The Best Worst Cartoon You Never Watched

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The 1990's were demonstrably the best decade in human existence.  It was pretty much the last time any American felt optimistic about anything, and for good reason:  we had a thriving economy, the world wide web debuted, and we kicked the whole decade off with the most awesome war ever: Gulf War I.  In the span of ten years, we proved that the lives and deaths of people on the other side of the world were nothing more than prime-time TV fodder, that we could buy the goods produced by starving third-world types we weren't bombing via computer and telephone wire, and that we could pay for it all twice over and still have money to not give as relief to those same developing third-world nations.

But nothing gold can stay.  By 2002, the world sucked again, and now we here in the States are stuck twiddling our thumbs and waiting with quiet desperation for the world to end just so we won't have to pay off our student loans, credit cards, and upside-down mortgages.  We all dream of death - maybe slow, maybe quick, but death has become preferable to the alternative. Maybe, just maybe, we'll all be dead before they release The Smurfs II - Electric Smurfaloo.   God, hear my cries:  kill me.  Now.

What the fuck is this shit?    This is that shit where a CG animator decides to make the character get all up in the cameras face as if that were a good fucking idea.  WHY THE FUCK WOULD I WANT TO SEE THIS?  ARE YOU ALL RETARDED?  That's my only guess, because in like EVERY FUCKING MOVIE where they have CG characters, one of them will inevitably get up in the camera's face. 

Guess what, computer animators - I am not four years old, and this is not the 1910's - I am not fucking fooled.  I do not think that Brainy Smurf is suddenly in the audience with me. Fuck. Like really  Is it like OH MY GOD A FACE AND IT IS HUGE!  Or alternately OH MY GOD IT'S COMING RIGHT AT MEEEEEE!!!  When human actors mug for the camera like this, they get fired - they don't keep their faces a respectable distance from the camera because of some difficult physical dynamic, they do it because sticking your face in the camera looks fucking stupid.  Making computer-animated characters put their faces right up in the camera isn't some cinematic "missing link" or grand impossibility which you have solved with a copy of Maya 3D, it's just something that looks stupid, unfunny, and awkward. Knock it the fuck off.

But in the 1990s, every Saturday and / or Sunday morning, we had something worth living for: cartoons.  Not just any cartoons: 1990s cartoons (and many live action TV shows) were absolutely nothing more than huge toy commercials.  Cartoons were, of course, always toy commercials, but in the 1990s they finally said "Know what? Fuck it - buy a toy and shut the fuck up."  It's no surprise that "King Arthur and the Knights of Justice" has exactly the same number of syllables as "Shut the fuck up, kid, buy a play set."

The characters on screen looked like toys, and their super powers were obviously spring-loaded action features: lances that fired rockets, twin hammer-fists that swung when the dude turned at the waist, shields that had battle-attack-ready animals on them - this was extreme phallic product placement.  Even the bad guys in KAANTOJ was a super-buff manly man wielding giant iron cocks. The only reason they called the show "King Arthur and the Knights of Justice" was because apparently Tipper Gore wouldn't let them name it "If You Don't Like This Show You Are a Fag." 

Jesus, look at the throbber on Lancelot

The premise for the show itself was ridiculous: The sorceress Morgana imprisons King Arthur in some sort of crystal palace, and Merlin decides to summon "a new king" from "the field of the future," picking a high school football team for the job.  What the fuck, Merlin? These kids are like 16, 18 at the oldest.  Have you ever tried to convince a sullen 16 year old kid to do something? Especially when you're A, like, fucking 100 and B - wearing a bathrobe as you so often do?  These little shits are not going to help you rescue the one true king.  These little shits are going to drink all your wine and then run off to pelt each other with horse shit down at the stable until they get bored, and then burn the stable down. 

Second, suppose you did get them into battle - what then?  Have them run plays or some shit?  Like, hut, hut, hike sort of shit? That's going to go great, right up until the point when one of these battle-hardened 6th century warlords hacks your running back in half and then skull fucks his helmeted remains, at which point one of the Knights of Justice is going to try to call for a time out, and the others are going to lay down and cry for their mothers until Morgana's knights slaughter them one-by-one. 

Luckily for the knights, most battles consisted of little more than all combatants galloping forward, stopping two feet away from each other, and then gently clanging their swords together

Third, you're incentivizing them with Guenevere and her ladies-in-waiting.  Merlin, times are changing:  we all shower ever day, and girls keep it neat, you know...down there.  This was actually one of my problems with Jerry Brukheimer's King Arthur and Kira Knightly's depiction of Guenevere as a rail-thin, hairless, waify warrior woman. Buuuuuulllshit - in the cold of northern Britain, you're not running around in a leather bikini - you're wearing half-rotten Wolf pelts and gnawing on the fatty remains for nourishment just like the modern-day English do. More to the point, even if Guenevere is just fucking banging hot, absolutely fucking smoking, Arthur is going to get her naked and then laugh about her massive jungle bush with all his adolescent buddies.

Finally, speaking of Guenevere - she's betrothed to King Arthur, then Arthur King comes from the future and takes his place, and the most she ever says is that he's acting strangely.  WHAT the SHIT?  How stupid is this woman?  Do all the Knight's starting line-up look exactly like their Medieval counterparts?  If so, how does the black guy fit into all this?  If they aren't basically perfect dopplegangers for the Knights of the Round Table, I can't even begin to imagine the shallowness of Guenevere's gene pool if she can't tell the difference between King Arthur, to whom she is betrothed, and slack-jawed 20th-century dude-bro Arthur King.

Ha ha - oh man brah, like a chia pet, for real

What Merlin should have done is to recruit a bunch of hard-ass G.I.'s from deep in Cambodia - the ears-on-the-dogtags wearing motherfuckers, Tom Berenger in Platoon all battle-scarred and caving motherfuckers heads in with a rifle butt...wave a sword at THAT, medieval pussies.  These guys would have killed half of the kingdom on their first day, and then spent the rest of their tour repopulating the island.  Soldiers deep in the shit don't care about a little fuzz - they're like Dennis Hopper - huffing gas, killing senselessly and without remorse, and fucking anything that moves.  USA! USA! USA!

King Arthur and the Knights of Justice was preposterous in both plot and execution, but it had a rocking guitar soundtrack and it made the youth of America believe in the power of football and friendship.  It also fit neatly into the semi-mystical vibe of the time, as evidenced by later incarnations of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers and the radically less successful Mystic Knights of Tir-Na-Nog.  It was fun, it was stupid, it's one of the best things to come out of the 1990's insofar as everything that came out of the 90's was fun and stupid.