nor bad way.
Action: More than you'd expect, despite it being a sitcom.
Drama: There's quite a nice collection of characters that play off each other very well.
Humour: The show is safe for kids rather than written for them. Yes, there's some adult humour sneaked into it. But children would probably just get bored since the show gives them a lot less they could enjoy and relate to than "The Simpsons" does, for example. Which is probably the reason the show didn't last long on Cartoon Network.
Worth watching: I'd say it is. In fact, I'd love to get it on DVD. It's a bit slow-paced, but I've enjoyed it.

Basically we've got ourselves a story that takes place in a not-so-distant future. Unlike "The Jetsons" and so forth, "Spaced Out" doesn't give us any kind of a gleaming hope for the world's sudden improvement. Here we see Earth as a very bleak and miserable place - overpopulated, polluted and completely taken over by an evil corporation called Kratch Industries, that has now decided to expand into space. Naturally, the recruitment process for the orbital station home project goes terribly wrong and one of the main characters gets the role by mistake. 
What I love about this series is that it's not aimed at kids and doesn't even try to teach any kind of moral lessons. You couldn't find them in some episodes if you wanted to. It's entertainment for the sake of entertainment. And perhaps Cartoon Network just wasn't the right channel for it.

The characters:
We've got a family that's somewhere in between the Jetsons and the Simpsons:
 a well-meaning, but idiotic father (amusingly enough, with a bit of an ego, which I quite liked);
 a very nice, well-read mother, who is a little... quirky and dreams of meeting aliens;
 a nerdy son, who looks like an older and plumper Elroy;
 and last, but not least - a rebel-without-a-cause daughter, who clearly belongs to some subculture or another. I'm guessing something in between goth and punk. Theatrically not caring and constantly bored, she was an instant hit with the teenage me. Especially when she made stupid mistakes she should have been "too cool" for.

The secondary cast is pretty fun, too. We've got a glamorous grandmother, who's accompanied the family to their orbital home as she couldn't bear the thought of parting with her son. Then there's the annoying neighbours the family was trying to get away from. And the best character of all - a soviet cosmonaut called Boris. I was amazed at how accurately-soviet everything about him was.  Also the family's got a cat and a dog, who tend to have deep philosophical discussions when nobody's around.


(*Spoiler alert*) The best episode:
I can't seem to find the listing so I don't know what the episode was called, but my favourite one was about Boris's arrival to the station. The guy's been through a lot! first he wakes up from a couple of years worth of sleep on his space ship, finds out that his motherland no longer exists and nobody wants him back, crash lands onto the station, almost gets killed, saves a character, gets hunted down for trespassing and when the good folks at Kratch fail to kill him they give him a job! Fantastic day if you ask me!

Curious finds:
I didn't find much. But there is this Jetsons parody video. Do forgive the low quality.


All in all, I thought "Spaced Out" was a good family comedy and I was sad to see it go. I think the show could have gotten even better with time, as cartoon series tend to. I feel it didn't have a long enough run to "realize" exactly where it's going. 
But if you're stuck for stuff to watch, I'd suggest giving "Spaced Out" a try.

I couldn't find a good screenie, so have a logo! If you'd like to know what the cartoon looks like, there's always youtube