Talking Too Much About Cartoons #1: Kablam!

Yesterday, a light bulb flashed in my head. It was 6 in the morning, and like any responsible adult at 6 in the morning, I was watching cartoons with the sun just starting to peek out the window and everyone else passed out asleep. More specifically, I was watching this one show called Kablam. Watching the second episode of it, the memories came flooding back to me like some animated tidal wave. The most important part of this little experience was not just of memories of watching some old TV show, but looking back on the experiences that shaped a large part of my youth. After I saw that episode again, I knew I wanted to talk about this show and my experiences with it, especially since I have in my opinion the perfect place to finally share these thoughts. Now assume the crash position, hold on tight, and take a deep breath as we travel back fourteen years in the past!

The year was 2004. I was only four years old. It was a Saturday morning and me, my mom and my brother were gathered around the TV scrolling through channels when I stumbled upon Nicktoons. My mom had just switched from cable to satellite, so I had never seen this channel before. The first thing I saw was the ending credits to some show called Kablam. I was immediately excited, not because i had already been a fan of the show, but because I had never even seen what a "Kablam" was before. As I would find out a few years later, Kablam was on its final legs by the year I was born, and was quietly hurried off air by Nickelodeon before the launch of the Nicktoon network, so I had not been able to watch this show before. Right after those closing credits was another episode, and as my curiosity for this unknown oddity was peaked, i naturally tuned in. Immediately, I had fallen in love with this show and every single part about it. The catchy ska soundtrack (remember when that was a thing?), the rapid bouncing around between the different artstyles, just how funny each segment and the hosts to tie all of them together were. All of these hooked me right away and I knew I wanted to see more. And see more I did, as I came back to this Nicktoons channel often to watch Kablam. This didn't last long however, as by around 2005 my family switched back to cable so I lost Nicktoons. By the time my cable provider picked up Nicktoons, it had made its rebrand as Nicktoons Network and Kablam had vanished.

"OK, hold on," you might be asking. "So what actually is Kablam?" For all my younger readers and certainly some of my older ones, Kablam was a Nicktoon from 1996 that was able to get through four seasons on Nickelodeon before getting cancelled in 2000. Unlike any other animated show on the channel at the time, which all worked as more traditional sitcoms split into two 11-minute segments, Kablam had 22-minute episodes that bounced around several different animated shorts, kinda like a polished up version of sister channel MTV's Liquid Television for a younger audience. While certain shorts came and went fast, particularly towards the last two seasons, the majority of the episodes had a few staple shorts that served as the faces of the show. One was "Action League Now," a superhero parody (a perfect choice for this show considering the basic concept around it) about a group of bumbling superheroes that are incredibly incompetent at their jobs of saving the world from evil, with powers that don't actually end up being all that useful (one just has the power to melt!) The entire short is animated through live action footage of action figures done in stop-motion. This became the most popular of the shorts on Kablam, spawning an eleven-episode compilation series after Kablam left the airwaves. It also happened to be one of my favorites, appreciating as I got older just how the series took advantage of its status of being made entirely with action figures by being one of Nickelodeon's most violent shows. Just about every episode, body parts can come flying off or get crushed into things and the censors are completely A-OK with this because it's being filmed with action figures and not real people or even animated characters. Looking back, it was absolute genius! Kablam, however, is not one for sticking to one style, as the shorts go between many different art styles and mediums of animation. Shorts like Sniz and Fondue, about two talking ferrets living together, are done in traditional cel animation, blending in well with the other Nicktoons on the channel.

Other shorts went in even more fascinating directions. Prometheus and Bob, a short about an alien teaching a caveman the wonders of modern technology was made through claymation. The hyperactive Life with Loopy, about the surreal adventures of a five-year-old girl, has my personal favorite look of all of Kablam's shorts. The bodies of the characters are puppets animated through stop-motion, with heads made out of metal and metallic facial features. The show also mixed this unique style with heavy use of real actors and live action settings for the characters to interact with. There was nothing else like it on television, making it one of the most fascinating visual experiences on the show. Of course, while all the shorts by themselves are great, my favorite part of Kablam was how these shorts were tied into each other. Now I can finally talk about the basic concept of Kablam, as it took its sketch comedy premise a step further than Liquid Television before and Oh Yeah Cartoons (also from Nick!) did after. Kablam was a show "where comics and cartoons collide" and did it through their hosts, Henry and June. Henry and June, as well as their TV crew exist inside a comic book and "turn the pages" to transition to the other shorts, acting as hosts to the show (and for a little while, hosts for Nickelodeon in general!) This was my absolute favorite part of the show and was the part of Kablam that really drew me into the show more than any other part. The hosts had great chemistry with each other, tying the shorts up with a comic book format was absolutely genius, I loved the rough art style, and most importantly they were absolutely hilarious. I swear I laughed at Henry and June more than I have any other cartoon (even if the first few Spongebob seasons come dangerously close.)

I think what made Kablam entertaining to me relied on two fronts. One was just how hilarious and well crafted the show itself was in its writing and animation styles. Another front was the hunt of it all. Around 2007, as I had started increasing my internet usage thanks to a in hindsight dangerous mixture of parental unsupervision, not having better things to do and access to my oldest sister's computer while she was doing important things in the real world, I had stumbled upon through google searches a site called Guba. Guba was kinda like Youtube except not nearly as many people posted on it, so copyrighted programs ran rampant (like Dailymotion!) It's been long dead for years, but while it was up, there were exactly nineteen episodes uploaded on the site of Kablam, taken from DVR rips of the Nicktoons run. When I found these, i was absolutely ecstatic! I watched and rewatched these episodes all the time and became absolutely obsessed. This time, I fell in love even harder than I did when I found it the first time. I played the two online games of the show a lot and successfully convinced my mom to buy a set of the Action League Now kids meal toys. It had become my favorite TV show by far, and the one time it reran in 2007 on Nicktoons Network on Thanksgiving weekend felt like a godsend, a message from the animation gods saying that they were listening to me and knew what i wanted, even if it was only for just the one episode. I had never seen the episode before, which made it even better. By then, I knew I had wanted more.

When Kablam was still in reruns, not every episode played in reruns, thanks to certain shorts having rights issues. Even of the ones that did play, certain ones were played in the rotation much more than others. The more commonly run episodes were the ones uploaded to Guba and the internet at large. However, into the start of the tens, diligent people were looking to make the number of episodes found max itself out. Unlike many of the other cartoons on at the time, Kablam did not get a home video release, possibly because of reobtaining the many different rights for shorts for home video releases. This, naturally, made the hunt for kablam episodes that much harder. Adding to that its limited run on the air for reruns compared to its peers, which made the search for the rest of its fourtyeight episodes so much more tantalizing. I had started joining my first internet forums just to be able to find downloads of new (for me) episodes as members made progress looking through tapes and recording what they could when the show played on international TV. While I liked that more episodes were uncovered on the first forum I was on, classicnickshows, the other forum I joined wasn't to find episodes, exactly. It was called, simply enough, the Kablam Forum. This was the one I spent much more time on. I was amazed that there were more people who not just remembered what this old show was, but still cared enough about it to form a community about it. Understandably given how old the show was, I could never find people IRL who knew what it was outside of my family (my older sisters loved it when it was on!) so it was such an exciting experience to talk to others about it online. People as along for the ride of finding episodes as I was, talking about their experiences with the show, it was cool! The crowd was a lot older than I was, ranging from high schoolers to people in their early twenties, but I never felt intimidated by them. They didn't look down on me either for being probably the youngest member of the board. Despite the age difference, i felt like I could be on totally equal footing with the rest, because what mattered in the end was that everyone loved the same things. I guess that's the power of the internet!

By the time I made it to middle school, most of the series had been found, and I had been watching episodes all the time. In part because of Kablam, I had gotten super into all the 90's nickelodeon shows that I could get my hands on through DVDs, VHS, shoddy video uploads from old tapes, and of course through reruns. The 90's are All That, a block for the Teennick channel had started up, and of course I was all over it. I was a total night owl back then so I was fine with staying up at midnight. I had hoped and prayed for Kablam reruns, but alas they did not come despite referencing the show in advertising. However, time was starting to pass. The classicnickshows forum had started slowing down. The Kablam forum had new membership and posts drag to a crawl. Eventually, the admin (PrincessJune was her name, I think?) had decided to shut down the Kablam Forum for those reasons, as well as to focus on other forums for older cartoons that had also died off. I had been one of the more active members who was trying to keep the forum alive, but even I knew that the time for everyone to move on was fast approaching. Soon, I had slowed down on watching cartoons in general, not just Kablam, as i refocused my viewing habits towards anime. I had thought that those last few leftovers of unfound episodes would never see the light of day again. I would revisit episodes occasionally, thanks to a streaming channel called Nick Reboot which had the show on its randomized rotation, but didn't seek to revisit the show much outside of those terms. Then I was taken for a spin.

2015 had become an interesting time to be a Kablam fan. First, A lost half-hour valentine's day special for one of the shorts, The Offbeats, was uncovered the year before. I had seen a commercial for it online years before, but I hadn't been particularly looking for the special in comparison to more Kablam episodes, so the finding came as a nice surprise to watch on Valentines Day the year after its discovery. I was late to the party on this finding. The me of just a few years before would have been chomping at the bit for this, seeing it drop as soon as the file had been uploaded. What was much more surprising was when early in the year, a user from the Lost Media Wiki uploaded another half-hour Kablam-related special, one that I had been hoping to see for years. They found the exclusive airing of "The Henry and June Show," a primetime special that took the hosts of their show out of their element by having segements revolving entirely around them without wrapping around the many different shorts. It had been said to have been a pilot for a potential series that would have played alongside Kablam during its run or possibly to replace it. Sadly, it never went anywhere. Nickelodeon never bothered playing the special again after that, so it got lost and buried. Thanks to this find, I did start to watch Kablam a bit more often inbetween anime sessions, starting to pay more attention to wait could be found. There were two more episodes that had yet to be found, and I had been hoping that someone, somewhere could find these. I still believed that these last two discoveries were just flukes, and didn't get my hopes up. Until 2016 happened. It was one ordinary morning, watching Nick Reboot, waiting for kablam to come out. I was ready for my half hour dose of nostalgia, when I had noticed something odd. After the intro, i did not recognize the Henry and June bit at all. "This is impossible!," I thought. I knew every found episode like the back of my hand. Before I had time to dwell on that thought, I had frozen up when I realized just what exactly was going on. This had been a newly found episode. I felt a sense of excitement and discovery (even if I didn't smell like discovery) I hadn't felt in several years. To my shock, after looking the show up again through Google, I had discovered that Mark Marek had uploaded almost the entire series from his personal Betamax tapes of the show to his personal website. My ten-year-old self would have killed for this type of access. After watching the other "lost" episode, my childhood felt like it had closure, as pathetic as that sounds. The one thing I took away from watching that last episode was just how I had developed between when I started following this show in kindergarden to the place I was in then. Even though so much about the world around me and myself changed since I started watching Kablam, I knew that one thing was for certain. My love for animation, the love firmly planted by Kablam, never left.

Hello and welcome to a new segment of my blog, where I take a look at the animation from the west that means a lot to me. Now I will say that the upcoming posts for this will not be as long as this was, but this should give you an idea about what to expect here. While the focus will mainly be on cartoons from the 90's-mid 2000's, there is the chance of more recent shows getting talked about as well. I want to use this series as a way of meditating about animation and how its affected my life, in ways both big and mostly small. So join us again next time, same Kablam time, same Kablam network!