Everyone has probably heard of or has seen the Lego Movie but there are always people trying to ruin the fun; this time it's Fox News (Surprise Surprise) saying the Lego Movie is Anti-Capitalist for using a corporate executive as it's main villain and that got me thinking.
Exactly how often is the Corrupt Executive used in animation?
Well lets go through the top ten Corrupt Corporate Executives.
Rules are that all animation is allowed and were looking at just the individuals rather than a whole company; for example it's clear that the whole of GENOM in Bubblegum Crisis is corrupt but cannot go on this list.
Without further delay lets begin.
10. Norman Osborn/Green Goblin from Spectacular Spiderman
Is not only a major villain but in this version of Spiderman he's heavily involved with other villains as well as creating half of them with his own experiments and betraying them should they go on a rampage.
9. Plutarkian Lawrence Lactavius Limburger from Biker Mice From Mars
Is disguised as a corporate executive but is really an alien from a race of Planet Looters.
8. Stavros Garkos from The Hurricanes
It's not enough that Stavros wants to increase his already high wealth but is also seeking ways to cheat so his soccer team can win the world tournament.
7. Gozaburo Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh
Had his own corrupt team of executives who all play card games, sadly for him he didn't foresee his own adoptive son betray him and turn his company into a Card Game amusement park complete with academy.
6. Looten Plunder from Captain Planet
This guy is the template for all Corrupt Corporate Executives and is the only villain in the show to have a plausible motive for pillaging the Earth.
5. MOM from Futurama
The only female on this list. She masks herself as a kind old lady in public but easily comes off as a gender swap Mr Burns when concocting evil plans.
4. Cyril Sneer from The Raccoons
As the picture shows, it's clear that Cyril is a greedy businessman who wants to destroy the forest for easy money and even has the Cigar to make the image work.
3. Albert Maverick from Tiger & Bunny
Although it's not so clear at the beginning when you essentially turn capturing villains into a tv show sponsored by major corporations but Using NEXT powers to cover up a murder he committed in front of the man he turned into a Superhero for the sake of continuing his TV show and then turning everyone against Kotetsu to keep it covered up and then gets away with it by wiping his memories before being killed off by Lunatic
2. Lex Luthor from Superman
One of the more famous examples in which the businessman (Or at least since the 80s) is having an inferiority complex when it comes to Superman and seeks to take down the powerhouse using anything and everything at his disposal which includes, kryptonite and powered mecha suits.
1. Mr Burns from The Simpsons
It's the height of hypocrisy when Fox makes comments about the Lego Movie being Anti-Capitalist when the Simpsons' (Fox's biggest money maker) most reoccurring villain is Mr Burns, whose history of crimes would make many of the other people on this list into petty thugs in comparison.
Extra: Funny how they don't bring up Robocop (Which has come out the same time as the Lego Film) when the main villain in that film is also a corrupt executive but nooooooooo they had to pick on a harmless yet awesome kids film about Danish building blocks. You must feel really big now Fox.
Really? Have my ideas dried up that much that I'm reviewing an old cartoon about talking shoes? Alright lets get this over with, this is the Shoe People.
The Shoe People is a British cartoon from 1987 based on a children's book about talking shoes that mimic the person they are meant for such as a clown shoe being a clown and a police boot being a Policeman.
The setting is an old cobblers shop with a backroom filled with old shoes but look further in and there is a magical place called Shoe Town just below Toecap Hill. This is where the Shoe People live.
And that's basically it. This is a very common British cartoon, it has a lot of similarities to the Raggy Dolls which uses a similar setup which I covered in my top 100 cartoons and the plotlines are pretty standard with character introductions and very basic children's plots such as losing something or surprise birthday parties.
Being honest looking back on it, it's a little bit creepy; I mean it's talking shoes, it's hard to embrace such a weird concept yet it somehow works; it's a pretty harmless cartoon but for an 80s cartoon it doesn't stand out as well as others.
It does have a couple of interesting facts.
1. The theme is sung by Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues.
2. It was the first western show to be broadcast in the former Soviet Union.
Yeah, in communist Soviet Union, talking shoes were acceptable.
Next time, something more interesting.
Everyone has heard of the madcap surreal humor of Regular Show and it's no secret that I rate it very highly, but it's not the first cartoon to do this humor. Earlier than that we had Angry Beavers.
Here is a show about Beaver brothers Norbert and Daggett, one of whom voiced by Sabrina the Teenage Witch's resident cat Salem. After moving out of their family home the brothers find a spot to build a dam and begin there many adventures in the real world but said real world pretty much involves everything older teens are supposed to do in this situation which is goof off.
The cartoon showcases their many surreal adventures which consist of space travel, B-Movie nightmares, becoming discostars and becoming hipsters with their stupidly long teeth; now some of those plot points sound similar to Regular Show and you'd be right.
These days many of the pop culture images and completely absurd plots in Regular Show wouldn't be acceptable ten years ago but the Angry Beavers were doing just that, the only major difference is time. You see the 90s was very much an era that never had it's own running theme so anything went back then.
If you want to bring back disco, make B-Movie horror films seem awesome or collecting cereal boxtops for a street sweeper, then the 90s was the right era for it. Heck even a stump with a drawn on face was considered a major character in this cartoon.
I don't rate it as the best cartoon, in fact it even missed my top 100 cartoon list but I do however rate it as one of the most important. You see an "anything goes" premise can only work when you embrace it as the normal and Angry Beavers was one of the first shows to work with that style and succeed; granted there were earlier cartoons like Ren & Stimpy and Rocko's Modern Life both of whom equally weird but those two function on a different concept.
So that's Angry Beavers; you know I can't help but laugh at the amount of beaver quotes this show had; my personal favorite is still Muscular Beaver.
There is an uncomfortable trend at the moment in the animation industry simply referred to as the remake or the rehash in other cases, this is taking a popular cartoon from eons ago and remaking it for a new audience but some of these so called remakes aren't really up to scratch and here are a few examples in what doesn't work.
The movies are terrible at this especially when each of these rehashes use CGI combined with live action; this is true with Yogi Bear, Alvin & the Chipmunks and the Smurfs, all of which are icons in their respective countries but as movies shown in this style it really doesn't work; and now that Disney want to try it, guess which franchise they're going to attempt this with.
Yep Rescue Rangers, a show which has no right to be involved in this type of animation to begin with considering there is only one prominent human character in the cartoon.
Warner Bros are really guilty of this, their recent rehashes of Scooby Doo & Looney Tunes does little to keep it's audience, in fact their problems are more to do with messing with the formula. Scooby Doo tried to go all contemporary by attaching an origin story and a complex plot to the simple chase villains dressed up as ghosts, Scooby Doo never had any problems adapting with the times providing it kept formula but has a hard time outside of that. In the case of Looney Tunes and probably Tom & Jerry as well, they suffer from being politically incorrect for modern audiences, the jokes and gags that were acceptable in the 40s & 50s are not so acceptable now so modernizing wasn't kind to them, in fact some say that the likes of Bugs and Daffy are too domesticated to be funny anymore.
Strangely enough classic American cartoons are also involved in rehashes with the likes of Rocky & Bullwinkle along with the very recent Mr Peabody & Sherman. Both of which are ancient by today's standards but makers insist on bringing it into CGI and making a film about it.
More recently we also have the likes of Pac-Man and Sonic coming back in CGI series and both sound like a desperate bid to regain fans when both franchises are practically dead in today's market. Even Powerpuff Girls are getting the same treatment as they return in their own CGI series but the makers insist the formula is still the same.
Remakes aren't all bad, Thundercats was actually good, if not better than the original, it is possible to remake things without ruining it. Other shows such as Ninja Turtles and Biker Mice from Mars both managed to survive being remade and improved as well.
So yeah, in most cases remakes and rehashes aren't exactly good for the industry, the idea of fixing something which isn't broke isn't always the best course of action to try and revive a long forgotten franchise. Only a small minority seem to succeed in this regard but as time moves on and nostalgia seems to only get more popular by the second, it's only a matter of time before I end up re-watching my whole childhood in CGI.
Did you ever want a series that shows you good action without any of the Shonen cliches interfering? Well look no further than Soul Eater.
Soul Eater is a Tim Burton-esque anime about trainee weapon meisters and their living Deathscythe weapons fighting against the likes of Kishin Demons and Witches all in the name of the Grim Reaper himself.
We join lead protagonist Maka Albarn and her partner Soul Eater as she hunts for the witches soul to make Soul Eater into a proper Deathscythe fit for the reaper. The same goes for Black Star and his partner Tsubaki along with Death the Kid and the Thompson Sisters.
But their lessons at the Deathmeister academy get disrupted by the Witch Medusa as she plots to revive the Kishin Asura, so it's up to the Academy students to stop her while also fighting off other Witches, a Werewolf, a Swordsman and Crona the ambiguously gendered emo kid with black blood and a scary weapon named Ragnarok.
Now this does sound like a plot of any Shonen series but the execution of the show is well done; this is mainly helped by the very stylish art style, awesome music and well choreographed fight scenes. With all this you kind of forget that the majority of the cast are all rejects from other anime. Allow me to expand.
Watching these characters it becomes immediately obvious where they take their inspirations from. Maka reminds me of Witch Hunter Robin, Black Star reminds me of Naruto, Death the Kid is the spitting image of XXXHolic's Kimihiro Watanuki, Soul Eater looks like the forbidden love child of Dead Leaves and the Gorillaz while the Thompson Sisters could easily walk into Burst Angel no problem. Only Tsubaki seems to escape the comparisons. The supporting cast does slightly better with original designs at least but they aren't nearly as strong as the main cast.
Quite early on we meet the unoriginally named teacher Dr Stein, and while at first he seems awesome through his battles and eccentric personality but after a while he just gets annoying, this is true for a lot of the supporting cast as they seem to fade into one dimensional characters rather quick and this is where the show starts showing it's cracks as well.
For a series with enough source material for a long runner, it tends to rush things an awful lot come part two. New characters are introduced out of the blue both enemy and ally with nothing much to work from other than names. The end result is a taped together mess which ends in quite a let down come last episode.
Final Verdict: It's definitely worth picking up but random pacing in part two really messes with the story far too much. Nevertheless its art style and action really save it from being generic.
