You know, after rereading some of my Cheaptoons posts from two years ago, it made me realize that sometimes I just want to write silly posts about bad cartoons. As a longtime animation fan, and also as someone who is fascinated by the mechanics of bad writing, I feel there is a lot more to examine in this particular category, so I got the idea to have a whole permanent tag for these sorts of things, with new posts intermittently. So here we are now, the first post of Ink & Pain, I hope your soul is prepared.
The late eighties and early nineties hosted an array of inescapable trends in television animation, and “actual quality” was not necessarily the most prominent. There was, of course, the popularity of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and as would be expected, that meant a whole bunch of copycats featuring teams of smart aleck gross mutant heroes that were easily marketable to the 6-12 boy demographic (the TV Turtles knock-offs were only slightly less embarrassing than the black-and-white comics ones from a few years before.) We also had a pop cultural embrace of very light environmentalism, which parallels the similar trend in the seventies but seemed more aimed at telling kids to recycle than anything broader or deeper (there were few eco-horror movies in that time, but plenty of unctuous cartoon characters telling kids about smog and deforestation), which I guess is better than nothing? Less prominent, but still highly confusing, were various attempts to turn popular R-rated movies into children’s cartoons, which seemed to recognize that kids saw movies like Robocop, Rambo, and Police Academy despite their subject matter, but also thought that those same kids would want a toned down version of the thing they apparently already liked—they were even trying to make an Aliens cartoon!
What luck for me that there is one show that manages to combine all three of those trends: The Toxic Crusaders, a Ninja Turtles-mimicking cartoon with light environmental themes based on a hard R movie from the eighties. The difference here is in its origins: not only is the movie The Toxic Avenger, the first in a surprisingly long running exploitation series, an intentionally over-the-top gory, gross bit of horror-comedy, but it’s fully-controlled by its creators, trash auteurs Troma Entertainment and company founder Lloyd Kaufman. Whereas a lot of the other adaptations of R-rated movies were the product of clueless Hollywood executives, anyone who knows anything about Troma and Kaufman know that the sheer gall of turning a movie like The Toxic Avenger into children’s entertainment was entirely the point. Kaufman is not one to let an opportunity like that go to waste, and Troma’s patented cheeky self-parody, combined with shameless pandering, is very evident in The Toxic Crusaders.
All thirteen episodes are free on Troma’s Youtube channel, and each one begins with the same introduction from Kaufman, clearly pulled from an earlier DVD release. In it, “Uncle Lloyd” explains how he should have made a killing on the show and accompanying merchandise, but was sabotaged by the “devil-worshipping international media conglomerates”—the self-deprecation and punkish devotion to independent business are the hallmark’s of Lloyd’s brand to this day (the other hallmark is apparently being a complete overbearing tyrant.) It is a bit of a put-on, but it’s mostly well-meaning, and Troma have doggedly stuck to their do-whatever-you want-as-long-as-its-cheap ethos, which is probably the reason why so much of their stuff still has a following (which would eventually allow Troma employees like James Gunn to go on to become big Hollywood directors.) Even if they aren’t great art, at least they’re mild curiosities and weird historical footnotes made by independent filmmakers, and because it’s all small potatoes in the business sense, it’s become free stuff that people can check out easily in this day and age.
The Toxic Crusaders is the definition of “a mild curiosity”, mostly due to the aspects of Troma that are evident in it. While produced by Murakami-Wolf-Swenson, the same company that produced the Ninja Turtles cartoon (and they look pretty much exactly alike, which is a mixed blessing for sure), the show itself takes the jokey nature of the Turtles and revs it to maximum—this has the look of an action show, but is really a full-on goofy comedy full of fourth wall-breaking meta jokes that clown on its own repetitive, formulaic nature. Troma’s Toxic Avenger, here just called Toxie, is portrayed as a preternatural squeaky-clean naive nice guy that everybody loves, despite his status as a “hideously-deformed creature of superhuman size and strength” (a phrase that they use, in full, constantly), and his team of other hideously-deformed creatures of superhuman size and strength basically act like well-meaning boy scouts who just happen to live in a toxic waste dump in the city of Tromaville, New Jersey. Their opposition is the evil Dr. Killemoff, a villain who lives on a polluted island city whose main goal is to find ways to despoil Tromaville, apparently the only clean city on Earth, so his race of alien insect people can take it over (why an alien insect like Dr. Killemoff “disguises” himself as a purple cyborg with four arms is never explained.) His equivalent to Shredder’s Foot Soldiers are called Radiation Rangers, and they are portrayed as so useless that they can be easily defeated by regular people, or entirely by accident. Ill-fated evil schemes commence, oftentimes attempting to take advantage of the farcical niceness of the Toxic Crusaders themselves, but something always ends up ruining everything for the bad guys—you know, the usual for these kinds of shows, but with more jokes, and at such a rate that there are some genuinely good ones alongside the groaners.
This is the kind of show where Toxie’s battle cry is sometimes “I hope I don’t get hurt!”, or where you get lines like “They’re polluting the potato patch with toxic chemicals! That’s…un-American!” (despite that, the environmental themes here are so light, they are less ideological and more a casually applied aesthetic.) In that same potato-focused episode, the chemical being used turns regular people into “forgetful, near-sighted old people” and is called “Magoop82.” A different episode ends when Toxie’s sentient mop (yes) reveals that it figured out how the villain’s plan would fall apart because it read the script. Recurring characters include Toxie’s stereotypical Jewish mother, who is referred to by every character as “Toxie’s Mom”, Toxie’s ditzy girfriend Yvonne who is a bad a singer and plays the accordion (I hope Kath “Princess Sally” Soucie got paid something extra for the amount of intentionally bad singing she has to do here), and yes, even “Uncle Lloyd” himself, whose whole family has the same facial hair he does. What I’m saying is, this show is a little bit kooky.
Considering that the animation is, of course, pretty bad and also ugly (but not ugly in the way the show intended, but in the way most cartoons from the early nineties were—plus, most of the character designs seem like they were made for action figures first, overly detailed and hard to animate consistently) and has no sense of proper timing, it falls mostly on the voice cast to make the comedy work. There’s a pretty interesting group here: Toxie and Dr. Killemoff are voiced by Rodger Bumpass (yes, SpongeBob’s Squidward himself), and for Metal Gear Solid fans, other main characters are voiced by Colonel Campbell and The Pain. Generally, all the voice actors are going above-and-beyond what this material probably deserves, but my personal favourite performance is from Academy Award nominee(!) Michael J. Pollard as Dr. Killemoff’s henchman Psycho, who looks like a standard character for one of these shows but certainly doesn’t sound like one. Psycho’s role here is usually to predict all the events of the episode and then be dismissed, and Pollard’s milquetoast middle-aged man voice makes almost every one of his readings amusing.
But for all the meta comedy and good performances, it still can’t quite overcome the limitations of the era. You can make fun of your own show for its bog-standard contrivances and shortcomings for only so long before it just sort of wears thin, and sometimes the jokes go on for too long or don’t land (which, to be honest, sort of reminds me of some of the parts of The Toxic Avenger I’ve seen.) The fact that it actively mocks itself makes The Toxic Crusaders an interesting counterpoint to the far less self-aware shows that it aped, but I don’t imagine the tongue-in-cheek style would continue to feel fresh if it went past its thirteen episodes. Considering that self-aware comedy in cheap exploitation projects is Troma’s style, though, I can definitely say that at least the show managed to embody Uncle Lloyd’s spirit.
Now, for something that I hope to incorporate into every one of these posts…
BUT, IS THE THEME SONG CATCHY?: It’s okay. Nowhere near as good as Chuck “Big Bang Theory/Two-and-a-Half Men” Lorre’s work on the Ninja Turtles theme, but you can do worse (I think Lorre also wrote an episode of this show, if memory serves. Probably a good training ground for his future career.)
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 