"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Space Dandy, "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Ever since the start of its second cour two weeks ago, Shinichiro Watanabe's anthology-like Space Dandy has been edging into more surreal and cartoony territory. The show often contains old Hanna-Barbera sound FX--they're the biggest example of how much '60s Hanna-Barbera slapstick shows like Wacky Races appear to be an influence on Watanabe and the other animators during Space Dandy. The vintage Hanna-Barbera noises are at their most abundant during special guest director Masaaki Yuasa's "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby," the most stoner-friendly Space Dandy episode since "Plants Are Living Things Too, Baby," which was guest-directed by Yuasa protégé Eunyoung Choi.

The Korean animator's trippy plant world episode was so clever and imaginatively visualized that I wrote, "I'm now interested in whatever her next project will be." That project turned out to be Ping Pong: The Animation, Yuasa's 11-episode, one-cour adaptation of Tekkonkinkreet creator Taiyo Matsumoto's 1996-97 manga about high-schoolers whose lives revolve solely around ping pong (the manga was previously made into a 2002 live-action film I actually rented and watched right before the Yuasa version began airing, as an appetizer to the show).

Ping Pong, which is worth checking out on FUNimation or Hulu, overcame limited animation (done under a really tight, two-to-three-weeks-per-episode schedule) and some patchy earlier episodes to become an enjoyable and occasionally moving sports anime that drew much of its drama from quieter material (the loneliness of the Christmas season; athletes who are so obsessed with winning that they've forgotten about the joy they used to get out of the game) rather than from whether the ultimate victor would be the cocky and outgoing prodigy in a dorky bowl cut or his stoic and introverted best friend/ping pong protégé. Like the first and sixth Rocky movies, the original Bad News Bears, the original Bring It On and the TV version of Friday Night Lights, Ping Pong is the kind of sports story where the outcome of the final match ends up mattering the least. To borrow that old saying derived from sportswriter/poet Grantland Rice's 1908 poem "Alumnus Football," Ping Pong is not about whether its characters win or lose but about how they play the game.





Choi directed an episode of Ping Pong, as well as the show's rotoscoped end credits sequence of a walk and drive through Ping Pong's seaside town setting. Her closing sequence is a good example of Ping Pong's knack for dazzling visuals despite its limited animation and low budget (another good example is the show's opening title sequence, which features perhaps the best opening theme tune on an anime so far this year, Bakudan Johnny's "Tada Hitori (Only One)," a rugged-sounding anthem that suits Ping Pong's equally rugged visuals and perfectly encapsulates the show's emphasis on fighting for self-respect instead of fighting to be at the top). Just as "Plants Are Living Things Too, Baby" was, for me, a terrific introduction to Choi's work, the LeRoy Neiman-like Ping Pong was a terrific introduction to the work of Choi's mentor, who, towards the end of Ping Pong's run, received even greater exposure in America than the kind Ping Pong was getting on FUNimation when Adventure Time aired "Food Chain," a standout "Finn and Jake learning about science" episode guest-directed by Yuasa ("Food Chain" was also one of the first projects from Science Saru, a new animation studio founded by Yuasa and Choi).

Between Ping Pong, the Adventure Time episode and now this Hanna-Barbera sound library-reliant episode that's even more offbeat than most of the already offbeat previous episodes of the same show, Yuasa is experiencing quite a year as an animator. I have no idea how Yuasa can function from only a half-hour of sleep per night, which he did while juggling Ping Pong, Adventure Time and Space Dandy. While I don't think the story in "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby" is anything special (if Ping Pong's a gritty but ultimately life-affirming show about plucking the day and not letting the need to win consume you, "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby" is Space Dandy at its most cynical and Emo Dandy-ish), the crazy, stoner-friendly visuals Yuasa directed while operating on an amount of sleep that's too insane to even attempt are imbued with the same panache Yuasa brought to Ping Pong and "Food Chain." There's an early sequence at a crowded space food court that just looks sensational, and the endless amount of culinary delights amusingly amplifies the torment Meow experiences while suffering from an empty stomach.

The story behind the making of "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby" is perhaps more interesting than the episode's story itself. Last year, Yuasa used his Facebook account to conduct a search for international animators to help him out on the Space Dandy episode. Two of the animators who submitted reels of their work to Yuasa and were chosen to take part in the episode were Ben Li and Jeremy Polgar, both staffers from Titmouse Inc., the American studio behind Superjail, Metalocalypse, the most recent season of The Venture Bros., the animated version of Black Dynamite and Motorcity, a short-lived Disney show I didn't expect to enjoy but wound up being amazed by its visuals and subversive undertones. So this episode doesn't just boast Yuasa as a guest talent. It also has veterans from Motorcity and a bunch of other enjoyable Titmouse shows.

"Yuasa-san was very open to us using Flash to animate our shots," wrote Polgar on Tumblr, referring to the same software that he and his co-workers deployed to bring Motorcity to life and turn it into one of the best-looking shows ever made with that software. The shots that Polgar referred to take place during a dazzling sequence where Dandy, Meow and the latest alien they've befriended attempt to sail by boat to the alien's homeworld using the strange physics of a planet called Pushy Boyfriend, which they've all been marooned on. The bizarre point-of-view shots in the sailing sequence are reminiscent of Yuasa's remarkable-looking ping pong match sequences on Ping Pong. Complain all you want about the limited animation on Ping Pong, but table tennis rarely looks as striking or as fun as it did on Yuasa's show.

I wish the episode's story was as remarkable as Yuasa's visuals and that it ended on a better comedic payoff for the two characters who suffer the most during the story, Meow and Carpaccio (Daisuke Namikawa), the aforementioned alien from a planet of talking fish called Girlfriend. The episode opens with Dandy, being his usual self-absorbed self, using whatever remaining cash he has in his not-so-fat pockets to buy himself a portable teleportation device called Mr. Teleporter instead of getting the starving Meow a meal, and during an argument with Meow, the Betelgeusian accidentally teleports Dandy's head--and only his head--to Planet Pushy Boyfriend.

On the planet, Dandy's disembodied head encounters Carpaccio, an astronaut who's been marooned on Pushy Boyfriend for 10 years. The little fish is trying to find a way to return to Planet Girlfriend, which has been stuck orbiting Pushy Boyfriend for nearly 100 years due to Pushy Boyfriend's clinginess gravity, so that he can warn his people about the sun inching closer to Girlfriend. After some fiddling around with the Mr. Teleporter gun, Meow winds up on Pushy Boyfriend as well, Dandy gets the rest of his body back and the duo helps Carpaccio return to Girlfriend, on the condition that he agrees to be taken to the Alien Registration Center afterward and registered.

Carpaccio arrives on Girlfriend to find that his 10-year absence actually lasted 100 years and that Yoko (Fuyumi Shiraishi), the lost love he's been aching to return to, is still alive, but she's now a Botoxed grandmother who doesn't welcome him back with open arms and is happily married to a dickweed of a fish. He returns to also find out that everyone on the planet is a climate change denier who won't listen to his warnings about the planet being burnt to a crisp. As the sun fries up Girlfriend, the depressed Carpaccio leaps right into the sun to kill himself (there goes another opportunity for Dandy to register another alien) and is greeted in Fish Heaven by a much more friendly Yoko. Back on the Aloha Oe, Meow, who gets offended whenever Dandy refers to him as a cat and insinuates that he eats fish, gives in to his feline side and wolfs down the meal he's been dying for: it's in the form of Carpaccio's broiled corpse.

The ultimate fate of the Frank Grimes-ish Carpaccio is supposed to be darkly funny, but instead, I felt awful for Carpaccio. Rejected by his climate change-denying planet and left without a purpose or reason to live, Carpaccio ultimately finds his purpose: as dinner on someone's table. Some viewers might view Carpaccio's unintentional transformation into a remedy for Meow's hunger as a meaningful act that Carpaccio will never realize is meaningful to Meow, but to me, it's just a bummer. The ending falls flat and could use a little more bite, no pun intended. I would have gone in an even darker direction and written it so that Meow gets what he wants, but then he chokes on a piece of Carpaccio and dies too. Like inept Dr. Gel and his assistant Bea, who, along with Planet Girlfriend, receive a fiery demise this week, Meow's no stranger to dying, so why not kill him here as well? But the flat ending doesn't detract from how much of a visual--and aural--treat "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Baby" is and how, like when "Plants Are Living Things Too, Baby" made me want to see more of Eunyoung Choi's projects, this week's Space Dandy episode is another reason to delve further into the work of one of Japan's cleverest current animators.

"AFOS Daytime in the Nighttime" begins Monday, May 13 and "AFOS Vault" begins Thursday, May 16

(Photo source: Corbis)

Starting next week, AFOS brings the daytime to the nighttime. "AFOS Daytime in the Nighttime" will stream a different weekday AFOS block ("Beat Box," "The Whitest Block Ever" and "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round") at 9pm from Monday to Wednesday.

"Beat Box" consists of selections from old scores with funk, synth or jazz sounds that have been sampled by beatmakers, plus cuts from more recent scores with funk, synth or hip-hop sounds. Beatmakers, get ideas for future samples during "Beat Box."

"The Whitest Block Ever" is a block of original themes or score cues from films made by filmmakers of color who have directed projects I like (and the occasional dog or two), including Justin Lin, Jessica Yu, Spike Lee and Robert Rodriguez.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" consists of original score cues from animated shows and movies, whether cel-animated or in CG. I'm not really into metal, but I like what Vernon Reid and Rodrigo y Gabriela have done with the genre, and I'm also cool with the metal score music Stephen Barton wrote for Titmouse's short-lived, too-badass-for-Disney Motorcity. I wish Barton released his cues from that show. They'd be perfect for "Brokedown."

Then on Thursday in the same slot at 9 (as well as earlier that day at noon), "AFOS Vault" will stream old one-hour shows from the AFOS vault that were never streamed before in stereo.

Studio Paradiso in San Francisco

The only episodes of AFOS: The Series I actually like and can bear listening to snippets of are the ones I recorded in a professional studio. I'm not so big on the rest of them. But back when I had a steady income, which was three centuries ago, I was able to afford to record a few of those shows in an actual studio, and I'm honored to have done so in the same San Francisco studio where Kid Koala and the band Dengue Fever cut some records. Those three episodes that don't make me cringe--along with the 007-centric "Dance Into the Fire," the final episode, which I occasionally get asked by listeners to stream again--will be streamed in the "AFOS Vault" slot.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (01/09/2013): Bob's Burgers, American Dad, Motorcity, Adventure Time and Regular Show

Cyndi Lauper looks a lot different ever since she started taking up Krav Maga.

"5-Piece Cartoon Dinner" originally started out as a post about the rivalry between Cartoon Network's "DC Nation" block and Disney XD's "Marvel Universe" block. Named after the Paul's Boutique instrumental "5-Piece Chicken Dinner" as a shout to the late Adam Yauch, "Din" turned into both a way to keep the AFOS blog from looking fallow and a writing exercise/endurance test to see if I would break while I made myself write about animated shows I don't usually watch because they're outside my Adult Swim/Boondocks/Venture Bros. comfort zone.

I did end up breaking halfway through the first season of Ultimate Spider-Man on "Marvel Universe" (it's nicely animated by Film Roman, but its juvenile scripts, except for the one for the Spidey/Iron Fist/Doctor Strange team-up "Strange," have paled in comparison to the writing in the Brian Michael Bendis comic it's loosely based on). I found myself busting out my best Danny Glover and grumbling, "I'm too old for this shit," and I gave up recapping USM. (There's a way to bring out the comedic side of Spidey's adventures without coming off as too juvenile. Unlike USM, Christopher Yost managed to do it during the Spidey guest shots he wrote for The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes.)

"I'm too old for this shit" was something I frequently thought while catching for the first time shows like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot and Ben 10: Special Victims Unit, so that's why those cartoons and a few others received Cs from me two weeks ago (and I don't think I'll ever have the patience to sit through The Hub's revivals of My Little Pony, Pound Puppies and Care Bears). But I also discovered cartoons that aren't made with just kids in mind and are equal to high-quality works like two of my favorite shows from the late '80s/early '90s animation renaissance, Batman: The Animated Series and The Simpsons (more specifically, seasons two through eight), the aforementioned Adult Swim half-hour hits The Venture Bros. and The Boondocks and the short-lived Cartoon Network gems Megas XLR and Sym-Bionic Titan.

Before "Din," I was already acquainted with the beautifully animated Young Justice, but "Din" has turned me into a Regular Show fan, and I've started to enjoy the Fleischer Brothers-style, "actually made for older viewers and potheads, but kids, you're welcome to take a toke too" vibe of Adventure Time. And I don't think I've ever seen an action cartoon outside of B:TAS that basically says to young viewers, "It's okay to question corporate America," which is one of the reasons why I fell in love with Motorcity. I initially thought, "There's no way this anti-corporate-world cartoon is going to last on Disney XD," and I was right. Disney canned Motorcity after one season.

"Din" is also a chance to bring an adult, "not every other word in the review is the word 'awesome'" perspective to these kids' cartoons (the A.V. Club has been the only site I regularly read that takes animation seriously and assigns writers who are around my age to discuss these shows in posts that, unlike most other online reviews, have been spellchecked, although in the cases of plucked-from-the-blogosphere AVC writers like Phil Dyess-Nugent of the intriguing Phil Dyess-Nugent Experience blog, you can take the blogger out of the misspelling-riddled blogosphere, but you can't take the misspelling-riddled blogosphere out of the blogger). But as early as the first week, I already complained about having to sit through the annoying commercials on kids' networks (my remote was broken at the time, so I couldn't fast-forward through them).

In addition to the aggravating kids' network ads for nightlights and juice pouches, I've started to grow tired of the kids' networks' haphazard episode schedules. Neither HBO nor FX would yank a 13-episode original series in the middle of its run without warning like Cartoon Network did with its serialized "DC Nation" shows about three weeks into their new seasons. That's because HBO and FX are run by grown-ups, and a grown-up way of relating to viewers is to warn them about the preemption beforehand, not afterward. Also, on some weeks, I've found my Adult Swim/HBO/FX-watching self saying, "Can somebody please swear or actually kill somebody? I think I'm going to fucking lose it."

So the first new "Din" column in 2013 means one major modification. I'm changing the "non-Adult Swim cable cartoon" rule and adding to the always-changing "Din" roster the cartoons I watch more frequently: adult cartoons, whether for the broadcast networks or cable (Archer will return to FX on January 17 and IFC will sneak-preview an interesting-looking new one called Out There on January 22 this week).

Whattup, cursing, sex and grown-up problems.

***

It took me about a few episodes of Bob's Burgers to get used to the weirdness of female characters being voiced by male comedians (kind of like how a viewer who's never seen The Venture Bros. before catches TVB for the first time and keeps wondering, "Why does that brunette chick sound like a dude?"), but now that I'm no longer distracted by that casting quirk, I consider Bob's Burgers to be the current crown jewel of the Fox "Animation Domination" block. Bob's Burgers creator Loren Bouchard has taken the best elements of his Squigglevision cartoons Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist and Home Movies--overlapping dialogue, great comedic voice acting by performers who weren't previously associated with animation, nicely written kid characters--and put them into a show with top-shelf animation (no off-putting squiggling during this one).

Add to those elements a recurring and interesting art-vs.-commerce conflict between Bob (H. Jon Benjamin) and his business rivals that Bouchard has said was inspired by the 1996 Italian restaurant movie Big Night--plus timeless storylines that deal with the unspoken affection the family members have for each other without getting too goopy--and you have a cartoon that's outlasted the Allen Gregorys and Napoleon Dynamites of the world and, due to its timeless writing, has the potential to age better in reruns than Family Guy's random pop-culture reference gags and the equally reference-heavy and spotty later seasons of The Simpsons. "Mother Daughter Laser Razor" is a great example of the Bouchard show's exploration of the bonds between the Belchers without resorting to those sitcom hugging scenes that made '80s studio audiences go "Awww" and made me want to go shoot myself.

Written by Nora Smith, "Mother Daughter Laser Razor" pairs off two characters who don't share a lot of scenes together--nine-year-old sociopath Louise (Kristen Schaal) and the parent she doesn't favor, the overly perky Linda (John Roberts, one of two male cast members on this show who voices females)--while continuing to explore how Louise's older sister Tina (Dan Mintz, the other actor playing female) seems to have inherited everything from Bob. Those attributes include a lonely and largely friendless childhood similar to the one we saw young Bob experience in "Bob Fires the Kids," Bob's calm demeanor and now, his hairiness.

At Dad's restaurant, Tina overhears a couple of popular classmates gossiping about another girl's hairy legs and realizes her own legs are equally hairy and susceptible to ridicule, so she asks Bob to take her to get her legs waxed after a couple of failed attempts to have them sheared. Lin was supposed to shave Tina's legs, but Lin, who's been fuming over Louise's frequent hostility towards her, is too distracted and angry to be entrusted with a razor, and as resident weirdo sibling Gene (Eugene Mirman) notes in one of the few observations of his that make any sense, "I don't think you should shave angry."

Lin's misguided solution to getting Louise to like her better is to trick her into taking part in a mother-daughter bonding seminar run by Lin's current favorite mommy blogger, "the Phenomimom," who turns out to be a creepy man named Dakota (Tim Heidecker from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!) who holds his seminars next door to a laser-tag fun zone that's more to Louise's liking. Dakota's "Modo Time" methods of getting disgruntled kids to bond with their moms are, of course, pointless and ineffective. They range from lame role-reversal improv games to forcing the kids to re-experience their days as fetuses while trapped inside "vagi-sacks," a.k.a. sleeping bags.

Because Bob's Burgers is a very good cartoon as opposed to a sloppy one like The Simpsons' fake Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show that sets up the presence of a fireworks factory and then fails to utilize it as a gag, "Mother Daughter Laser Razor" makes it to the fireworks factory when Louise frees herself and the other kids from their hellish seminar experience and leads them to escape to the laser-tag fun zone, where Louise and Lin finally end up bonding over laser guns aimed at an enraged Dakota. If this were The Young Ones, the anarchic Louise's love of destruction and criminal activity would make her Vyvyan. Between the attraction to laser-tag and her enjoyment of Bob's favorite spaghetti westerns in "Spaghetti Western and Meatballs," I wouldn't be surprised if this mini-Vyv grows up to become an action movie director, just like how Gene is bound to become either a hacky morning zoo DJ or a hacky stand-up and Tina is headed towards becoming either a chef like her dad or an essayist penning Paul Feig-esque best-sellers about her awkward adolescent experiences.

The kid characters are the best part of Bob's Burgers. That's mainly because they--particularly the nutty and over-enthusiastic Gene--talk and behave more like real kids who don't really know much about the world outside the restaurant and the playground and less like precocious Huey Freeman-style stand-ins or Mary Sues for their adult creators (although Aaron McGruder's use of Huey as the voice for his politics on the Boondocks cartoon works quite well for that show).

My favorite example in this episode of the Belcher kids being such kids--other than Gene's desire to get a scrotal wax despite not fully grasping how painful it likely is--is a quick gag that's easy to miss, and a lot of them can be easily missed due to the overlapping dialogue that's distinguished Bob's Burgers from The Simpsons and the Seth MacFarlane cartoons. When Louise tries to back out of mother-daughter time, she communicates to Lin her reluctance to spend time with her by using break-up lines she's overheard from either dozens of break-up conversations between couples at the restaurant or break-up scenes in rom-coms: "Look, I think we should spend some time apart. I'm just not really looking for something serious right now. You understand--I mean, yeah, it's gonna be a little awkward, you've got some of your stuff at my place, we live together..." "I think we should spend some time apart" are words I hope I'll never have to say to Bob's Burgers.

***

I prefer the MacFarlane-produced American Dad (which isn't run by MacFarlane but by co-creators Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman) over the show MacFarlane is better known for and has been more creatively involved in, Family Guy, for several reasons. One of them is because Family Guy doesn't have Patrick Stewart entertainingly pissing all over his fatherly, buttoned-up image as Captain Picard and Professor Xavier almost every week as the voice of Avery Bullock, the batshit crazy boss of CIA agent Stan Smith (MacFarlane, who also voices Roger the alien), like in the latest American Dad episode, the enjoyable "Finger Lenting Good."

Avery presides over a Lenten pact where the Smiths must rid themselves of their worst vices for all of Lent. For instance, Francine (Wendy Schaal) has to give up smoking, while wimpy teen Steve (Scott Grimes) has to avoid weeping, which Steve can barely keep himself from doing when, in the funniest non-Avery-or-Roger-related gag, Hayley (Rachael MacFarlane, Seth's sister) and Stan sing aloud "Nothing Compares 2 U" to make Steve crack. The first Smith who succumbs to his or her vice has to sacrifice a finger to Avery, who reveals that he wears a bracelet made of severed fingers ("I started collecting when I was in Vietnam. Two summers ago. I was on a sex tour. Did not get laid, had zero game. Just kept... cutting off fingers."). Between Avery episodes like this one and Kate Mulgrew's frequent scene-stealing on NTSF:SD:SUV:: as Kove, Paul Scheer's eyepatch-wearing boss/ex-wife, I've gotten a kick out of seeing post-Kirk Star Trek captains make the space-time leap to absurdist comedy. Your move, Sisko.

***

(Photo source: unseendaydream)

Like the best final episodes of shows that were taken from us too early, "A Better Tomorrow," the dramatic conclusion of a two-part season finale that's ended up being Motorcity's series finale, functions as a fine summation of what the show wanted to do (in Motorcity's case, it's to blow stuff up) and say (any time corporate America offers you utopia, never be afraid to question it) while also trying not to leave too many threads hanging. Otherwise, we would have been left with a colossal, Heroes season one finale-style letdown. However, one thread is left hanging, and it's my only disappointment with "A Better Tomorrow": after the show made such a big deal about Burners leader Mike's connection to his helmeted nemesis Red (Eric Ladin) in "Vendetta," we never learn Red's identity.

The year 2012, as told through tweets I favorited

AFOS, which I finally upgraded from mono to stereo earlier this month, was occasionally mentioned on Twitter by other people in 2012, either to express their disappointment in iTunes dumping AFOS from its station list (another reason to dislike iTunes, but I can't really do anything about their decision to dump AFOS) or to praise my station for streaming movie themes they enjoyed hearing. Author Scott Pearson, a contributor to Simon & Schuster's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Star Trek: Myriad Universes anthologies, did both:

The AFOS blog's new "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner" column received a few shout-outs and retweets on Twitter, mostly from staffers at Titmouse because I said a few nice things about the animation studio's collabos with Disney: Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja and the even more impressive--and anti-authoritarian--Motorcity. The latter action cartoon is a one-season wonder that looks remarkably like a big-budget animated feature film each week and is another unfortunate casualty in a TV landscape that hasn't been kind lately to true sci-fi like Motorcity. Alyssa Rosenberg posted a piece on ThinkProgress where she lamented the lack of true sci-fi shows on the currently-more-fantasy-oriented--and crap-oriented--Syfy. Motorcity, which was slept on by even the few TV critics out there who regularly cover animated shows, was exactly the kind of sci-fi show Rosenberg was clamoring for.

I favorited Motorcity writer George Krstic's tweet about my review of his "Power Trip" episode mainly because of the joke he cracked about himself and his colleagues:

Enough about me. What about the rest of 2012?

(Most year-end lists can make for boring and grueling reading. Reflecting on the past year by skimming through tweets I favorited is turning into an entertaining alternative from scrolling through endless year-end articles and think pieces.)

Quite a bit of fun resulted on Twitter from the much-hyped second season of Downton Abbey (I once tweeted, "Note to self: Don't forget to add #DowntonAbbey to the list of 'Shit White People Like That I Don't Understand the Appeal Of.'"):

Artists whom I've been giving heavy airplay to on AFOS got the chance to kick it with their idols:

There was 2 Broke Girls showrunner Michael Patrick King's stupid defense of the racist material that's being written for the Korean Long Duk Dong on the show, or as GQ writer Lauren Bans amusingly calls the openly gay King's brand of humor, "gaycism":

Ignorance came not just from sitcom joke writers but also from TV stars and, as usual, the far right:

There was Linsanity (and the inevitable and stupid racial slurs in response to the rise of the NBA's first Asian American star player):

There was also the fall of aging (and disappointingly homophobic) champ Manny Pacquiao:

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (12/26/2012): The best episodes of 2012 (part 1)

The helmeted villain with no name attempts to trim Mike's bangs.

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. There will be no new columns this week and next week due to the holidays and the lack of first-run programming (only Tron: Uprising and Motorcity are first-run because Disney XD chose to burn off the rest of their episodes over the holidays). In a special year-end edition of "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," here are previous reviews of five of my favorite non-Adult Swim cable cartoon episodes from May to December 2012.

Motorcity, "Power Trip" (from May 11, 2012)

Motorcity, the only one out of the five cartoons this week that's not based on a superhero comic for a change, is only two episodes in, and this unlikely collabo between Disney and the not-so-family-friendly Titmouse animation studio (of Metalocalypse and Freaknik: The Musical fame) is already the most inventive and thrilling of the five. It's not a superhero show, yet it's dealing with questions about heroism (and even activism) more interestingly than most cartoons that are actual superhero shows.

In Motorcity's future setting, the socio-economical punching bag that is Detroit has been divided by greedy developer Abraham Kane (Batman: The Animated Series and Metalocalypse vocal MVP Mark Hamill) into two sections, the sparkling-clean, EPCOT-like Detroit Deluxe for the city's most affluent inhabitants and Motorcity, a subterranean ghetto that Kane is plotting to completely bulldoze. Teenage gearhead Mike Chilton (Reid Scott, currently appearing on HBO's Veep as the conceited douche on VP Selina Meyer's staff) has banded together with cowardly hacker and best friend Chuck (Nate Torrence), industrial spy Julie (Kate Micucci) and mechanics Dutch (Kel Mitchell), Texas (Jess Harnell) and Goat Jacob (Brian Doyle-Murray) to prevent Kane and his Shockbots from wiping out Motorcity. These tech-savvy rebels call themselves the Burners. If an older Phineas and Ferb joined Dominic Toretto's crew from the Fast and the Furious movies and then were all forced to live in a dystopic ghetto of the future, it would look something like the Burners.

To borrow a line from the infamous Super Bowl XLVI Chrysler ad where Clint Eastwood big-upped the Detroit auto industry, now Motorcity is fighting again. But will Kane succeed in turning the Burners and the people of Motorcity against Mike, who, like Jacob, used to work for KaneCo? Will the fog, division, discord and blame make it hard for the Burners to see what lies ahead?

Even though Motorcity must have been created by Titmouse honcho Chris Prynoski long before the Occupy movement began (and judging from how much work Titmouse put into making the show's visuals look amazing, it had have to been created that long ago) and Prynoski is more concerned with high-octane action than political allegory, it's hard to ignore how similar the Burners' opposition to Kane is to the struggles of us 99 Percenters. It's about time Occupy protesters got an animated show they can root for and embrace--and of course, watch while being camped out between protests, most likely through Burners-style illegal means that would make Disney's blood boil.

Speaking of Disney, how the hell did a show with a clear disdain for EPCOT-like things manage to get Disney's approval and make it on to a Disney-owned channel?

"When I asked Prynoski about this [satirical] aspect of Motorcity," wrote Jim Hill in his article about Motorcity, "all Chris could do in response was laugh and then say 'I don't think I'm allowed to comment on that. But I will say that you're a very perceptive fellow.'"

For a long time, I found it difficult to get over Cartoon Network's cancellation of the Titmouse-produced Megas XLR, which, like Motorcity, had a bunch of teenage gearheads as the heroes (instead of souped-up hot rods, their ride was a giant robot from the future). I think I'm finally over it. Motorcity is a great substitute, and in some ways, it's an even better show. Sure, there aren't as many amusing pop culture reference gags on Motorcity as there were on Megas XLR, which, for instance, regularly ridiculed MTV for cancelling the Titmouse cult favorite Downtown by destroying a "PopTV" sign in every episode (Roth, a robot named after car customizer Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, and a shout-out to Admiral Ackbar's "It's a trap!" line from Hamill's Star Wars past are as reference-y as Motorcity gets). But the Burners are more interesting characters (I especially enjoyed the matter-of-fact way the "Battle for Motorcity" premiere episode revealed that Julie is Kane's daughter) and more fallible heroes than Megas XLR's Coop, who always triumphed over the Glorft at the end of each episode despite leveling most of New Jersey in the process. On Megas XLR, the destruction of Jersey was a running gag, but on Motorcity, the impact the Burners' battles against Kane have on the fragile ghetto they call home is treated a little more seriously.

This week's "Power Trip" episode, scripted by Megas XLR co-creator George Krstic, features a great scene where the Burners brainstorm how to break into the KaneCo Tower and realize why each of their ideas would suck donkey balls. In that comedic scene and in later moments where characters debate over weaponizing an unstable KaneCo energy source, "Power Trip" deals with how heroism sometimes requires compromise, but without getting preachy about it. Mike gets a KaneCo R&D scientist (Jim Cummings) to steal from Kane an energy core, which would result in Kane's evil empire being shut down once and for all. But even though the energy core is too unstable and dangerous for the Burners to keep around in Motorcity, Mike insists on using it as a weapon, and his stance is met with opposition by Chuck and the scientist. The series isn't afraid to show that while Mike is a great leader, he's also an adrenaline junkie, and his recklessness can be a liability for the people he wants to protect.

In "Battle for Motorcity," the constantly whiny Chuck, who's so squeamish he makes Shaggy from Scooby-Doo look macho, quickly became the show's most grating character. He's still a whiny crybaby in "Power Trip," but luckily, this second episode gives Chuck more to do than just whine, squeal and activate his ejector seat, and in the scenes where the characters express their hesitancy over handling the energy core, we see why Mike values Chuck as the conscience of the group and why Mike needs him to keep him in check (over on Tumblr, several Motorcity fans are already shipping Mike and Chuck as a gay couple, and I wouldn't be surprised if some female viewer somewhere is currently hard at work on her Mike/Chuck slashfic).

(Photo source: People of MotorCity)

I'm making Motorcity sound like a serious show, but it's far from it. It's as wild a ride as that rollercoaster Phineas and Ferb built in their backyard. Disney and Titmouse may turn out to be the most worthwhile partnership between The Mouse and another animation studio since Disney and some little computer graphics company from the Bay Area.

***

Motorcity, "Vendetta" (from June 19, 2012)

Motorcity introduces yet another adversary for the Burners during another solid episode of this finely crafted cartoon, "Vendetta." This time, it's a nameless, red muscle car-driving warrior (Eric Ladin, just recently killed off on The Killing) in a spiked helmet who looks like a rejected Tron: Uprising baddie and is referred to in the end credits only as "Red"--although this mystery man's beef is mainly with Burners leader Mike Chilton. On the one-year anniversary of the day Mike severed ties with Abraham Kane, Red emerges from out of nowhere to take revenge on Mike and eliminate him.

In juicy flashbacks that finally explain what Mike did when he was a KaneCo employee, we learn that he was a cadet in Kane's army of soldiers known as the Ultra Elites. The fact that a businessman assembled an army to guard him and do his dirty work shows how psychotic this particular businessman is.

At the height of Donald Trump's still-continuing racist nonsense about President Obama, Lewis Black did a hilarious Daily Show "Back in Black" segment where he joked that he wants Trump to be the next president because America needs to be run by someone as insane as Muammar Gaddafi and Kim Jong Il. Kane is like a mash-up of Trump's Third World dictator-style craziness and Steve Jobs' technological genius, his dickish treatment of his Apple colleagues and his love of the color white--in the wardrobe and burly body of a douchey gym manager.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (12/19/2012): Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Kaijudo, Dan Vs., Tron: Uprising and Motorcity

And then Elise tore off her clothes and reenacted Sandra Bernhard's crazy monologue from The King of Comedy.

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired. There will be no new column next week due to Christmas. Instead, five previous reviews of the best non-Adult Swim cable cartoon episodes I saw between May and December 2012 will be reposted on December 26.

Back in September, I caught most of the series premiere of Nickelodeon's CG-animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This reboot of the '80s indie comic-turned-cartoon is noteworthy for bringing back to the franchise '80s and '90s TMNT voice actor Rob Paulsen, who, when TMNT exploded as a merchandising phenomenon, was four years away from getting the chance to work with better and funnier animated material as the voices of Yakko, Pinky and Dr. Scratchansniff on Animaniacs (but on this new TMNT, Paulsen voices Donatello instead of his old role of Raphael). I might have liked this TMNT reboot if I were 12, but because I'm not 12, eh, it's not so appealing to me. The only other TMNT episode I've caught is "It Came from the Depths," the latest installment.

(Photo source: TMNTPedia)

Sure, the animation is much more fluid during this CG version and the theme song is 2000s-style lite-rap instead of very '80s lite-rock (little-known fact: the '80s theme, which the new theme lifts its chorus from, was co-written by a then-unknown, pre-Dharma & Greg/Two and a Half Men Chuck Lorre), but otherwise, the Ninja Turtles aren't much different from the Ninja Turtles I first saw (and tolerated) as a kid. They still fight like Japanese swordsmen and talk like white dudes. They're still obsessed with pizza, a joke that wasn't funny in 1988 and still isn't funny in 2012.

However, there's one genuinely funny gag during "It Came from the Depths," and it has nothing to do with the episode's boring plot, which reintroduces mutant alligator Leatherhead, a Killer Croc-ish character from the old show. Ninja Turtles leader Leonardo (Jason Biggs) is a fan of Space Heroes, a popular sci-fi cartoon that's a mash-up of Filmation's barely animated version of Star Trek from the '70s--a show I first caught on Nickelodeon!--and Hanna-Barbera's Sealab 2020. The cel-animated clip of Space Heroes is a great animation industry in-joke from episode director Juan Meza-Leon about how stiff and crappy the animation looked on the Trek cartoon. The Space Heroes clip even resembles an actual episode of the Trek cartoon, "More Tribbles, More Troubles" (but here, the Tribbles make honking noises instead of purring sounds and are called "Trumpets"). They even nailed the Trek cartoon's strange, Ingmar Bergman-esque two-shots of Kirk and Spock! That was one of Filmation's famously lazy-ass ways of restricting the animation to just mouth and eyebrow movements.

(Photo source: TMNTPedia)

Aside from that terrific little spoof of the Trek cartoon, Nick's TMNT isn't a show I'll be revisiting. The controversy surrounding Biggs' involvement in the show is more interesting than the show itself. The American Pie star has an off-color and not-exactly-Nick-audience-friendly Twitter account where he tweets racist jokes about Indian American spelling bee contestants and raunchy ones about Ann Romney and Paul Ryan's wife (what else would you expect from a guy who became famous for sticking his dick in a pie?). During the week of the Republican National Convention, Fox News anchor and pepper spray expert Megyn Kelly reacted to Biggs' tweets about the Romney and Ryan wives by yelling, "Off with his head!" Nick ended up apologizing for Biggs' RNC tweets and "our mistake to link from our Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles twitter feed to Jason's personal twitter account" and yadda yadda. So Nick apologizes when the GOP whines about Biggs' anti-Republican jokes, but the channel's silent about the racist jokes he cracked a couple of months before about Indian kids? Ninja please.

***

As someone who got involved in writing a few pieces of Asian American fiction (one published, the others either unpublished, unfinished or read by barely anybody) to help take away the power of the Jason Biggses of the world, I think it's kind of sad that the only current action show with an Asian American lead as the main hero is a kids' cartoon where he's voiced by Scott Wolf and the heroes cheesily shout aloud reverbed I-have-the-power incantations like "Tatsurion the Unchained!" and "Scaradorable of Gloom Hollow!," a kids' show-ism that usually makes me fumble for my remote. I initially didn't think I'd be able to withstand the TV-Y7-rated Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters, but in spite of its kids' show-isms and occasionally clunky dialogue, the Hasbro Studios cartoon has grown on me. The fact that it's rather nicely animated by the Korean studio MOI instead of poorly animated like the '80s versions of G.I. Joe and Transformers sort of helps, along with little touches like the attention to Ray's biracial background, the lead duo's names of Bob and Ray (c'mon, man, that's gotta be a shout-out to Chris Elliott's dad and his late comedy partner!) and Bob's words to Ray when he wishes him luck in part 2 of "The Rising," the first-season finale.

"Don't forget: bob and weave," says Bob, a.k.a. Tatsurion, to Ray in a rousing callback to the battle instruction from Ray that was misunderstood so badly by Tatsurion in the series premiere that it wound up becoming his nickname.

Ray doesn't kill his cruel nemesis the Choten like I wanted him to, but with the help of the other Duel Masters, their kaiju sidekicks, a resurrected Sasha (Kari Wahlgren) and even his newly-outed-as-a-Duelist mom, Ray's able to foil the Choten's season-long plan to open the Veil that the Order of the Duel Masters keeps sealed in order to protect Earth from the creature realm. Alakshmi (Grey DeLisle), the Shane Vendrell of Kaijudo, continues to get screwed over, even after finally wising up about her evil boss and deciding to help Gabe thwart him. She's rewarded for her moment of clarity by winding up a prisoner in the Fire Civilization, where the Fire God excites a coliseum full of bloodthirsty Fire Civilization creatures by declaring war on Earth.

In another set-up for season 2, the Choten, now trapped in the creature realm with his henchmen and his new ally Nigel Brightmore, hatches another plan: to conquer the realm from the other side of the Veil. Meanwhile, the Order chooses the no-longer-inept Gabe as the new Light Civilization Master to replace the traitorous Nigel, and Ray must deal with losing his dad Ken again, but he's unaware that Ken is alive and was rescued by Water Civilization creatures. Also, Masters Chavez (Freddy Rodriguez) and Nadia (also DeLisle) stop playing timid and finally express their feelings for each other (as do Ray and Allie, but less overtly) to cap off a season-long romantic subplot that consisted of nothing but very minimal dialogue and strange electricity between Chavez and Nadia whenever the Choten's attacks forced them to be huddled together in tight corners.

Of course, nobody watches Kaijudo to see these humans make out. We tune in mainly to see kaiju wreak havoc on each other, and "The Rising, Part 2" delivers plenty of kaiju rampaging on each other (and emerging from the opened Veil to attack Earth during some of my favorite epic shots of the series), although Guillermo del Toro's robots-vs.-kaiju epic Pacific Rim, which hasn't been released yet but has just dropped an amazing-looking trailer, is already making Kaijudo look like a bunch of rough notebook doodles.