cartoons

Why Laugh Tracks Are Unnecessary in Cartoons

1 Comment / Animation, TV /

Via: Connexions

So last night I sat down to listen to a CD called Bugs Bunny at the Symphony. Which, as you might expect contains various orchestral music from Bugs’ Looney Tunes shorts in much the same style as Bugs Bunny on Broadway. All I can say is that it’s great to hear the scores being played by an orchestra, especially with all the modern digital mastering an all that.

As I was listening to the music (which I was also simultaneously playing in my head), everything started to fall apart when I realised there was a laugh track included. Now, its my understanding that the CD is supposed to be a live recording of Bugs Bunny on Broadway and as a result, audience reactions are included because, well, the audience reacts to the shorts as you would expect them to. What bothers me is that, well, its a CD! I can’t see anything and its really difficult to laugh when your only cue is the music.

I recommend you check out the CD if you like the music of the old shorts (and who doesn’t), which is nothing short of sheer brilliance.

But enough of that, today’s topic is about laugh tracks and why cartoons in general don’t need them. two things first though: being European and therefore cultured (I kid, I kid) I must say that the whole idea of a laugh track is rather ugly. I once watched Everybody Loves Raymond and I could’ve sworn the laugh track came from a different show as I didn’t hear a single joke the entire episode.

Secondly, there is the good kind of laugh track, which is one where the reactions are those of a real audience who is watching the show. As far as I know, this type is rare in the US but is commonly used by the BBC for their sitcoms. It’s a much superior version in my mind and produces much more realistic results.

So why is it that you don’t really see cartoons with a laugh track (any more)? Well for one, cartoons are inherently more visual than live-action shows. Sure, there are some wordy puns and one-liners, but for the most part, we get a laugh from seeing characters get hit over the head. That signal replaces the need for an audio prompt.

Cartoons, especially those aimed at a younger audience, employ this to great effect and have done so for many years. Although the humour in those does tend to be a little bit more direct so that even kids can understand what’s going on.

Shows for older folks have also escaped mainly as a result of creator’s insistence (The Simpsons) or just because it was felt to be unnecessary. Live-action shows include a laugh track because they were (originally) broadcast live in front of a studio audience. Animation has never had that luxury (as pointed out to Homer, live cartoons place a terrible strain on the animator’s wrists).

My theory that because we know animation cannot be conducted “live” we therefore don’t expect to have a studio audience participating in the broadcast. An exception was The Cleveland Show’s recent “live” broadcast, although in that instance, it is clear that the show’s setting has been changed in order to be reminiscent of the old prime-time shows of yore.

The Flintstones is a lone exception as it does contain a laugh track (although from my own viewing experience, only some episodes/seasons do). I’m sure the reason it is included is so that the show felt more in-line with the live-action shows it attempted to copy and back in the 60s, that meant including a laugh track. As you may have noticed, this makes the show seem somewhat more dated than it should be.

I like to believe that the main reason cartoons and animation don’t usually have laugh tracks is that they contain a higher standard of comedy than their live-action counterparts. The lead-in time for animation means that everything must be planned out in advance, writing an animated show requires a different set of skills, the ability to drop an anvil on a charcter and have him walk away and the ability to design your show to fit your needs al combine to collectively result in an altogether different and higher brand of comedy. One that can safely and reliably dispense with the need to tell its audience when they heard a joke.

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Anomaly Appraisal: Neighbors From Hell

Animation, TV /

Yes, this is a tad late but I would rather have to wait and watch it online than cough up for cable every month. There were a few somewhat scathing reviews put out in advance of the show’s premiere a few weeks ago, namely in Variety, where the reviewer pretty much shot it down before it even left the gate. Not here though, oh no. On this blog we believe in positive criticism and looking on the bright side of life and all that.

FIrst of all, the setting: a family of demons get sent to Texas to stop a giant drill from getting all the way to hell. So far so ordinary. The twist is that what the Hellmans see on the surface simply does not compare to what they do underneath. It’s far worse!

The first episode is so clearly a pilot episode. There is the standard introduction of characters, the monologue about why they are where they are and of course, a convenient plot that introduces the audience to the setting and ancillary characters. It’s a pilot, so there’s not point getting too worked up over the plot. Every show must have an introductory episode of some sort and the producers here clearly decided to do that straight out of the gate. Nothing wrong with that, but it does not provide the best platform on which to measure a series.

The music in the show is rather standard fare really. There is nothing remarkable about it except to say that yes, it does contain some heavy metal. If it didn’t, I would have a lot of questions about a show supposedly centred on a bunch of folks from hell.

The animation was done using Toon Boom software, which I posted about waaay back when. It certainly provides for a much higher standard of animation than flash although it stil falls short of true hand-drawn animation. That’s not a problem though. The animation is remarkably smooth and certainly does not suffer from the jerk, puppet-like movements that flash is so susceptible to.

The character design is pretty darn good actually. There are plenty of cable shows where nickel and diming has resulted in character designs that look like they only got one pass through the saw and skipped the finishing table altogether. The designs are split into two groups: The Hellmans and everyone else. The family seems to fit in despite the fact that they are green.

Each character is only a small bit stylized and whose design most certainly matches their character. Therefore we have the father with his jacket, the mother with a somewhat attractive red dress, the daughter in dressed prim and proper (although this belies her demeanour) and the son in a T-shirt.

Pazuzu is perhaps the most interesting, mainly because he doesn’t really look like a goblin, more of a wild-eyed boisterous dog. His wide eyes and huge grin suggest a character that really is Balthazar’s best friend.

The characters are your usual nuclear family. The oafish father Balthazar tries his best his best to do right for his family as well as his wife. He gets in trouble with the boss, he betrays his best friend (a goblin named Pazuzu) and has plenty of pop-culture references in his catapult. He’s a likeable fellow overall.

His wife, Tina, is a somewhat more interesting character. Despite being a housewife, she is easily superior to her husband. She is driven and more than capable of fulfilling her own ambitions.

The daughter, Mandy, has the coolest head in the family. She is not above using violence against her brother though and is especially skilled at getting people to do her bidding. The son, Josh is your standard teenage boy. He’s always up to mischief and getting himself into awkward situations. It is hinted that he has a temper a well.

Much remains to be seen as to whether the characters become as richly developed as their backgrounds suggest. A common problem I find with the likes of Family Guy and more recently The Simpsons, is that hardly any episodes are devoted to the kids and their development. For the most part, they are fill in characters that come and go as needed but are rarely seen to have their own lives with their own problems. Hopefully later in the season, we will see a few episodes where the kids get a chance to mature as characters.

A character of note is Satan, if only for his voice-actor, the very funny Steve Coogan. It’s fantastic to hear him again, especially as he is hardly ever seen outside the UK. For those that don’t know, Steve is one of the funniest comedians of the last 20 years and created one of the most memorable characters to grace TV screens in Alan Partridge. He adds an awful lot to the character of Satan which in turn made the show much more enjoyable (at least for me).

Overall, I liked the show. It’s not the most fantasic animated TV show ever made (because that is currently airing over on Comedy Central and is back to what it does best) although it deserves to succeed on tbs. Could the jokes be improved a wee bit? Sure. They stray dangerously close to the gratuitous at time, I mean c’mon, do we really need to see horses going at it? The allusion should be more that enough for the viewer to get the message. Humour like that suggests a lack of finesse and the easy way out. It may be good for a cheap laugh onec, but it does not stand up during repeated viewing (for the most part).

Neighbors From Hell is a show thatis trying to prove that animation can indeed be marketed to adults. It deserves to succeed in that regard. I recommend you watch it at least once.

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The Return of Futurama…Again

Animation, Futurama, TV /

What do I need to say that hasn’t already been said. Futurama is a show with more lives than a cat. Not only that, it is also, by far, my favourite animated TV show of all time. OK, I admit it, I tend to lean towards the geeky side of life, and I do tend to get some of the more intelligent jokes that the writers ever so craftily put into the show.

Tomorrow night (Friday) sees the third dawn for a TV show that under any normal circumstances would have been mothballed aeons ago and left at that. However, as we’re all well familiar with, just because a TV show has been cancelled does not mean it is as dead as you might think. Family Guy set the gold standard simply because fans went out and spent their hard earned money on the DVDs. Why did they do that? The show was damned funny, that’s why!

Futurama would follow a similar pattern, although as you may not be aware of, due to the arcane release “windows” that many (if not all) of the TV networks instigate, Futurama DVD boxsets were on sale in Europe months (if not years) before the US, where the show was still in the syndication “window” of its release.

Having said that, it was this system of syndication that may have helped save the show (and Family Guy too). Cartoon Network stepped up and began broadcasting episodes every night at 10 o’clock. It was strong ratings for these broadcasts that eventually resulted in a full-scale bidding war for the rights after [adult swim]’s deal expired.

Comedy Central was a winner and they immediately commissioned new episodes that were subsequently rounded up into 4 DVD movies before being broadcast. Strong sales of these movies (I do own all four) convinced the good people at Comedy Central that a proper series was needed.

Thus we come to today (or rather tomorrow) when the first of these new episodes will be broadcast. The show has come a long way since 1998 when it blasted onto the FOX network. Always the sister to The Simpsons, it was constantly pushed around the schedule, which in my opinion significantly contributed to the (supposedly) low ratings. A similar fate befell Family Guy until it’s return when it set up shop at a dedicated time. It has enjoyed good ratings ever since.

After the original cancellation (actually, the commentaries on the DVDs mention that the show was never actually “cancelled” in the traditional sense, it’s contract was simply never renewed), there was much talk about how it was a result of being a sci-fi show and how it didn’t match up to The Simpsons in terms of humour and so forth. Nothing could be further from the truth! In reality, Futurama has been able to maintain it’s high standard of quality jokes and storylines in stark contrast to the sharp fall the Simpsons has experiences of late.

With an order of 22 episodes, there will be plenty of new Futurama to come for quite a while. It’s fate after that is still uncertain, but I hope that this, the third attempt, will see Futurama be successful enough for a proper conclusion to the series. That’s all I have to say on the matter for now. I’ll post a review of the season thus far in a couple of weeks.

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TV Cartoons in 3-D: It Would Be Awesome.

Animation, TV /

I’ve made my thoughts known on 3-D before, but that is in relation to movies, not TV. I’ve come to relize that three is a huge difference between the two. Whereas one is a waste of money, the other can be a tru benefit to audiences.

To begin with, 3-D in the movies is something that has been traditionally wheeled out to give people a reason to go to the cinema rather than stay at home on the couch. With the growth of HD TVs and home theatre setups that, when done right, can give a proper cinema a serious run for the money, Hollywood needed something that TV couldn’t offer. That was 3-D, a gimmick introduced in the 1950s that didn’t particularly work then and it doesn’t work now.

The reason? Higher ticket prices for one. Does the extra couple of bucks on top of a regular ticket price done justice by the added dimension? Not really, in my opinion, the market is still very much in the growth stage. That means we will continue to see growth in the market for the forseeable future but it will eventually level out. Don’t expect every screen in a cinema to be 3-D for at least 5 more years, and maybe longer.

So if 3-D doesn’t really work for cinema, why can it work for TV, specifically cartoons?

TV is the archetypical model for entertainment consumption. It’s 24 hours, 500+ channels (if you aren’t a tightwad like myself) and more hours of entertainment in a day than you could handle in a year. Since people watch so much TV, it makes much more sense from an economic standpoint to introduce 3-D technology in order to boost demand.

However, much the same as HD, it will take a long time for the technology to become widespread. Firstly, people who just dumped $1,000+ for a HD set are not about to go and buy a 3-D one soon. With about ~60% market penetration in the US, that’s a lot of people who probably aren’t in the market for a new TV in the next 5 years or so. Besides that, it has taken 13 years for HD to get to this point, so, at the dawn of 3-D, expect a similar timeline.

Enough beating about the bush, why could cartoons benefit the most? My one and only experience with 3-D cartoons (not CGI movies, BTW) was a 10 minute Spongebob Squarepants experience at Kings Dominion in Virginia a couple of years ago. It was fun and obviously geared up to throw as much 3-D at the audience as possible but it was tolerable for the most part.

Animation, and TV cartoons in particular, with their relatively simple lines would be ideal for 3-D. The technology is already there. I’m pretty sure ToonBoom can tweak their software to allow for dual camera positions of something like that. Seeing as their software already creates a virtual 3-D environment, this wouldn’t be too much of a stretch.

The best part? Imagine an anvil or something like that shooting our of the screen at you. Squash and stretch will never be the same again! Again, the nature of animation lends itself perfectly to 3-D compared to live-action. Personally, live-action faces an uphill struggle if only because to make things truly stand out, there is a reliance on SFX and the like.

The future is bright for cartoons at the dawn of the 3-D TV age. Only two things can upset the apple cart. Firstly, the fact that everything produced until this point is in 2-D and thus renders the new TVs useless. Secondly, people have a dislike for wearing the glasses. There are two camps, those that never wear glasses and hate wearing them and those of use that do use glasses and have a hard time putting 3-D glasses over out regular ones. Perhaps someday someone will come up with a solution, until then, cartoons will have to remain in 2-D.

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The New Thundercats: Preliminary Thoughts

Animation, Cartoon Network, TV /

Word came through today with details about the new Thundercats series that will be produced by Warner Bros. Animation and will air on the Cartoon Network next year. But first off, an apology. Clearly this is supposed to be a daily blog and cleary this is the first post for a couple of days. In my defence, 14 hour workdays can really screw around with your scheduly and sadly, that’s what I had to deal with this week. Fun times, but you gotta do what you gotta do and I still have my career chip so I guess I can’t complain.

Without further ado, onto today’s post!

When I first read this, I immediately thought of a quote from an excellent why-haven’t-you-read-it-yet interview with Fred Seibert conducted by Joe Strike on AWN, where Fred talks about his first days at Hanna-Barbera:

…The kid comes in and his first question is ‘Why don’t they make cartoons the way they used to?’ I do have a rap for that and I talked about The Flintstones, The Jetsons and Huckleberry Hound, bababa… He looks at me finally and says ‘I mean the stuff they made in the ’80s — why don’t they make good stuff like that any more.’ I realized the issue of cartoon quality is really all in the eye of the beholder. In general, especially for a 25-year old kid, whatever you grew up with was the best stuff.

Which is pretty telling really isn’t it? Here, Fred considers the early H-B stuff to be the best, but the young guy thinks the 80s stuff is the best. The connection? Both favour the shows from their respective younger years. This won’t impact the current topic of discussion, but it is interesting to note nonetheless.

So we’re getting a new anime-influenced series. You already know my thoughts on anime so let’s not rehash that. What is relevent is, of course, Loonatics Unleashed. In case you forgot (and I mentioned it, like, last week or thereabouts), Loonatics Unleashed was a show that probably could have been done better and was perhaps unfairly bashed around the head by Looney Tunes fans as perhaps the grossest bastardization of the characters in living memory.

Why mention it? Because it took an established property, plastered it in “anime”, which for some executives, means extreme plots, little dialogue, poor direction and character design that any 14 year old could do. Again, not to disparage the folks who worked on the show but there were clearly too many cooks in the kitchen and fingers in the pie on that show.

That is unlikely to happen to Thundercats, there’s too many eyes on this one, what with it being a classic 1980s show that any kid worth their salt has fond memories of. As the picture above barely shows, it is hard to decipher what the show will actually be like. Suffice to say it will probably have a darker tone and more brooding charcters than the original.

There’s no point commenting on the show itself as that picture and the press release is all we have to go on. What I’d like to see though is a show with strong charcters, clean, artistic, creative design that is clearly evolved from the original and plots that would not be beyond the scope of the original series.

If they pull all them off, they’ll have a lucrative merchandising empire on their hands.

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Why Aren’t There More Cable Cartoons on DVD?

Animation, TV /

Think about it. Of all the cartoons broadcast on the major cable networks (the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon and Cartoon network), how many have had a bone fide DVD release. As those who have waited so long to watch their favourite show whenever they want, surprisingly few.

Starting with Disney, they are actually not as bad as I thought. A quick search of Amazon reveals that DuckTales (have their own store!), the Gummi Bears and Rescue Rangers are all for sale. Recent stuff is a wee bit harder to come across and while you can buy Phineas & Ferb, you can’t get illustrator extraordinaire, Dan Santat’s fantastic show The Replacements.

Nickelodeon fares a bit better, you can find all the classic Nicktoons as well as newer stuff available. The only caveat, they’re the “burn-on-demand” type. In other words, you can’t find the DVDs in shops because they don’t make them until you place an order. I appreciate this approach as you can get an industry-standard DVD with jewel case. The only downside? The cost is a bit on the expensive side, $36 for a 4-disc collection of Danny Phantom!

The Cartoon Network is perhaps the best of the bunch. Their list of shows is exhaustive if mainly confined to shows the network owns. Nonetheless it is nice to see shows such as HiHi Puffy AmiYumi (2nd hand only now) to Codename Kids Next Door receive proper releases. In addition, actual Warner Bros animation titles are available too, with shows such as Batman: The Animated Series for sale in full, most likely as a result of the nature of comic book fans no doubt.

Cartoon Network does have one nasty habit though. They have, on numerous occasions, begun to release DVDs of a show only to stop halfway through leaving collectors and fans holding the bag until they release the full series a few years down the road. It happened with the PowerPuff Girls and is currently the situation with Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. Personally I will be quite annoyed if I bought two volumes of episodes and then had to go out and buy the whole series only to fill in the episodes I missed.

With the advent of video-on-demand (VOD) the whole concept of a DVD release may become moot anyway. With the likes of iTunes already offering a whole season’s subscription to shows like the currently-being-broadcast Adventure Time and my one of my all-time favourites, My Life as a Teenage Robot, the time may come where we won’t even care if a show is released on DVD.

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