The Delbert Cartoon Report

2016 has been a terrible year when it came to celebrity deaths.  While some have naturally passed on (like these two), others just suddenly at a young age died like Prince.  Today's focus are these two as they played among other iconic roles these two cartoon characters.  Riley was Stu Pickles on the Rugrats and Kaplan was Choo-Choo on Top Cat. Jack Riley: I have heard great stories about the man.  He was an incredible nice guy with a great wit.  That type of wit got him the roles that he did on shows like Bob Newhart.  When playing Stu Pickles, I watched Rugrats on a regular basis as a kid (like many of you 90's kids).  It was a unique show.  A lot of haters complained that it was literally a baby show because they're babies, they have baby adventures, and all they do is poop and cry and all that other stuff.  Ehhhh.......no not really.....it was much more than that.  It wasn't this gross pooping and drooling show, it really was par...

It's time to take a look at another public domain company.  This time it's Meta Video.  Here is a company that was so cheap it's unthinkable what they did to these cartoons with a little extra effort to ruin them. Meta started out as Nippon Industries in the 80's.  In 1987, a line of tapes known as Superstar Cartoon Video came out.  These tapes usually only showed about 4 public domain cartoons.  And they are the usual suspects like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Popeye, and The Three Stooges.  The artwork for the VHS covers varied really badly.  Many times there are parts they forgot to color in.  This Bugs Bunny tape forgot to even color Bugs at all.  Sometimes they will refer to official art such as the Harveytoons characters, but again, the colors are all messed up (especially on Baby Huey). Have a look at one of them.  This Daffy Duck tape shows the cartoons in wrong pitch and incorrect titles (probably to remove all...

Here is a new series of blog posts talking about the many public domain companies over the years that released public domain cartoons. Our first victim is Goodtimes Entertainment.  This company was formed in the 1984 with the primary goal is releasing public domain titles.  Some of the earliest known tapes include the Kids Kartoons, Great American Cartoons, Classic Video Library, just simply Cartoons, or no titles at all. In the late 1980's, Goodtimes formed a division known as Kids Klassics.  This series of tapes mimicked somewhat of the previous Goodtimes VHS's.  However, they went a step further and began sub licensing  from other companies. Many of these Kids Klassics tapes include The Berenstain Bears specials, Muppet Babies, but big time with Hanna-Barbera cartoons.  These tapes were made right before Turner bought the Hanna-Barbera library.  The public domain tapes bear similar references to Goodtimes's previous tapes with the box ar...

Now here's an unusual duo of chipmunk sounding voices.  Someone wanted to bring back The Nutty Squirrels (sort of).  You can read about them here:  http://jldelbert.blogspot.com/2016/07/alvin-and-chipmunks-knock-offs-nutty.html This comeback was really two new characters named Shirley and Squirrely and released their song, Hey Shirrley this is Squirrely in 1976.  In the 70's, music was awesome.  There were wonderful singers and songwriters like John Denver and Harry Chappin, piano rock legends like Elton John and Billy Joel, Disco was on the rise, and great rock music from bands such as Led Zepplin came on to the scene.  Many of these songs withstood the test of time and has big radio play value to this day. CB Radio Music......on the other hand.............yes folks...this existed.  These country type music is basically two people (or squirrels in this case) CB'ing each other since it was the "it" thing for truck drivers everywhere.  This ...

On this day, Nickelodeon debuted their first three Nicktoons: Rugrats, Doug, and Ren and Stimpy.  Each one had creative freedom and did whatever they wanted without restrictions of the shows like Hanna-Barbera of DIC. Nicktoons is of extreme importance as the cartoons would help bring back animation big time along side The Simpsons, Disney, and some WB shows.  Gone would be shows like The Smurfs and was replaced by shows now deemed towards a general audience (even though they were also grabbing kids attention). Nickelodeon was just a mere kids channel for cable since the late 70's having to acquire licenses for other shows like Inspector Gadget.  Once Looney Tunes went on the air, they knew they had a winner with their ratings and thought that they could create toons of their own because once the Looney Tunes license has ended...that's it (it ran for 11 years by the way). Each of the 3 shows was different.  Ren and Stimpy was based on exaggeration.  Doug...

There's no denying the Looney Tunes are some of the best cartoons ever made, and there's renewed interest with the fans now that Boomerang begun bringing more shorts back on reruns.  However, not everything that WB did with these cartoons are considered great.  This is the Top worst Looney Tunes ever made in CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER.  Please note, this is based on the majority of the fans' reactions and may not represent my opinions. 1. The Seely Six Carl Stalling was the main man when it came to music in the WB cartoons followed by Milt Franklyn who trained under Stalling.  But in 1958, a major musicians strike took place and affected WB causing them to go to Captitol Records for background music.  John Seely was the organizer of that music for the company and while these were necessary for early TV shows that had a budget, these felt awkward in the Looney Tunes.  The six cartoons include 1 Bugs Bunny, 2 Road Runners, 1 Tweety and Sylvester, 1 Foghorn ...

Here is a knock off of the Chipmunks that should have been a short story, but sadly turned into something worse....much worse! In 1984, Audiofidelity put out a record to cash in on the new success of the Chipmunks called The Happy Chipmunks sing Michael Jackson's Greatest Hits.  It was a typical kind of record you would expect from the Chipmunks.  High squeaky voices singing all the big his.  Some may question why such creatures are singing about Human Nature or a song involving a girl claiming Michael's the father of her child, but we've been exposed to his music so much that we really don't care. Ross Bagdasarian Jr. filed a lawsuit against Audiofidelity causing them to change from The Happy Chipmunks to.....    As the album indicates, these records also came with a poster.  A second record came out titles The Happy Hamsters Sing Ghost Busters.  This time they keep stressing the fact that they are NOT chipmunks, they are hamste...