That's Nobody's Business But the Turks

For those who are wondering about the second DVD collection of Tiny Toons (comprising the second half of the 65-episode first season), yes, all the music appears to be intact in the "Tiny Toons Music Television" episode: the two They Might Be Giants songs, "Money" and "R-E-S-P-E-C-T." Hamton singing "Happy Feet" in a not-very-good episode called "Hero Hamton" is also intact. And in the second season of Freakazoid!, "We'll Meet Again" is also intact.

The "Music Television" episode is kind of typical of early Tiny Toons in that it's a mix of really good moments and moments that aren't so good at all. The first two videos, with the TMBG songs, are terrific, among the most enduringly popular tings WBTVA ever did. (The split-second gag that always kills me in "Particle Man," directed by Art Vitello and boarded by Bruce Timm and Doug McCarthy, is Plucky pulling a dog sled with the dogs whipping him; a throwaway reversal of an old cartoon cliché.) The next two segments aren't nearly as good, and the finale, a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" parody without the real "Sorcerer's Apprentice" music, is downright boring. The second-season follow-up to this episode, "Toon TV," was better overall, though I don't know if Warners has any plans for future DVDs; it's kind of a minor miracle that we got this and, best of all, the complete Freakazoid! series.

This Tiny Toons set also contains the episode that was so badly animated that the director took his name off two of the shorts. It's "Strange Tales of Weird Science," animated by a company called "Encore Cartoons" (though there's a one-minute unrelated prologue, probably originally intended for some other episode, animated by Kennedy Cartoons). That's the one where the gag credit reads: "Number of retakes: Don't ask!" In 2007, in comments on this blog, Tom Minton gave some background on this episode and how it was "buried deep for as long as possible".

The first of the three shorts in this episode, "Scentimental Pig," was written and directed by Eddie Fitzgerald, and is a rather gruesome but reasonably funny story where Plucky and Hamton literally try to eat each other. (Hamton also sings the original lyrics of "Merry Go Round Broke Down" in this one.) The other two shorts are credited to director "Allen Smithee"; I would suspect that Fitzgerald directed them too, since one director usually did all the shorts in a given episode, but I don't know that for a fact, and it might have been another director. Anyway, here is the last of the three, "Duck In the Muck" (written by Minton). Update: Minton, from comments: "It was not directed by Eddie, but the real director probably wouldn't care to be identified even now so I won't expose the person."



Minton, by the way, is pictured on the bottom left-hand corner in the staff caricature above, which appears in the Tiny Toons episode "K-ACME TV"; that caricature of Minton (by Bruce Timm) was also used for his cameo in the second season of Freakazoid!

I'm Holding Norm Abram Above My Head!

The second and final season of Freakazoid! will finally get a DVD release on April 21, on the same day as the second half of Tiny Toons season 1. (Let's hope the rest of Tiny Toons doesn't meet the same fate as the rest of Animaniacs; as I've said many times, my favorite episodes of Tiny Toons are from the later seasons on Fox.) That means we'll finally get to have a DVD version of scenes like this:



The late Ricardo Montalban was a guest star on both seasons of Freakazoid! as the Khan-like villain Guitierrez. Paul Rugg, writer and voice of Freakazoid, shares his memories of how Montalban got cast and how much fun he was to work with. Read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt, followed by the "bloopers" scene he describes.

Perhaps my fondest memory was when he had to come and do addition dialogue for the episode HERO BOY. For reasons we couldn't figure out...the episode came up about 3 minutes short. So, John and I devised a solution in which Guitierrez would show Freakazoid his favorite bloopers. Our editor found some of the dumbest, old, live action black&white footage I've ever seen. We cut it together and I wrote some dialogue to cover the footage. When Ricardo arrived he had neither seen the footage nor his dialogue. I explained the setup to him. "Guitierrez is crazy about these bloopers and he really thinks they are funny and he really wants to show them to Freakazoid and..."

"Ahhh, yes. I see. I see. Yes. Let's do it." Ricardo and I went into the booth. We ran the footage and he made me laugh so much that I didn't do my lines. The sound guys were rolling. Andrea was in hysterics. Bruce Timm popped his head into the room and started laughing.