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Disturbing Cartooons

what was that sheep?.. policed childrens dreams... used to say.. I'll say thank you latter.....
 
I think I kind of remember this sheep thing. Was there not some kind of giant golden dream city in it?

Very vague memories of it being under attack by nightmare creatures a lot, and a wee kid that went visiting in his/her dreams every night.

Was it called something really crap like Captain Ram and the Dream Patrol?
 
Jolly Jack said:
I think I kind of remember this sheep thing. Was there not some kind of giant golden dream city in it?

Very vague memories of it being under attack by nightmare creatures a lot, and a wee kid that went visiting in his/her dreams every night.

Was it called something really crap like Captain Ram and the Dream Patrol?
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something like that yes...... captain sheep and the dream patrol?...
 
Admiral Ovine? :confused:

Anybody out there remember it? Maybe younger members? It's gonna drive me mental now...
 
Younger members can mean a lot of things . . . younger than whom?

I am 29, but I have NO idea what it is.

-Fitz
 
Well, uh, yeah, ok you got me. I'm 30 and I only just remember it.

Believe it was on in the early/mid nineties just as I was moving away from watching kids tv.

Possibly on BBC1 when Andy Crane presented.

I thought someone under 25 might have fond memories of it as formative influence. Wasn't as good as Dreamstone though.
 
I remember seeing this sheep thing too, but a power search on IMDB only throws up Wallace and Gromit in A Close Shave. I think it was British.

It's not on Toonhound, though:
http://www.toonhound.com/

...but you could try e-mailing the guy who edits the site about it.
 
It is on Toonhound! Captain Zed and the Zee Zone! :D

The main character wasn't a sheep he was just a bloke, but the staff of the headquarters were all comedy sheep with beanie hats on.

Yes! Thanks for the link GNC, I thought I was just imagining it for a while there.

Among the other classics on the site, does anyone remember Alias the Jester, and his little green dog, Boswell?

Quality programming, that.
 
Excellent, I knew Toonhound wouldn't let us down.

Alias the Jester was great, especially the little noises Boswell made. But it's sort of in the shadow of Dangermouse and Duckula, in the Cosgrove Hall scheme of things.
 
Most of the people on this thread are long gone from here, but I've enjoyed reading it over again tonight. Anyway, first part of Robo Story is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaKx...B607D9ED&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=46

And the opening titles to Once Upon a Time... Man are here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtLzysOD ... re=related
They do conclude with the Earth being destroyed (pessimistic much?), so I assume that happened in the near-mythical final episode.

Any more scary cartoons that anyone here recalls?
 
IvanVolle said:
Here's some creepy stop-motion animation from 1984. I highly recommend clicking on this here linky(clip from "The Adventures of Mark Twain" episode "Mark Twain & Satan):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q29CmMHSQ3M
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I highly recommend watching the whole film if you can find it! Much better than The California Raisins...
 
amarok2005 said:
For the moment at least, the Noveltoons cannibal cartoon is on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIWaeNztPHI

Disturbing or what?
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Dunno if it's disturbing, but it's very odd, especially that ending. It's not as bad as it could have been, I thought body parts were going to start flying! I wonder if David Cronenberg saw that one at an impressionable age?
 
Erm...

In the future, teams of high school girls from around the world will compete in various elaborate World War 2 battle scenarios, with appropriately restored tanks.

Further attempts at explanation would probably be superfluous.

link



:eek!!!!:
 
dreeness said:
Erm...

In the future, teams of high school girls from around the world will compete in various elaborate World War 2 battle scenarios, with appropriately restored tanks.

Further attempts at explanation would probably be superfluous.

link



:eek!!!!:
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And of course, there is a British team.

Here is a brief clip, amazingly it manages to capture every facet of the rollicking, wild and frantic British lifestyle.

(But be warned, it's pretty intense.)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=regl4vTld5E


:shock:
 
I had to bump this old thread for this video, I don't remember it from when I was a kid, only just discovered it...

 
dreeness said:
Erm...

In the future, teams of high school girls from around the world will compete in various elaborate World War 2 battle scenarios, with appropriately restored tanks.
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What normal bloke doesn’t like Japanese schoolgirls and tanks?

maximus otter
 
I've just spent a while reading back over this thread. Some great stuff on here. Things I'd forgotten that we'd been talking about back in the early 2000s.

But for a disturbing cartoons thread I'm kinda surprised that we've not really touched upon the subject of Warner's wartime cartoons and the infamous "Censored 11".

A fair few years ago my little brother picked up a bunch of bargain bin Looney Toons character DVDs from a Pound Shop. I can remember getting a phone call from him (Yeah. A phone call. Which pins that firmly in the early 2000s) saying 'I'm just watching this Daffy Duck DVD, and the most f**ked up shit has just turned up in this'.

And the nature of that 'shit'?

Nazis.

We kind of forget that Warner's made cartoons featuring caricatures of all sorts. Celebrities. Presidents. World leaders.

Some of those were pretty grotesque caricatures, at that. Nasty racial stereotypes. That kind of thing.

During and around WW2 there were a number of cartoons poking fun at Axis Powers Nations. Germany, Italy and Japan. Russia also.

Cartoons such as the Daffy Duck toons 'The Ducktator' and 'Daffy - The Commando'. Or the infamous 'Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips'.

After the 1960s these particular cartoons were rarely screened or collected. The latter Bugs cartoon wasn't even included in WB's WW2 themed collections.

Because of the grotesque stereotyping, largely.

Occasionally some of these have slipped through the net, of course. Being broadcast somewhere in the world without anybody thinking of the potential offense they could cause. They were not however included on United Artists Censored Eleven list.

For the uninitiated, back in 1968 United Artists owned the distribution rights for the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies back catalogue. And they took the decision to remove 11 specific cartoons from that catalogue, and bar their future broadcasting, due to racial and ethnic stereotyping presented within them.

Mostly, but not exclusively, really pretty grotesque black stereotyping.

The 11 in question:

  1. Hittin' the Trail for Hallelujah Land - Merrie Melodies - 1931
  2. Sunday Go to Meetin' Time - Merrie Melodies - 1936
  3. Clean Pastures - Merrie Melodies - 1937
  4. Uncle Tom's Bungalow - Merrie Melodies - 1937
  5. Jungle Jitters - Merrie Melodies - 1938
  6. The Isle of Pingo Pongo - Merrie Melodies - 1938
  7. All This and Rabbit Stew - Merrie Melodies - 1941
  8. Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs - Merrie Melodies - 1943
  9. Tin Pan Alley Cats - Merrie Melodies - 1943
  10. Angel Puss - Looney Tunes - 1944
  11. Goldilocks and the Jivin' Bears - Merrie Melodies - 1944

Not all of these will have included recognisable Looney Tunes characters, of course. But while several of those titles may sound like the name of some kind of distasteful UKIP panto, these really happened! And some big names were involved with making them too. Numbers 4, 6 and 7 were Tex Avery toons. Number 10 was courtesy of Chuck Jones.

Perhaps unsurprisingly All this and Rabbit Stew features Bugs Bunny, being hunted by a black hunter (in the traditionally Elmer Fudd kind of role). It was technically Tex Avery's final short for Warners. His name doesn't appear on the credits because it was released after he parted with the company.

An early version of Elmer Fudd (appearing in scripts simply as 'Egghead') appears in The Isle of Pingo Pongo - a crude travelogue style short, in which Fudd visits a South Sea island populated by black skinned natives who could best be described as drawn simply as tall, scrawny, savages with massively caricatured lips. Nobody's finest hour, here.

You're not likely to see those eleven shorts popping up anywhere. They are banned. But the wartime toons aren't. And encountering them can be very jarring. While Warners' were never as deliberately safe and tranquil as Disney's cartoon output of the same period, we have nonetheless come to trust the Looney Toons characters as family friendly.

Watching Bugs trick Elmer Fudd is fair play. Watching Daffy getting incredulous about something is funny.

But watching Daffy as a dictator or Bugs doing a slanty eyes impression of a Japanese man somehow feels like a bit of a betrayal of that trust. Like finding out a childhood hero is actually a massive bigot, and they've just been hiding it well, for decades.
 
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Dr_Baltar said:
Except for a well-known online video hosting site, of course.
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Well, yes. :) But not via official channels. You won't see them on broadcast TV, for purchase in any home format, or streamed by a service like Netflix or Amazon.

YouTube remains the bastion of unpoliced copyright infringement we know and love. :D
 
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The ironic thing about Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs is that it was aimed at African American audiences, and had been specially commissioned and researched to appeal to that market. I can't find anything online to how contemporary viewers reacted to it, but it would be interesting to know.
 
GNC said:
The ironic thing about Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs is that it was aimed at African American audiences, and had been specially commissioned and researched to appeal to that market. I can't find anything online to how contemporary viewers reacted to it, but it would be interesting to know.
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I've not actually seen it, but I also understand that it was devised in part to also be an open parody of Disney's Snow White. To the point of lifting individual scenes from that movie.

I can quite believe that this was never meant to be offensive. At the time. It was (slightly misguidedly) trying to appear to a specific audience. Many of the Censored Eleven do contain strong elements of Jazz and jive talking, and Warners genuinely brought in respected black radio actors and jazz musicians for these shorts.

I don't think that was out of intentional bigotry. But viewed in a modern context it would be hard to see many of these as not being crudely stereotypical. For example, black men being fascinated by dice games is a trope which flows through so many cartoons of this era. Portraying black men as habitual gambling addicts really was considered an acceptable thing in pop culture at that time. Warners were far from alone in displaying things like that. But their back catalogue has survived far longer than some of the smaller animation houses of the day.

.
 
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