One by one, the guests arrive
The guests are coming through
The open-hearted many, the broken-hearted few
And no one knows where the night is going
And no one knows why the wine is flowing
Leonard Cohen, “The Guests”.
Please allow me to introduce myself, as the Rolling Stones would say. I am not a man of wealth, at least not yet. But I am considered by some to be a man of taste, such as the man who runs this blog. I asked him politely if I might have a chance to share my knowledge of the type of taste I know well, since I feel it doesn’t get a lot of critical attention, and he agreed. So here I am.
But, since you might not know much about what I know about it, as Sam Cooke would have it, I should probably explain it to you before I get around to anything more specific later on. Here goes.
For the greater part of my life, I have spent time in the company of some of the most enlightening and thought provoking, yet sometimes aggravating, people on Earth. These people can assume any guise they so choose: human, animal, vegetable, mineral or otherwise. They have physical and mental abilities we here on Earth only wish we could have. And yet, the vast majority of them have personal and psychological hang-ups that only Sigmund Freud and/or Carl Jung could completely get to the bottom of. All of these are displayed fervently in a style of presentation and performance that simply does not exist in any way in our more buttoned-down “real” world. All of these attract me to them like a moth to a flame, and reduce me to a fly in a spider’s web in their presence. They’re that attractive to me and so many others, and so hard to resist once they capture you.
I am speaking of the miraculous and frustratingly hard to categorize filmmaking art form known formally as animation, and informally (and sometimes very derisively) as “cartoons”. Specifically those made for the equally miraculous and hard-to-define medium known as television.
This is a genre with a large and vast history within that of television, with an ever increasing number of beings added to its ranks every year. It is something that no less a scholar of the media than my fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan once referred to as television’s “optimal mode” of presentation, one that embodied both its strengths and its liabilities to the greatest degree possible. I need only to drop the name of one of its more iconic characters, or a group of same, and you know who I mean and what I am talking about, right away.
Yet it is one that is repeatedly dishonoured, insulted and humiliated by those who know nothing or very little about it. And because these people often hold positions of social and political power they should not, the characters and their creators alike often suffer in silence. To say nothing of the many fans and admirers these programs have individually and collectively.
When I started researching what would eventually become my history of the genre, America ‘Toons In, I was repeatedly shocked and appalled by how little truly objective academic scholarship there is on television animation. Let alone in the popular press, who, in categorizing the majority of the good programs in the genre as “simply” for “children”, displayed in the past and now a monumental level of ignorance towards the programming genre and a blatant manipulation of the sociopolitical impotence of the latter group, who are that who are most gratifyingly empowered in the narratives of television animation. I am hoping that my publication of that work in 2014, as well as the eventual publication of the encyclopedia I am currently labouring on, will help create some sort of equalization in this area, but I cannot know for sure.
I see the neglect and abuse which the genre suffers from on a regular basis being a regular viewer. As is true with most of television, programs come and go with a rapidity resembling the butchering of cattle in a slaughterhouse, then and, particularly in our attention-starved world of today, now. You can’t really appreciate things unless you look at them closely enough to get them, and those who profess to do so without doing that know not of what they speak. I make it a point to know the best things about it in particular inside and out, and I hate them being dismissed without thought.
Television animation is often taken advantage of, as its characters are taken advantage of in its narratives. Suddenly and without warning. And, unlike the characters, the programs themselves, as copyrighted properties “owned” by faceless corporations, seem defenseless to being wrongfully manipulated.
Consider, for example, the recent thoughtless decision of Cartoon Network to revive “The Powerpuff Girls” without the involvement of its original driving force, Craig McCracken. This was, as with most tactless and trivial revivals and “reboots” and whatever other dumb invented terms used to describe them, a needless one, done only as a secure means of providing financial profit and for no other justifiable reason. The original was a Mona Lisa that does not need a mustache tactlessly applied to it.
Or there is FOX’s treatment of the genre’s one undisputable masterpiece, “The Simpsons”, to consider. It was and is brilliant most of the time, but it could have remained so even if its lifespan had been much less than its current unassailable record of 26 years on the air. But even long-time fans like me seem tired of seeing the episodes of its second and third decades that are mere tired replicas of the brilliance it repeatedly achieved in the 1990s. Yet FOX, network and studio alike, seems not to notice or care.
There are bright spots on the horizon, however, and those are more what I want to celebrate in this column rather than the flaws. Although I will certainly comment on things I don’t like if provoked.
I quoted that particular Leonard Cohen song at the beginning for a reason. It is very much about what I feel has gone on with television animation, as programming art and commercial property alike. The guests in that song are invited into a house under the pretext of having a good time (“those who dance begin to dance”) or to vent their problems out to the host (“those who weep begin to weep”), only to be, one by one, “cast beyond the garden wall” when their usefulness has ended to the host.
I always invite television animation characters into my house, and I never cast them out. Because I know their suffering better than anyone can, and I know they deserve much better than they get from this world.
I hope you agree with me, and I hope you will follow me on this journey as I meet new guests and revisit old ones in the context of my writing and research. I would like it if someone else could learn how to feel as I feel about them. Because I cannot do this alone by any means.
David Perlmutter is a freelance writer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The holder of an MA degree from the Universities of Manitoba and Winnipeg, and a lifelong animation fan, he has published short fiction in a variety of genres for various magazines and anthologies, as well as essays on his favorite topics for similar publishers. He is the author of America Toons In: A History of Television Animation (McFarland and Co.), The Singular Adventures Of Jefferson Ball (Chupa Cabra House), The Pups (Booklocker.com), Certain Private Conversations and Other Stories (Aurora Publishing), Orthicon; or, the History of a Bad Idea (Linkville Press, forthcoming) and Nothing About Us Without Us: The Adventures of the Cartoon Republican Army (Dreaming Big Productions, forthcoming.)
