Dic Geeks

What? *Two* cartoons an episode?! Yeah, that's the new structure, get with the times my pal. We're trying out something new; not only are we reducing the overall workload by doing this but also it allows us to have a more relaxed and proper discussion-y feel to each cartoon instead of just droning on about plotlines and bad characters. This week we have the New Kids On The Block cartoon ("Everything wrong about celebrity toons" according to TVTropes) and Hammerman (Literally Mc Hammer's very own cartoon). One's a stinker and ones a corker, and I feel I may have ruined that already. But hey!

Oh, right, yes, also here's a SPECIAL ALERT for this episode: You guessed it - fucked audio! This time round it was nothing to do with us directly; instead my microphone inexplicably started distorting audio every so often throughout the recording along with making a bunch of clicking noises. Now, the clicking noises I've managed to remove, but I wasn't able to keep the distorted audio in. Thus, A Totally Not Noticable At All replacement recording has been spliced in where this happened. Yeah, this episode is a bit of a mess but it should hopefully give you some idea of the structure and next time we're going to take more precautions to hopefully stop this from happening so we can give you a good quality episode for once. Thanks for your patience and we love you! <3

An interesting collection of jobbers, an entire plotline pulled out of literal thin air and a dog that was known mostly from being a brand of stationary. Against all odds The Poochie Special, a pilot from 1984, genuinely ends up being one of the more enjoyable Dic shows we've seen in a while. Barring the 80s mild racism, a fun loving attitude and an adorable talking dog that is part time adventurer and part time temporary CEO of a newspaper company, this cartoon is a little strange. A lot of it happens out of nowhere; it opens with a kid being inexplicably chased through the streets of Cairo with no explanation, only for the guys chasing the kid to completely disappear the moment Poochie and her robotic assistant Hermes get there. And then theres a bit where they somehow end up at the hands of the last remaining worshippers of Osiris (who is inexplicably female here)? It's...weird. Again, somehow despite all this bizarre and completely unexplained bullshit, The Poochie Special ends up being genuinely a pleasant watch. Whilst there's not much opening for more episodes after this one (which is probably why it failed as a pilot), it's definitely worth a look at for the sake of a random cartoon being made out of a popular-at-the-time series of plush toys and stationary.

Once again, I must apologize for the audio in this one. It was all over the place once more and we ask of you to please be patient with us as we try and figure out a more solid recording method that allows us to have more decent and consistent levels. Next episode will be coming in a fortnight, now that we're finally back on the right schedule! Thank you for putting up with our constantly stumbling arses.

For some inexplicable reason, DiC thought it'd be a great idea to launch a cartoon based off a popular game that came out in the arcade and at home...approximately 6 years after it had come out. They then further thought it'd be a swell idea to have only one episode actually vaguely based off the lore of the show itself to string kids into watching, only to then take it completely off the rails by the second episode. Did we mention there were toys too? Really really cheap and shitty looking toys? If that hasn't made the pieces fall in place, us talking about it will. This thing is frankly one of the most dire excuses for a cartoon we've ever seen.

Fair Warning: The audio on this episode is a bit fucked, honestly. Mark had a cold and Avery was sleepy. I've set both our tracks to the "Heavy" setting on the Hard Limiter effect, so there may be points where it gets a bit too loud. The alternative was to have both of us be a bit too quiet, unfortunately. So yeah, partly gross audio ahead from Blocked Nose Man and varying noise levels from Obnoxious Dork.

More affectionately known as "SatAM", Sonic the Hedgehog was Dic's second cartoon featuring the blue blur. Rather than take a second spin at the cartoon antics of AoSTH, SatAM is considerably darker and edgier. It features Sonic, Tails and Robotnik, with them having been placed in a cartoon that has basically nothing to do with them, and the Freedom Fighters, a group of generic animal people which the cartoon actually focuses on. Yeah, if it's not too obvious by this point, we weren't too appreciative of this one. The entire show feels drab and dull and Sonic's arsehole personality (which worked nicely in the silly antics environment of AoSTH) sticks out like a sore thumb and makes him utterly unlikable. Listen in to hear us go a bit more indepth into the whole thing and why it simply didn't work anywhere near as well as Adventures did.

On a partially related sidenote: Hello! We're back! Season 3 of Dic Geeks is officially commencing with this episode, and we're shifting ourselves back to the biweekly schedule we originally started on. Turns out, much as we wanted to push through the exhaustive and exhausting list of shows that Dic made, doing it weekly tired us out quicker than ever. But we've had a nice break from it all, and we're diving straight back into it. We wont normally announce these things in order to allow us more freedom of choice with regards to picking shows out, but next episode we'll be taking a little look at the phenomenon that is Street Sharks.

Outro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8I6OLsOb00

Remember Ulysses 31? Jean Chalopin certainly did. So when Mattel comissioned DiC to produce a cartoon based around their failing toy line 'Wheeled Warriors', the result was yet another french-style anime set in space. But could the cartoon series save the toy line? Did Jayce ever find his father and the other half of the root or whatever that medallion thing is supposed to be? Will we annoy a bunch of people by describing this cult classic as 'kinda mediocre'? All these questions answered and more in this, the grand finale of Season 2 of DiC Geeks.

With Hello Kitty's birthday being only a mere 164 days away, we decided to do a bit of early celebration by watching the very first Hello Kitty cartoon broadcast on TV! Furry Tale Theater, despite the name, largely consists of weird half-arsed parodies of both public domain books and films that were popular at the time. Because there were only 3 other Sanrio characters that weren't very import-friendly (namely due to Japanese names and also due to one being just two angelic humans), some one off characters were created to fill out the cast. We have the Sanrio lineup of Kitty and her extended family, My Melody and Tuxedo Sam followed by the Dic creations Catnip and Grinder. There's also the strange anomaly character of Chip the seal who appears to be both a Sanrio and a Dic creation, having been made especially for the purposes of this show. Unfortunately, this show ended up being a bit flat and overall naff - I mean, the stand-in characters Dic made just look like rejects from The Catillac Cats for gods sake. So in order to spice it up, we spend the first half of this episode talking about how good the new Netflix series Aggretsuko is. Seriously, go watch it, it's so good.

When Maniac Mansion co-creator Gary Winnick tried to code his very own NES action game, the results were underwhelming. The marketing however took on a life of it's own thanks to input from a young(ish) Steve Purcell, and so there exists both a Marvel Comics miniseries and a DiC pilot for 'Defenders of Dynatron City' that far surpass the quality of the game they were created to sell. We'd say some more about it, but that's it. It sort of just, existed for a while before fading into obscurity. Apologies for the somewhat rushed episode this week, we should be back up to standard as usual next week. Well, provided the cartoon is decent, at least.

With the success of Fox's X-Men cartoon, studios spent much of the early 90s looking for the next big superhero team. Unfortunately, it was the early 90s and therefore comics were ugly and barely comprehensible in a way they had never quite been before. On that basis, Ultraforce is an excellent translation of the Malibu Comics series (remember Malibu Comics? Neither do we), mining several months of deep continuity for its unengaging plots and almost entirely unlikable heroes to work with. Of course, by the time the cartoon came out, the entitre of Malibu's continuity had been completely reset, making the cartoon completely redundant. Even if the timeline hadn't been reset, it would feel redundant. Ultimately, the show is a time capsule to an age of tedium. 

In 1991 DiC made a show in which the three most famous sportsmen in North America teamed up to fight supervillains with sports-themed gadetry. That's the entire premise. Despite everything about this show, despite the fact that there should be no conceivable way of it working, ProStars ends up being one of the best things we've ever had the pleasure of viewing whilst doing this show. So listen in for this lovely episode in which we enthuse about the cartoon that is all about helping kids.

In honor of Earth Day, we used a heat-spewing, energy-wasting mathematics machine to show us an infamous environmentalist superhero cartoon from the early 1990s. But is Captain Planet as wonderous as his Emerald Mullet, or is 'Captain Planet and the Planeteers' just another piece of trash in an earth-choking landfill?

(It's the latter. its a DiC show, its always gonna be the latter.)