Monday, March 10, 2014

Toons You Might've Missed: Garbage Pail Kids (1987)

For years, Topps obtained licenses to produce trading cards based on selected television shows and movies. They don't do that much anymore, as they're only producing baseball, football, & WWE cards for the most part these days.

In 1987, one of their original properties was, in turn, licensed to CBS, which commissioned an independent animation house to adapt the Garbage Pail Kids for television in a lively animated series that never made it to air after all. The reason? Watchdog groups, such as Action For Children's Television, complained about the characters making fun of the disabled, among other things. Eventually, the series did make it to US television (it was produced in part in Canada). I will admit I never saw the show the first time around, and wasn't collecting the cards (aimed at a younger audience), so I spent some time looking at one of the two shorts in this episode, a parody of one of my favorite shows, The Untouchables. "The Unmentionables" shares its title with a classic Bugs Bunny short from several years prior, and is followed by "Heartless Hal":



Rating: B.

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