Subscribe!KaBlam! (1996)
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First episode title: Your Real Best Friend How familiar with the show am I?: I had never heard of it. Is this the first episode?: IMDb lists the episodes in a different order, but it's unclear why - this is clearly meant to be the first episode, and other sources indicate it was aired first. KaBlam! It's a sketch show! Presented by two animated kids called Henry and June! With a bunch of different animation styles for the featured segments! Its title is very excited!!!
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The parts of this show that aren't the actual shorts themselves are all animated in an intentionally crude style, including the opening sequence which shows a bunch of action-packed scenes like a not-Godzilla attacking a city. A voiceover describes this as the show where cartoons and comics collide. The Henry and June between-shorts segments play into this, being set on the pages of a giant comic book that they can interact with.
In the first Henry and June segment, the two kids - Henry the green-haired boy and June the blue-haired girl - explain that KaBlam is better than an actual comic book, since it can't give you a paper cut and the hosts turn the pages for you. Throughout all this there are a lot of visual gags, and I especially like the ones that play with the comic book setting - for instance, when Henry is saying that you can just relax while they do the work for you, he's demonstrating by lying in a hammock that's tied to the gutters between panels to hold it up.
June tells you to prepare your eyes, as she suddenly gains several more eyes; your ears, as her ears grow to massive size; and your bladder, as Henry approaches clearly having just been to the toilet. They introduce the first show as Sniz & Fondue, and then Henry goes to turn the page for us and... gets a paper cut. Hehe.
So, Sniz & Fondue. They are anthropomorphic cartoon animals of the same species, distinguished by Sniz having green punk hair and being really short, and Fondue wearing a blue outfit including a chef's hat, but their species is not obvious - my initial assumption was cat, but according to the internet they are ferrets. To be honest, they are not drawn in a style that would lend itself to realistic depictions of animals.
The Sniz & Fondue short in this episode is called "A Toxic Tail". It opens on an establishing shot of a house with four mailboxes outside, neatly establishing how many people live here, and the house is currently bouncing up and down. Inside we see that this is because Sniz is bouncing on the bed of Fondue, who is berating him and telling him to get out of his room. It's not obvious how old these characters are - they seem to act like children, and Fondue's room is full of toys and posters, but if they're kids then there aren't any adults around in the house. (I have nothing against adults with toys and posters. If I had no self-restraint my room would look similar. I am just trying to work out what the cartoon makers were going for.)
Fondue says it's the billionth time he has had to ask Sniz to leave his room, and Sniz, holding a notebook, says it's actually the billion and third time. He says that's how many times he's been asked to "vacate your domicile", although Sniz doesn't seem to talk like that the rest of the time so I think the gag here is him attempting to sound intellectual while giving an obviously absurd response. Not a bad joke, but probably not the first impression you want to give me of your character if that's not going to be their usual personality.
So Fondue says he'll go and trash Sniz's room in revenge, and goes in there to find it already looks as though a wrecking ball hit it. There are splats all over the walls. There are cracks in the bed. A vinyl record is smashed on the floor, but that doesn't matter because the wire leading from the record player to the plug socket is torn off anyway.
A pissed-off Fondue walks downstairs and into the kitchen, ranting. There are two other characters sitting in there, one female and one male, only their clothes and hair distinguishing them from the other two. Fondue, saying he'll find a way to keep Sniz out of his room, heads out of the front door and slams it, and the two characters remaining in the kitchen reiterate the same joke from before, the girl saying he's said that a billion times and the guy correcting her to a billion and three.
Fondue goes into a pet shop called "Darwin's Den" asking a moustached shopkeeper of indeterminate species for an attack dog, one that would bite the legs off an intruder. There are a variety of weird-looking animals in glass tanks around the walls. I think one of them is meant to be a baboon with its butt on its face!
The shopkeeper denies Fondue's request, saying he only sells rare and illegal animals. It's nice to know where someone stands on this sort of thing. He shows Fondue his most recent acquisition, a "Madagascar scorpion" which he says is the deadliest arachnid in the world. Unsurprisingly, in real life it doesn't appear that there is any such species, and it looks to me like the deadliest scorpions live in North Africa and the Middle East. He says that you only have to get stung once and then "Oh, baby, will you die!" No sign of the censors around this show, then.
Fondue buys it, the shopkeeper reminding him not to tell anyone where he got it, and on the way back to the house Fondue monologues about how Sniz will never come into his room again. He gets to his room to find Sniz tucked into the bed, with a drink and a plate of cookies. Fondue is concerned to know whether Sniz is wearing shoes in his bed because "I just changed the sheets last month" - an odd joke to make considering the episode has tried to make out Fondue to be the neat one and Sniz to be the untidy one so far. Anyway, Fondue tries to scare Sniz with the scorpion, but Sniz points out that the scorpion can't hurt him from inside the tank, and Fondue clearly notices the unspoken flaw in his plan - he can't scare off Sniz with the scorpion in the tank, but he can't let the scorpion out of the tank without endangering everyone.
Sniz congratulates Fondue on his effort, and slaps him on the back - and the tank slips from his hands and smashes on the ground! The scorpion starts scuttling around and Sniz jumps into Fondue's arms in fright. Fondue seems to have less of a problem with Sniz when the situation gets serious.
Cut to the kitchen, where the other two ferrets have clearly just been told about the scorpion, as they're standing on the table and the girl says "One sting and it kills?!" We pull back to see that Sniz and Fondue have coated their feet in balls of tape as protection, which is interesting because the colouring of their usual outfits makes it look like no part of their skin below the hands is exposed anyway, with their shoes indistinguishable from their trousers and extending up to the bottom of their torsos, which are shaped like they're wearing some sort of smock.
The girl berates Fondue for getting the scorpion, and then it comes into the room and comes far too close to Sniz before leaving again. Sniz wants to find weapons and crush it, but Fondue complains, saying he paid $39.99 for it - all three of the other characters simultaneously respond "You got ripped off." which was a nice little joke I liked. Out of not wanting to die, Fondue comes around to their point of view, and they all pick up household items as weapons and start looking. In the process, the girl and other guy happen to get named as Bianca and Snuppa.
Sniz and Snuppa go in the bathroom and when Sniz looks in the bath he screams out loud, but it's just because there's soap scum in it. Now, this cartoon hasn't been entirely consistent about who is clean and who is dirty as I've said, but I guess it is the "soap" that is scaring him here rather than the fact that the bath is messy.
Meanwhile in the living room, Bianca pokes around under the sofa with a broom while Fondue is ready with a hammer for whatever comes out. She slides something out and he immediately starts smashing before Bianca points out it's the action figure that Fondue had lost. Apparently a "Fluke Skyrunner" figure. What's that from? Space Wars?
Sniz and Snuppa run in and point out what neither of the other two can see - the scorpion is on Fondue's back! After a heart-poundingly tense moment, Sniz uses the tennis racket he's holding to carefully... launch the scorpion out of the window. It lands in a sandbox that a little girl is playing in and she immediately smashes it to pieces with her spade. ...Well then.
We come full circle to the shot of the house jumping up and down again, but inside, next to Sniz jumping on Fondue's bed, Fondue has set up short rope barriers like you'd see where people queue outside a nice restaurant. A buzzer goes off, and Sniz jumps down, "queues" again, and pays Fondue for another go!
Fondue: If you can't beat 'em, charge 'em!
Back to Henry and June. Henry was scared of the scorpion in that cartoon and is glad it's over, so June asks him how scared he is of the black widow spider that's behind him, as a giant spider looms in the background. Henry obviously thinks she's trying to trick him and explains to us that she always tries to one-up the previous cartoon. The spider webs him to a comic panel and prepares to bite, Henry screaming out for help, while June ignores him and introduces the next cartoon, unfortunately in the process using a word that's a slur for people with mental disabilities over here in the UK. I wonder if this was aired here?
The show she presents is Action League Now!, which started out as a recurring segment on live-action sketch show All That. It's equally at home in both cases - the characters are portrayed using action figures in stop-motion, switching to live action for anything where it's easier to portray by physically tossing an action figure across the screen or doing something else to it than trying to create the action frame-by-frame.
So for example, in the first scene, the chief has the superheroes cleaning his car for him. They're on an actual front lawn, the characters therefore dwarfed by the houses - is this a world where action figures live alongside humans? The car is a toy remote-controlled one too. The actual wiping down of the car is shown using stop motion, but when some of the characters get a hosepipe and turn it on, the figures are just static next to the hosepipe while it actually physically sprays water.
The gag is that they get annoyed at the chief's orders and spray it at him, and, just being an action figure, the power of the water sweeps him into the road and he gets immediately run over by a (human-scaled and real) black car, plastic limbs coming right off. The superheroes don't even acknowledge this, but they do notice that the car's driver is letting litter loose out of the car windows. So, to pursue the litterbug, they get in the chief's car and chase after the other car, also rolling right over the injured chief themselves in the process!
Then Action League Now! gets its own opening sequence that introduces the characters. "The Flesh" is a big muscly guy with no clothes on, his Ken doll crotch fully exposed. The show is definitely trying to have as much fun as possible with the fact that action figures let them show a naked guy on a kids' show. "Thunder Girl", who wears a very Wonder Woman-like outfit, apparently "flies like thunder". "Stinky Diver" is a sort of G.I. Joe-looking soldier in a diving outfit who, from the looks of it, is always stinky due to a tendency to get flushed down the toilet, presumably by a child taking playtime too far, assuming these toys have an owner. And "Meltman" is the result of someone melting an action figure using the old magnifying glass trick, and thus doesn't look like much of anything any more. And then it gives this particular instalment a title, "Road to Ruin".
The narration quickly reveals that the culprit dumping garbage out of his car is the mayor, apparently just because he can. It says that only an "elite fighting force" can defeat him - cut to the Action League in the other car, singing Row, Row, Row Your Boat together, as a humorous contrast. They spot the mayor's car and chase him, dodging rubbish all the way, until a wrapper covers their windscreen and they veer off the road, swerving around and crashing into things. All of their car driving is portrayed in live action, the remote-controlled car clearly being used as one and actually running into all these objects. The whole thing looks hilariously low-budget as a result, but it's obviously intentional.
Just as they manage to ditch the paper, they drive straight off a cliff. As they are falling, Thunder Girl just uses her power of flight to escape the falling car and ditch everyone else!
Thunder Girl: Uhh, this is my stop. Thunder Girl, away!
Flesh: I hate it when she does that.
Thunder Girl catches up to the mayor's car, flying alongside it and threatening him, but then realises she's about to crash into a van coming the other way. Then there's a just as over-the-top "how will they get out of this one"-type cliffhanger announcement going into the ad break, which also gives us a quick preview of which other cartoons are going to be in this episode. But we'll get to those when they come.
Coming out of a recap, the narrator asks whether Thunder Girl will get out of the way in time, only to immediately tell us she won't, as she gets thrown in the air by the van. Presumably she has some sort of super strength too because she says that didn't hurt, before the remote control car lands on her - how the geography of this works I have no idea. Did the mayor's car have time to drive downhill and then back around for Thunder Girl to now be at the bottom of the same cliff from before? Perhaps we are not supposed to think about it as hard as that.
With all the team back in the little car, the narration tells us that the heroes use their tracking skills to find the villain, with this turning out to mean playing I Spy where "L" is for "litterbug". The mayor challenges the heroes to a game of chicken and the two cars start racing towards each other. You may be wondering how the heroes expect a little remote-control car to stand a chance against a full-sized one. Well, it doesn't, and it gets run over. But then the mayor's car goes over a cliff he hadn't seen and explodes into flames. All portrayed with a real car, of course - that one shot must have spent a chunk of this show's budget.
The heroes, none of them showing any sign of injury from the collision, look down over the cliff and make fire-related jokes about the evil mayor, and that's where this segment ends! The show switches back to Henry and June for Henry to explain that Action League Now was animated using "Chuckimation", i.e. the technique of throwing an action figure past the camera and then having a car run it over. He contrasts it with traditional animation, portrayed as a crowd of animators chained to their desks and being whipped as they draw cels. How would you feel being one of the animators that had to draw that, then?
The show they introduce next, Life with Loopy, also has an interesting animation style. It's mostly stop motion but the faces of the characters appear to be 2D animation, and there's an extra twist to the style that I'll describe momentarily when we reach it.
The opening for the segment shows a girl with green hair in a pink dress dancing around, so we can assume she is the titular Loopy, and then there is a title card for the episode, "Hi-Fi Frankenstein". A ginger-haired boy introduces himself as Larry, and Loopy is his sister. He's holding a boombox and shows us a cassette tape of a band called Bugsteak, and this is where that other twist comes in - whenever there's a close-up of someone's hand holding or operating something, it switches to live action, with someone's actual hand wearing a glove that matches the colour of the character model. It's a neat solution to something that must be a tricky problem in stop motion.
He says that some people don't understand his love of this band and starts telling us what happened a week ago as an example, although we're going to stay back last week for the rest of this segment and it wanders quite far away from his point, so I don't think he's a very good storyteller.
So, last week then, Loopy bursts into Larry's bedroom wearing one of those stereotypical tall Pacific island tribal masks and holding two shaker instrument things with pom-pom-haired doll heads on them, wanting to play "cannibal cheerleaders". I mean, she is just a kid, but the writers should know better. But Larry ignores her as he dances around and sings along to his music, which is punk-sounding and the vocalist is doing an appropriate English accent - although I don't think the writer was picturing that accent, because the lyrics are all very American. "I'm a radical dude and you're a goober"?
Loopy walks out of the room, and, in the passageway, encounters her typical cartoon mother, who wears earrings and what look like fuzzy slippers. Loopy complains about getting called a goober, so her mother tells her her brother's going through a phase and that she should make a new friend. Loopy says "OK! I will!" and marches off into what must be her room, and flickering lights start coming through the crack. As if we hadn't got the implication of what's going on here from the title and from the conversation itself, narrator Larry interjects to tell us that Loopy literally made a new friend.
So we next see the family (also including: typical dad in pinstripes) being introduced to Loopy's new friend, Frank, who is more of a robot than a Frankenstein's monster, with a record player for a body, record still in place! Also, since Frank is meant to be her replacement for Larry, he is clearly based on him, including the spiky red hair.
Frank: It is a great honour for a mere machine such as I to be accepted by clearly superior humanoids.
Wow that totally sounds like what a robot designed to be your friend would say. Not ominous at all. Loopy's dad certainly seems to like Frank and offers him a doughnut, a real hand being once again used for this purpose - all Frank does is compliment the father before the scene ends, so we don't get to see if he's actually capable of eating it.
Next, out in the garden, Loopy is in her cannibal get-up again and has Frank tied up, as voiceover Larry explains that Loopy just kept playing with Frank for the next few days, and Larry was starting to get suspicious about him. And then Frank sneaks up on Larry out of nowhere and starts talking about taking over the world and enslaving humanity and laughing about it, and Larry just scratches his chin as if he's mildly suspicious. OK, so it wasn't meant to be subtle then...
Larry finds out that his mother's cooking implements have started to go missing, and, suspicious, goes down into the basement, where Loopy pulls him behind the boxes she's hiding behind, indicating what she's hiding from. Frank has gathered the kitchen appliances and apparently added googly eyes to each of them, and is giving them a speech about how he has only been tolerating Loopy's games to learn more about humans in order to defeat them. He starts telling various tools which parts of the world they will now rule, and they actually seem to be reacting by shuffling about, so I guess he has done more than just add eyes!
Larry says he never liked Frank anyway, but Loopy is sad because she did. Larry reassures her that she doesn't need to make a friend because he's still her friend, and then they decide to confront the machines. Larry jumps out and holds up a wad of papers labelled "30-Day Guarantee" and threatens to send all of the cooking implements back to their manufacturers. Frank tries to argue that all those warranties are expired, but he is distracted enough by this argument for Loopy to grab him from behind and disconnect his wires. Then she shoves the Bugsteak tape in his mouth, which I guess was made from a cassette player, and Larry and Loopy and all the kitchen devices start dancing around to it! They are gonna try and change those devices back to normal, right? Or are we just in a world where it's normal for them to act like that?
That short ends and we now get to see the most surreal Henry and June segment of the episode, where they stuff themselves with massive watermelon slices and then start shooting seeds out of their mouths like machine guns. It's my favourite part.
It turns out all that was just to spell out the name of the next cartoon in seeds. It's "Prometheus and Bob". This one is pure stop-motion and, as the narration explains, the conceit is that these are recordings made hundreds of thousands of years ago by a tall purple alien (Prometheus) using a remote-controlled camera as he attempts to teach a loinclothed caveman (Bob). This opening narration and the title cards are the only parts with comprehensible dialogue - the alien speaks in some alien language and the caveman just grunts.
There are two short segments in the episode and the first one is "Art". Prometheus has set up a slab as a canvas and has some paints and brushes, and is trying to show an uninterested Bob the concept of art as he paints an animal. Prometheus hands Bob the brush and he just starts stabbing the animal with the wrong end. Is he trying to kill the animal, or is he just randomly bashing one thing against another? We will never know what he thinks.
Whenever it jumps to a later clip there is a fuzzy screen effect as if that's what unrecorded sections of the tape look like on this alien camera, and Prometheus points a remote control at the screen to trigger this effect. Now Bob is slathering some paint on the slab with no obvious goal. A monkey approaches and drinks some paint, so Bob picks it up and squeezes it in the direction of the slab, squirting out the paint from its mouth and making a pink mess. Well, at least he directed it right!
Another skip, and Bob is drawing lines on the slab erratically, while in the background the monkey is painting little shapes on Prometheus's spaceship. Bob's arms are swinging so wildly that he ends up punching Prometheus and knocking him out - guiltily, the caveman picks up the remote control and turns the camera off himself! Wow, that must be a simple thing to operate! So in the next clip Bob is still operating it and Prometheus is still knocked out, until the monkey dumps some paint on his face, making the alien angry and the caveman laugh. Another skip, and Prometheus grabs the remote back from Bob and dumps paint on his face in revenge. So Bob presses his own face into the canvas, making a "painting" of it! And it almost looks like a face, too. He laughs again, and the alien is exasperated.
One last little gag: the monkey takes hold of the camera and points it at another slab, where the monkey has made a perfect portrait of itself and the other two characters! Well, someone was learning from all this at least! Bob throws something at the camera and that segment ends.
The other segment is "Bowling". Prometheus has set up a lane and six skittles. For some reason, the painting doesn't seem too absurd to me, but the idea that an alien race would have invented the exact same sport of bowling that we have on Earth seems like a step too far. Unless, of course, we only know of it because Prometheus's species taught it to our ancestors. Bob bowls the ball and knocks down all the skittles in demonstration. Amusingly, Prometheus has the monkey acting as the machine, as it resets the skittles itself.
Prometheus picks up another ball and hands it to Bob, who walks over to the skittles and starts bashing them with the ball. Cut to a later clip and everything is set up again but the monkey refuses to get out of the way of the lane, and Bob just starts tossing the ball around in boredom and ends up hitting the camera with it. I guess the camera survived that because we still go to another clip!
This time the monkey sneakily grabs a curved bone from a nearby animal skeleton, so even though Bob finally bowls the ball as intended, the monkey puts the bone in the way which launches the ball right back and would have made it hit Bob's head, but he ducks in time. In another clip, Prometheus tries to keep the monkey at bay with a whip(!), but Bob has somehow got his tongue stuck in the bowling ball, and, in his efforts to remove it, he ends up falling onto Prometheus! One last clip and Prometheus is trying to get the monkey to help remove the ball from Bob's tongue - once the monkey helps, it comes off, flies up, and hits some rocks on a nearby cliff, causing an avalanche which they then all have to flee. And that's all from Prometheus and Bob!
One final Henry and June segment now, where they recite the "pledge of Blam-legiance". To do so, they each put their head over their heart, which involves detaching it. They are parodying something which would be familiar to every American child watching but still feels weird and dystopian to me. The pledge just replaces most of the words of the original with absurd soundalikes like "the excited snakes of America", with visual gags galore. The pair zoom off on jetpacks right out of the comic book, which closes and shows us the back cover, finally showing us the episode's title, "Your Real Best Friend". I don't know whether the episode title always appears right at the end like this, but it would be in keeping with the absurdity of the rest of the show!
So, overall, did I like the show? I'd say yes. I really appreciated the creative mix of animation styles and there were plenty of funny moments. I wouldn't say any of the individual segments stood out as exceptional - a full half hour of any one of them would have probably needed a bit more going on to be as enjoyable - but in this compressed format each show gets to do its thing without any filler and then move on, which I feel enhances them all.