It's funny, cause Match Game definitely crossed my mind when I came up with this. I think my love for 70s fashion (genuine, non-ironic) made me dismiss it, but I absolutely see other people coming up with that.

Kiss is actually a pretty great choice.

Apropos of this piece, I sometimes play this mindgame where I try to define a decade by singling out exactly one song, one film, one TV show, and in the case of the 80s, 90s, and 00s, one video game. The trick is that the defining media has to exemplify both the BEST of the decade and the WORST of it. And you can't…

Right? I binged on this show this summer and ended it with 3 questions:

Actually, I like it quite a bit. It's dumb as hell, sure, but it definitely knew it was. It also had some fairly creative ideas in terms of making fun of various animated tropes, if nothing particularly new.

MIB is probably the closest we'd get to a Dr. Who animated show - in terms of weird, crazy, outlandish plots that come together nicely at the end.

There were two animated Dr. Who "episodes" starring Tennent's Doctor. Both were awful, although the second one was slightly better than the first one. Tennent was surprisingly good as a VO, though.

Besides the mentioned Drawn Together and Total Drama Island, individual episodes of various cartoons have parodied the reality TV show concept (mostly American Idol, but they've done Survivor and Big Brother as well).

The efficiency of HB's animation cannot be overstated for sure - the question is why the content was so poor. Some of it isn't - Top Cat is actually particularly great - but these knockoffs and re-skinned versions of kids solving mysterious is the real question.

This is hilarious.

Agreed - was there a big thing about indie productions dying off right after the glut of indie-distributed films right after Pulp Fiction? And how the whole "Sundance acclaimed" films didn't mean shit when distributed to mainstream audiences?

@pico79:disqus Yep, that was the one. And you're right, those episodes understood the animation and the limits of it, and seemed to understand the style they were parodying. Not some but with "Fun Pit."

Apparently there's a Disney Afternoon panel at some point. I doubt you could get into that, but if you could…

Just caught it, and agreed with him and yourself. And again, what makes it particularly upsetting is that they did a much better cartoon parody a few seasons ago (I forget the name of that episode). Not sure what really went wrong here.

I think the problem with this episode was the actual cartoon parodies weren't that great, which is weird because they did a pretty great "animation parody" episode before. This one was bad because, it kinda seemed like it was making things up, as if they weren't familiar at all with the cartoons they were lampooning.

"Subverting" may be the wrong word, but Faust and her crew distinctly and expressly sought to make something more than a show FOR LITTLE GIRLS. I'm only a casual watcher of the show myself (I don't use the word fan since I'm lukewarm on the current direction of the show).

Yeah, TTG is more Dexter's Lab than PPG, the latter being more analogous to MLP, and like Dexter's Lab, I wouldn't follow that show either, but would enjoy it every chance I did watch it. I'm following TTG mainly because there's nothing else going on television-wise right now.

I was hoping they'd do the joke about "the joke about the guy who throws the snail."

Yeah, it's weird that the general sense of the movie is that "it's not as bad as it could be" kinda miss the point. Most of these kinds of films are within "passable" territory, the question is if its necessary or really clever outside of humorous "pony getting used to being a human" gags. Beyond that it sounds like…

First off: dark, etc.