And you could probably argue similarly for a lot of early art animation (which gets accepted variously into experimental and otherwise "underground" semi-canons) and "Silly Symphonies" and Winsor McCay. And you'd find formal qualities around, but not in a "show," in the same package (obviously McCay's comics and animations share plenty of DNA, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find another film from 1917 that looks anything like this).
(Side note: I read it for the pictures, honest, but Ain't It Cool News had a great run-down of mid-30's animation, lots of Max Fleischer, that blows the early Bosko Looney Tunes out of the water here.)
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Anyway, I started thinking about the Looney Tunes Golden Collection, which I got for Christmas, and its relationship to "Ren and Stimpy," the cartoon that probably made the biggest mark on my childhood. John K. was hugely reverent to cartoon history and I was surprised to see so many direct formal similarities between "R&S" and LT. I knew that the baboon episode of "Ren and Stimpy" (one of, if not the, last episode ever directed by John K. before he left the show) amounted to direct pastiche, but I wasn't aware that even the more gruesome episodes -- like "Mad Dog Hoek", which made my physically ill to watch when they showed it on Saturday mornings -- are pretty directly indebted to Looney Tunes (cf. "Bunny Hugged").
I still don't think there's a categorical difference between Looney Tunes and "Ren and Stimpy," but Frank Kogan said this during the conversation:
Well, I hate the term "postmodernism" because (among many other things) it overemphasizes the importance of high modernism and it falsely calls things "post" that have been done before, but nonetheless I do think that stuff like Ren & Stimpy and South Park and the Simpsons and Powerpuff Girls all display a sense of "knowingness" that obvious predecessors (Looney Tunes, Honeymooners, Rocky & Bullwinkle) didn't. I put the scare quotes around "knowingness," since in no way would I say the earlier ones have less self-awareness or are less willing to enlist the viewer in calling attention to and having fun with the cartoon-process itself. But the newer ones all have a patina of what I was metaphorically calling "PBS," by which I don't mean the real PBS but more like "PBS for hipsters," where subversion and knowingness are sore-thumbed and sold, the idea that it's got and is giving an edge on the mainstream. Obv. all those shows sell to lots and lots of people beyond the "PBS"/hipster category (and I can see how Looney Tunes and Rocky & Bullwinkle (as opposed to Hanna Barbara) had aspects that were proto-"PBS" themselves), and I'm not sure how many hipsters even made their way to Powerpuff Girls, but I still perceive the sensibility.
(Back in WMS #2 Christgau perceptively suggested that my use of the term PBS was too broad in the end and what I really meant by "PBS" was "the quote-unquote postmodernist ('pop institutionalized,' as Willis says, although the institutionalization looks pretty ramshackle to me) sensibility of Lower East Side artists" - which in turn I think was too narrow a designation for what I was getting at, but it's not off-point.)
So what wasn't fully evidenced in the earlier cartoons was an appeal to a "hipster PBS" sensibility, since that sensibility wasn't in existence in a big way, yet.
I maintain the aversion to calling this sort of thing "postmodern," too, but I also do wonder whether or not the sense of "sore thumb" (meaning: a sense of extra-demonstrative knowingness -- a wink or a nudge too far, or songs/shows/etc. that in effect say "'look how weird we are, look what we can get away with,' and lose their 'tossed-off' quality") changes depending on its audience. For me, "Ren and Stimpy" always coded as a cartoon as valid as Looney Tunes for children -- part of it admittedly came from my parents not understanding some of what was going on. This was the difference between "The Simpsons" and "Ren and Stimpy" -- my parents could see the themes, the innuendo, the content, right in front of them (my dad was convinced he didn't like "The Simpsons," but every time I'd quote him something from it he'd laugh and ask, "what's that from?" I think he'd enjoy the show a lot if he watched it now).
Anyway, the point is that there was no patina for me, because I had no understanding of the hipster audience whose sensibility (if not butts in the seats as far as audience is concerned) this show might have reflected. And my sense at the time, seeing it occasionally play on MTV, was that the older audience didn't know what to do with it, either. Interesting that "Ren and Stimpy" began debuting on Sunday mornings as part of the original Nicktoons trilogy ("Doug"/"Rugrats"/"Ren and Stimpy") and then started showing new episodes on Saturday nights as part of "SNICK" ("Clarissa Explains It All"/"Roundhouse"/"Ren and Stimpy"/"Are You Afraid of the Dark"). Of course, there was simply a one-week lag between episodes -- the ones that debuted Saturday at 9:30 PM would be on TV again at 11:00AM the next Sunday.
So there was no real attempt to distance Ren and Stimpy from an exclusively kid audience, and my experience as a kid was that there was no wink in an older direction (even if there wasn't anyone to reciprocate the wink -- though John K. had an interesting anecdote in the R&S DVD features about how the characters were taken up as gay icons for their ambiguously homosexual relationship...John K. basically suggested that if this was intentional, it was no more intentional than any other homoerotic cartoon comedy team). For me it was first and foremost a children's show, and it simply didn't make sense to watch it on Saturday night instead of Sunday morning. It was the mainstream.
And just in the past couple hours I've been thinking about Liquid TV and "Beavis and Butthead"'s role in this conversation, since they're pretty obvious forebears to the Adult Swim style that Mike talks more about in his post. I think that Beavis and Butthead could have just as little happen in the course of a music video as Space Ghost could have happen in the course of a 5-minute set. Some of the best videos were the ones that just shut Beavis and Butthead up -- and we basically just enjoyed the video, presumably in the same way they were. There was no more wall between us -- we were equally dumbfounded (or bored).
Anyway, not to bring subjectivity in to things (because if I hear that word one more time I'm going to become a research scientist) but I wonder whether or not one person's sore thumb can be another person's free lunch? Or alternatively whether some thumbs are just sorer than others, and just as lots of things can have "a little PBS," lots of things can also have "mildly sore thumbs." The difference being, I can't imagine a sore thumb that would be better than a thumb that isn't sore -- I can't imagine a sore thumb that preserves (as PBS can preserve)...unless, I guess, we're asking for whom the thing is preserved (people who need to get gouged in the eye with a sore thumb to feel something?). Or maybe, instead of "better," what I'm really saying is "I can't imagine a sore thumb that would be less obvious and winky than a thumb that isn't sore," which would be redundant.
And anyway I guess the real conversation to be had here would be how the work winks and what winking does to do the work. Thing is, I can't think of a counter-example to "Ren and Stimpy" that winked less -- or if I can (sort of), the wink-less (not winkless) example is merely a watered-down version of what made "Ren and Stimpy" great (later "Ren and Stimpy" sans John K., "Rocko's Modern Life," and Mike brought up "Cow and Chicken" -- I might even include something like "Duck Man," even though it had a more cogent narrative; but I would hate for "semi-wink" to just be shorthand for "shows I happen not to like very much," because the semi-wink sensibility is valid and pervasive). There was "Rugrats," which was more of a short narrative in the "Simpsons" vein, but its sensibility was very different from that of "Ren and Stimpy."
Is it possible to have a thumb that isn't sore? Ashlee's new tracks jab me in the eye at every turn, and I'm starting to enjoy the sensation, even though she's never been particularly eye-gouging (just heart-rending and gut-ripping) in the past. I guess that's kind of what Mike is asking in the first place: Why do some TV critics need to get poked in the eye all the time to feel something? And why don't more people talk about "Roseanne," anyway?
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