Cartoons

The ScoobyThon on Cartoon Network continues, much to Peter’s helpless dismay. I left a videotape recording on super-slow last night and actually managed to catch my very first piece of TV work, a deathless thing which revels in the title “The Hairy Scare of the Devil-Bear.” It features two characters named after Larry and Fuzzy Niven, this being its only possibly claim to any kind of fame whatsoever.

I wish they would just “strip” the things in temporal order so that I could get all my taping done at once, but there’s no way they’re going to do that: even middle-of-the-night viewers would be bored witless. Oh well. It’s been educational watching excerpts from The Many Lives of Scooby and noting highs (Shaggy unpacks a suitcase and mutters, “I guess I’d better dress for dinner.” — at which point we see the suitcase is full of identical green floppy T-shirts…) and lows (right now the group is having a run in with, not just a ghost, but a ghost spaceman. Argh).

The only thing about this exercise that’s really beginning to get under my skin would be the incessant (five per hour, at least) commercials for a relentlessly insipid MOR collection of Christian music called “Songs 4 Worship”. “Millions have Experienced the Glory!” the announcer intones. Well, if they have, it’s been despite the music, not because of it. I’m going to have to listen to the B Minor Mass about thirty times to get the sound of some of these things out of my head. The heck with you, Time Life Warner AOL Whatever! (Yeah, I know, I work for Warner sometimes. Sometimes the King’s Shilling looks more tarnished than others.) (But I’ll take the heck-wish back the minute that the story editor on Justice League calls me and asks me to write a Green Lantern script. Yeah, that’s the ticket.)