Memorable TV Opening Themes

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

HERE WE ARE! FACE TO FACE! A COUPLE OF SILVER SPOONS!

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

[Mal Shot First]

YOU SONOFABITCH!

I was actually being sincere with the comment about the animation. When I was a kid, I recognized that it was different from most of the other cartoons I'd seen (we didn't have any other Filmation cartoons where I was growing up). The rotoscoped style really stood out to me.

Re: Saturday Supercade - I've never seen any of these cartoons, but it's kind of weird to think that Donkey Kong was the protagonist of his show at the time and Mario was sort of the Elmer Fudd to his Bugs Bunny (at least that's what I gathered from that intro).

[Quasar]

I imagine part of that is because they had Donkey Kong Jr. too. They probably didn't want him to be a good guy, but then have his dad be an asshole on another part of the show.

Out of all the segements, Pit Fall looks especially lame. I think that Pink Panther lookin' dude was actually introduced in the cartoon, then shows up in the next video game Pit Fall II. Not that he actually did much in it.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I like the look of Filmation cartoons. It's pretty distinctive. The animation was, admittedly, limited, but it was the only way for them to do what they did.

Mario isn't quite Elmer Fudd in the show. He's portrayed as generally competent and clever, but he's also pretty unlucky, and he's exasperated by Donkey Kong's constantly eluding him. Well, it's not that he's unlucky, exactly. It's more that Donkey Kong is infuriatingly lucky. Mario's probably a little closer to the earlier version of Dreyfus in the Pink Panther series. (Note: I hadn't seen Quasar's comment when I wrote this. It's kind of cool that we both mention Pink Panther, I guess.)

You probably got this from the intro, but they're not exactly enemies in the show. Mario and Pauline are trying to capture Donkey Kong and take him back to the circus, and Donkey Kong likes fucking with them.

The show came out after the Donkey Kong Jr. game, so Donkey Kong was already being seen in a more sympathetic light. You probably also noticed one of the Saturday Supercade segments was a Donkey Kong Jr. cartoon. Kong rarely appeared in these, since the premise behind them was that Jr. was actively looking for his dad. Jr.'s voiced by Frank Welker and is a blatant ripoff of Scrappy Doo. The big difference is that his battle cry is "Monkeyyyyy MUSCLE!" instead of "Puppyyyy POWER!"

Frank Welker has been Fred Jones's voice since the first Scooby-Doo series, so it's not like he didn't know what he was being asked to rip off. I think the only other person who has ever voiced the cartoon version of Fred Jones was the guy who did the version of Fred in A Pup Named Scooby-Doo. Also, I think someone else might have provided Fred's singing voice in that terrible DTV Scooby musical from a few years back.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I only had two episodes of Saturday Supercade on tape, but I watched those two tapes a lot. I've seen a lot more, thanks to the Internet. Most of it's pretty bad.

One of the episodes I have has a Q*Bert segment where Q*Bert dresses like Michael Jackson, moonwalks, and sings "Beat It." I couldn't find the full episode, but here's the part with "Beat It":

[Mal Shot First]

Michael Jackson owned the '80s, after all.

Here's another intro that practically oozes '80s essence.

[Dalty]

(Baiting Goiter)

I bet He-Man's success was due to it being a coded message about the benefits of homosexuality.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I also have an episode of Kidd Video on my NBC tape. My grandmother recorded Saturday Morning Cartoons for me while I was in Germany. I think I mentioned this on Corona the first time I posted the Saturday Supercade music.

Americans in Germany only had the American Forces Network. It was a hodgepodge of American programming. It had stuff from all the major networks. We also had Hessischer Rundfunk, but most Americans didn't watch it. I would watch it when I was left alone in the living room, but I usually only had a vague idea of what was going on.

AFN didn't do Saturday morning cartoons, and it also didn't really do commercials, so the tapes were pretty special to me. I had one for NBC, one for ABC, and two for CBS.

I've always felt like Kidd Video owed Marvel and TSR some money. It's pretty clearly "inspired" by the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon.

* * *

You're going to have to try harder than that to bait me, Dalty. I'm totally cool with that reading of the show.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I feel like maybe I talked at length about He-Man and masculinity on Corona.

[Dalty]

Did you talk about Dolph Lundgren?

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I think this is where I talked about it.

Boy, I sure do write a lot.

[Dalty]

It's what we love about you. 'Cept for when equines are involved.

[Quasar]

[Quasar]

Since there appear to be some people not so familiar with Farscape on here:

[Dalty]

I like Claudia Black. Where do I get more Claudia Black?

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

Later seasons of one of the Stargate shows, according to Quasar.

[Quasar]

[Quasar]

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

The last part of the opening credits for the new Battlestar Galactica reminds me of the closing credit music for Avatar: The Last Airbender:



Incidentally, the closing credit music for Avatar: The Last Airbender reminds me of the Kid A version of Radiohead's "Morning Bell":



It doesn't remind me in the slightest of the Amnesiac version of Radiohead's "Morning Bell":

[Quasar]

For Dalty:

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I had a giant Flash TV show poster in my room for a year or two. I also had one for the Adam West Batman. They replaced my Michael Keaton-as-Batman and Jack Nicholson-as-Joker posters. I also had this creepy-as-fuck Gumby poster that glowed in the dark. It was something one of my mother's students painted. Gumby's eyes just got more and more evil the longer you stared at them. It wasn't so bad while the lights were still on.

[Quasar]

I kind of forgot. Can Dalty even watch youtube videos?

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

It seems like at one point he couldn't, but now he can. It depends on how old the video is. If it was put on YouTube before all videos were dual-uploaded as FLV/MP4 videos and the uploader chose FLV as the format, Dalty won't be able to view the video. I think that's what happened with the video I posted the other day. (I guess. I'm not sure. When I checked to see whether or not it was available as an MP4 file, I saw that an MP4 file was a download option. Not sure what Dalty's problem was. Maybe he just instinctively knew it wouldn't be worth his time.)

In other words, the above video is the only kind of Flash video Dalty will be able to watch. This only applies to when he's on his tablet, of course--unless he's just incredibly bad at watching YouTube videos.

[Dalty]

What he said.