Talking Too Much About Cartoons: Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi

Welcome back to the next installment of Talking Too Much About Cartoons, where I... well you get the idea from the title I think, so let's get to it! I promise this won't be as long as the last one of these I did.

In 2004, Cartoon Network was going through a major transformation. The most noticeable one was in its advertising. The channel went through its second major rebrand in the 12 years since the channel launched. Gone were the days of the "powerhouse" bumpers, for something more elaborate. Cartoon Network started the "CN City" era, having every commercial and coming up next bumper be intertwined within an experimental new concept. In these, all of the original shows on the network all crossed over and seemed to live within the same city, with Miguzi happening underwater and Toonami in space as it always had been. Characters from completely different series interact with each other inbetween shows in an attempt to bring all of the channel's shows together and have more unified advertising and marketing compared to the competitors. Even the logo had changed after 12 years!

Another, maybe less obvious change was in its schedule. By this time, older Hanna Barbara cartoons had been pushed to the wayside, off the channel entirely and off to the spin-off channel Boomerang. Even the first of the original shows, the "Cartoon Cartoons," had been pushed to early mornings. Instead, CN had looked towards newer originals alongside acquired works, mostly anime. Anime had dominated the channel during the early 2000's, playing every afternoon on Toonami, alongside early Saturday mornings and late on Saturday nights. This transitioned to Miguzi as well, which played anime alongside cartoons that took lots of inspiration from anime, like Teen Titans and Code Lyoko. So to say the least, Cartoon Network, for a time was infatuated with Japanese culture at the time in the midst of the ongoing anime boom. In some ways, it only felt natural that the subject of today's post would happen the way the network was moving.

I mentioned Teen Titans a few sentences ago, and for good reason. When Teen Titans started in 2003, the show had blown up in the ratings and did very well for Cartoon Network. But one popular aspect of the series in particular was its theme song. Since Teen Titans tried differentiating itself from the rest of the DC Animated Universe by taking animation cues from anime, they also tried keeping up its "anime-ness" by actually getting a Japanese pop group for its theme song. This is where many American viewers had first heard of Puffy Amiyumi. Ami and Yumi had been popular in Japan since the mid 90's, and Teen Titans having them sing the opening may have been what swayed Cartoon Network to pick up a series based around them. Around the same time as the first season of Teen Titans was ready to release, Sam Register, then Vice President of the channel, pitched a show about the J-Pop duo. Renegade Animation, coming off of two failed pilots for CN and having only worked on commercials and shorts beforehand, had a stroke of luck when the network picked up the pilot for what would be Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi. The pilot itself definitely felt different from the final product in a few ways.

The main girls themselves got some different designs, Ami's look especially. The different artstyle certainly gave off more of a UPA vibe than the final designs did, a look similar to Gerald McBoingBoing (which also happened to get on Cartoon Network two years later.) Instead of nabbing dedicated cartoon voice actors like the final product did, this pilot got two Japanese women to voice them instead. The culture shock element of the show ended up being scrapped too. Honestly, the animation is somewhat smoother than in the final product, and my favorite part of the pilot overall (other than that brief use of Tomodachi off of An Illustrated History at the end of the pilot, although I'll be talking more about how good that song is very soon.) Comedywise, the pilot doesn't seem that different from the main show itself, I enjoyed it about as much as the series.

The final product is about animated versions of Ami Onuki and Yumi Yoshimura and the different adventures they go on inbetween gigs on a seemingly endless world tour taking them to practically every part of the world with a stage, alongside their penny pinching manager Kaz along for the ride. The dynamic duo face off against insane fans, talent sucking vampires, former band members wanting to take over and just about whatever else the writing staff has in mind. Pink-haired Ami is the typical optimistic girly girl, loving shopping and pink things and seems to fluctuate between drums and guitar in addition to vocals, just depending on the episode. Yumi is more of a sarcastic punk rock type, dressed up in purple. As you might expect, the two contrasting personalities clash pretty often in the show. So about the show itself? It's pretty ok. The comedy can be kinda hit or miss earlier on, as the staff is figuring out what they can do with this show. The dialogue can get hampered at points by some kinda weird voice direction, making them miss their mark. More often than not, thankfully, the direction works! The voice actors they got for Ami and Yumi are great. Ami was voiced by Janice Kawaye, who voiced Jenny-XJ9 in My Life as a Teenage Robot. Yumi has the voice talent of Grey DeLisle, who did Frankie Foster in Foster's Home and TONS of other characters for cartoons. Good on this show for getting them, because they really play a big part in making these characters feel memorable and endearing. They both do great jobs despite the occasional slip-up, and really fit the characters well.

Although I can't deny there are two more parts in the equation that make this show stand on its own as a pretty alright entry in Cartoon Network's original lineup. It's cute as hell and there's J-Pop involved. As you readers will soon find out and what friends I've had already know is that I'm a simple man. You don't need a ton to win me over. A show that combined two of the cutest character designs in western animation mixed with a genre I love and some great voice acting and decent comedy to go alongside it and I was totally sold. There are many moments in the show that use Puffy Amiyumi's music, mostly during montages. It runs the gambit of the group's career, from their debut AmiYumi to the then latest album at the time of the pilot, Nice. They also played songs in small music videos occasionally in the first two seasons. I really liked this aspect because it got me to dive into the discography of the real band, and it was some of the most fun I had listening to music this year!

Season 3 had downscaled two elements I really liked about the show. The music had showed up much less, as the short videos disappeared and less episodes used tracks. Another aspect that seemed to disappear later on were the live action segments. For much of the show, the real life Ami and Yumi showed up to do skits at the beginning (and in season 1, at the end) of each episode. They felt a little awkward at first, especially with how disconnected they were with the segments, but they really began to grow on me, kinda like the show itself did in a way. It helps that the real band were super cute like their animated counterparts were. After Cartoon Network stopped broadcasting the show, the latter half of season 3 dropped these segments entirely. At first, I had thought that it was a mistake on the part of the network that the last five or so english episodes got captured from, but that got proven wrong because the final episode had a live action bit in the upload which was a montage of Ami and Yumi having fun on the set over the seasons. Maybe they thought that the videos and live action were too distracting and got in the way of the show? The tradeoff seemed to be that season 3 was all in all the funniest of the seasons. The writers seemed to realize that the show wasn't gonna last long and reveled in that by doing more fourth wall breaking gags and bringing back characters as opposed to just whatever the new setting of the week was, even if there was lots of that in season 3. My biggest wish was that Julie from the final episode had been used more than once, her design is just as cute as Ami and Yumi's and the idea of her constantly trying to destroy the band sounds like it could've been pretty funny to see in new ways.

I saw this show a little bit when I was younger, mainly on Cartoon Network Fridays, as it didn't have tons of reruns compared to the other originals on the channel. I was ok with it, but it didn't leave much of a lasting impression on me. On a rewatch, Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi was fun. A lot of fun. Like, more than I was expecting going in. The songs are great, the plots are fun if maybe generic at times with almost sickeningly sweet endings, the comedy works and Ami and Yumi are a great pair. Cartoon Network seemed to like it for a while as well, as it became a mini marketing machine at the time. Several online and console games, an complilation album, a decent bit of advertising and even a thanksgiving day parade float! Maybe it was not the best Cartoon Network had at the time, in an era of modern classics like Megas XLR or 80% of the Toonami lineup at the time, but I certainly had a good time with it. This could've only happened at the exact time in the exact place on the exact channel it was on. So maybe it's a good time capsule into what was happening with animation during the mid 2000's. I'm a sucker for time capsules, anyway.

Thanks for reading this word vomit all the way through. This didn't have the sort of personal narrative that my last cartoon review did, but I just finished a rewatch of the show and I just had to talk about it. I wanna bring up the music one last time, because the first post of a new segment I'm calling Albums I Adore (and Why You Should Too!) will be covering the antics of the real band behind these colorful characters, covering my personal favorite album of theirs, Nice. This will be after the next Circle of Friendz. Hope you read it.


BYE BYE BOO~!!! sorry i couldn't help myself.

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!