Archive for June 2002
Dead Air: Scooby’s All-Star Laff-A-Lympics
June 19, 2002, 6:30 pmWelcome sports fans. It’s a cartoon competition. For medals, even.
Entertainment-Geekly.com - June 19, 2002
Strictly speaking, when held up to the tenets of Dead Air, Scooby’s All-Star Laff-A-Lympics isn’t a perfect candidate. The show still airs, occasionally (mostly on Cartoon Network, which owns every Hanna Barbera cartoon and has dibs on their organs I hear), and there are still tapes for sale, but very few. This is more of a Dying Air show. As each year passes, with less and less attention paid to the older, rarified toons, this show dies a little, until one day it too shall pass.
The Laff-A-Lympics were a big excuse to cram every cartoon in the H+B stable onto the screen under the pretense of a competition. Continuity be damned, these anthropomorphic bastards were wandering the world together and forced to participate in a variety of competitions. Some were straight-up Olympics events (shot-put for example). Others were more bizarre, usually intended to highlight where it was the event was being held, like climbing up Big Ben or having flying carpet races in Baghdad (yeah, well, it wasn’t in the terror-sponsoring nation we’re familiar with today).
The cartoons were divided into three teams – the Scooby Doobies (ha ha ha), the Yogi Yahooies, and the Really Rottens. Each team would pick its representatives for each event and then it was all out war. The unspoken rules went like this; Teams could do whatever they wanted during the race, within reason, but interference with another team was forbidden. Other than that, it was fair game. The Scoobies and the Yahooies tended to attempt non-offensive cartoon hyjinks (like winding up someone’s tail to act as a propeller) whereas the Rottens would constantly attempt to cheat. Sometimes the good guy teams would get ruled against by the judges (who would accept the decision with good grace) and sometimes the Rottens would genuinely win, without cheating (usually only when a Scooby or Yahooie plan backfired, causing the good guy teams to fall behind). But at the end of the day it was usually the Scoobies who won, followed by the Yahooies in a close second (the Washington Generals of Cartoon sports), and on a couple of notable occasions, the Rottens would win.
There was a subtle advertising con going on during these shows. The Scooby team was made up of recent characters, many of whom had shows currently on the air (hence the Laff-A-Lympics gave the air of bringing the Saturday Morning line-up together), the Yahooies were mostly Hanna Barbera’s early cartoons (most of whom didn’t have current shows), and the Rottens were a collection of antagonists from across the board (in some cases, they were reminicient of characters from competing shows). There was then this sense that the current cartoons were better than the old cartoons. Stay tuned kids, the good cartoons are on next. I’m willing to overlook this subtle preference to the modern however, as the show tended to provide more geography lessons than some of my grade school teachers ever provided.
At the end of it all, I think it’s this lack of context, this hodge-podge nature the show had that will ultimately keep it from returning to the air waves. Where as you can air an episode of Dynomutt (who, along with Blue Falcon, was a Scooby) in any decade and the opening song would fill you in as to who they are and what they do, they’re totally without explanation in the Laff-A-Lympics. Everybody knows Scooby, but will a kid understand Speed Buggy? No. It’s just randomly random.
Indelibly burned — To this day, I still pull out my Snagglepuss and Mildew Wolf (who were the Wide World of Sports* style announcers of the games) impressions, but nobody gets it. I think they’re mentally deficient. Stupid eeevhun.
*Which was an ABC thing. ABC aired the Laff-A-Lympics. Both ran on weekends. You do the math.
—castewar | no comments
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