Like a malefic revenant wandering the earth to tend to its unfinished business, so has Cheaptoons, my series about the inadequacies of animated video game adaptations, manifested again during this most eldritch of seasons. For one more terrifying moonlit night, we must face the wrath of spectral mediocrity!
When I first started Cheaptoons back in 2018, Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures was still relatively fresh, having run from 2013-2015; at the time, it felt too recent to jive with my mandate of looking at these cartoons from a historical distance. Well, guess what, we’re now at a point where even that series is ten years old, far enough away that it has now achieved a similar distance. This “modern” animated take on Pac-Man is officially old now…and so am I! Very possibly…you are as well!
Certainly, this show’s theme song, which mixes the traditional Pac-Man music with some Auto-Tuned pop lyrics, pulls me back to 2013—it’s so 2013 that I came close to involuntarily doing the Harlem Shake. It was terrible! In a completely different world of video game popularity—no longer a potential fad, no longer seen as just a time waster for kids but nonetheless probably edging out animated TV shows as a modern child’s go-to piece of entertainment—and a completely different world of animation—no more Saturday mornings, expectations wildly different—the question becomes just how different a video game cartoon for kids at that time would be compared to what they were like in the eighties and nineties. The surprising answer to that question, at least based on one (conveniently Halloween-themed!) episode: not as different as you might think!
Is it too late to make a “Tiger Blood” joke? Oh, it is? Well, then.
One sub-theme that’s been alluded to multiple times over the course of my Divine Comedy journey through the underworld of animated failures is that there is no category more piteous than the aborted attempts to keep a character or concept relevant well past that character’s or concept’s retirement age. Everything becomes outdated eventually, and while some things can stay beloved longer than others (usually through sheer force of ubiquity and corporate money, i.e. Marvel and DC superheroes), most are succeeded by newer things that better reflect the cultural context of the current audience, and the choice is to either bow out gracefully and enjoy existence as a piece of history, or to try to reconfigure yourself in order to stay current, the latter rarely succeeding. When I was a kid watching Saturday morning cartoons (a concept that has itself become obsolete), I endured this type of thing all the time, and nowadays it seems to be back in the culture again, except with the additional horror that some of the things being contemporized were created in my lifetime.
There are two reasons for this I can think of. One, as I think I mentioned back in the Rocket Robin Hood post, the people making the creative decisions have a hard time reconciling the fact that the things that they loved as kids are not necessarily going to ring the same way to kids two or three (or four…or five) generations after them (I feel like I was part of the last generation where Tarzan was thought of as a permanent cultural fixture like Superman or Batman—I guess the racially problematic aspects of the character finally caught up with him.) Two, these were often stories or characters that were still properties owned by a company (or the estate of the original creator), and simple museum pieces don’t bring in the bucks, so the need to retool to keep things profitable override any sense of taste or dignity.
No medium better represents that pathetic lingering in the face of blatant irrelevance than newspaper comic strips, one of the longest running popular mediums we have. Aside from the fact that newspapers are having a rough go of it in general, the comics have had a longstanding problem where decades-old legacy strips refuse to cede the printed real estate to newer voices—but you could probably write entire books about that. For this post, I’m going to zip past the domestic comedy comics that haven’t represented domestic life since my grandparents’ age and zone in on their adventure comics counterparts, which somehow seem even more dated and even more bizarre when they stick around, like unfrozen cavemen wandering the streets (by which I mean Alley Oop.) King Features Syndicate, the most prominent newspaper comics syndication company in existence (and one that still has the Hearst family calling shots), has a stake in several of the most important adventure comic characters in history, particularly Flash Gordon, The Phantom (whose comic strip is still going), and Mandrake the Magician, who are more or the less the basis for every Sci-Fi action or superhero thing in existence. That essential place at the basis of much of contemporary pop culture cannot be denied, but these characters were also created in the 1930s, and have since been usurped in popularity by the things they inspired. They are historical artifacts that would be fine existing purely as something homaged and interrogated in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which is honestly more respectful because it treats them like important pieces of art worthy of contemplation and not just products. But no, that’s not good enough for King Features—they need to make sure every subsequent era still cares about these characters, even when they clearly don’t. So, this trio has been subject to more reboots than most, and they’ve been rebooting them in animated form since before some of us were even born.
When most people think of the Universal Monster movies, they think of them collectively, not as individual horror films that just happened to be put out by the same company and featuring many of the same actors. When you think of Dracula, chances are Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy are lurking around as well. This was something that Universal themselves leaned into, as their second era of monster movies in the 1940s eventually started just throwing in all the monsters, giving you the most bang for your buck. By the fifties, most kids experiencing these movies for the first time were either seeing them revived in theatres as double bills, aired on TV under the Shock Theatre banner, or featured prominently in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland—so, in the minds of generation after generation, the monsters were always hanging out in the same dusty castles and spooky moors, making them into a group not unlike how the yokai spirits of Japan are portrayed. The continuing existence of “The Monster Mash” makes that abundantly clear.
Speaking of Japan: despite coming from another continent, Konami’s Castlevania series is very much following the tradition of those monster mash-ups, reintroducing the classic creatures to a new generation of kids through a new medium (I’ve written about that before.) The original 1987 entry could basically be described as “Conan the Barbarian with a whip fights the Universal Monsters”, and as the series progressed, it developed more of its own style, as well as its own nonsense mythology and timeline (which somehow is able to include Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, even though the book is bereft of mummies and skeletons and fish-men), but never strayed that far from that original pitch. No matter who was fighting through the dark corridors and at what point in history, Castlevania has still been about Dracula and his castle housing an accumulation of monsters from all sorts of sources, and reappearing every century or so for another Monster Shindig. The atmosphere the games perfected was a fun celebration of every Gothic horror trope they could cram into one setting, pulling from not just the movies, but also literature, folklore, and demonology, making it seem sensible that all these disparate evil beings hang out together in this one big house. No other game franchise really has this very Halloween-y spirit.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 