TV Review #4: The Wacky World of Tex Avery (1997)

 

I should discuss with you how I review TV shows for this blog, some lucky shows will get me to watch and discuss the entire thing and some terrible shows will get me to view a few episodes. I've been working on watching every episode of Tiny Toon Adventures for a later blog entry to this blog because well I loved that show as a kid and I'm curious how it holds up in the long run. Other shows I hear aren't as good I will watch one or two or three episodes of and get a minor view of how the whole show was. This blog is for silly fun and I'm not being paid for it. Unless you are giving me money, comic books, or other fine things I really do not want to sit down and watch all the episodes of something like The Wacky World of Tex Avery. It's even harder when some of the episodes are considered lost media. If I do enjoy a show that gets  a bad rap I will actually end up putting it on "the list of stuff to watch every episode of" so I'm not going to go along with the crowd unless I happen to agree with them. 

The Wacky World of Tex Avery was a DIC cartoon of the 1990s. From the mid 1990s. You know the DIC DARK PERIOD. It wasn't the highest of the high (like the 1980s/early 90s stuff) it was a lot of bad mixed in with admittedly some good but out of the 30 shows they made between 1994 and 2009, 20 of them sound like stuff I don't want to touch with a 30 foot pole and two of them sound amazingly weird/bad that I have to discuss them. I'm sure these TEN INTERESTING LATE ERA DIC shows will get touched on throughout this blog existence because I'm the type of person who wants to talk about Sherlock Holmes and the 22nd Century. 

Tex Avery was a cartoonist who worked with pretty much every major studio that was around between the 1930s too the 1950s. He created Droopy Dog and the Wolf guy and Daffy Duck and the RAID bugs and the Frito Bandito and all kindsa stuff. His animation was very vibrant and fun to watch, along with being funny. The Wild World of Tex Avery does not do his legacy justice in any way shape or form. First off the animation is cheap. Like very cheap looking. It cannot pull off the kind of jokes Tex Avery did in the very nice looking animation of the past. Secondly the characters they created for this show just feel like they were rushed and were like eh fuck it ones a fly and ones a cowboy. I mean the weird Italian guy from Pompeii showed a little bit of creativity but the rest not really. Thirdly a lot of the jokes carry on way too long, a lot of what made the old cartoons great were they went to the next joke at a rapid pace. Finally the show feels confused, there were several gross out jokes in one cartoon but not many in another. It's like it wants to be Tex Avery AND 1990s Nickelodeon cartoons and doesn't really know how to do either.

FINAL VERDICT:  Before watching this I watched a Droopy cartoon from 1943, Dumb-Hounded and was thoroughly amused throughout. I think I was like "you know that would have been a good joke with better animation" once throughout the one and a half episodes of this I watched. I remember seeing this for the first time in a video of "EVERY 90S CARTOON INTRO EVER" on YouTube and being amazed at how bad it was. This doesn't even have nostalgia behind it. At least I can go to my sister and say "Hey remember how awful Monster by Mistake was?" and still get a weird nostalgic kick off it. I can't even do this with that. I can't even say usually good voice actors did a good job here because they didn't. It felt like they were cashing in. I mean I ain't blaming them but still. The only thing that's even remotely interesting about this show was before they made it they went too Nancy Avery to get her okay and give her some money for using her fathers name. She wanted a bit more just so she could send her two kids to college and they were like "You know we don't actually have to give you anything" so she went to Chuck Jones who was still alive at the time and well I hope he raised hell because the people behind this trash deserved it, and you know I like to try to be positive about even the less then wonderful stuff I talk about but this doesn't deserve any positivity.