Re: SWAT Kats meet the Flintstones

From: Felix Lee <flee_at_cse.psu.edu>
Date: Tue, 13 Jun 1995 00:56:12 -0400

> Why doesn't it make sense to put human cartoons in the Kat universe?
> We put kat cartoons in the human universe...

because there's no precedent. it would be as odd as if 90% of the
cartoons in our world had naked mole-rats as the main characters.

now if the Kats kept primates as pets or something, then you might see
"human" toons in the Kat world, but there's a good chance that the
Kat-human-toons would have tails, fur, etc.

like, if The Little Mermaid were in the Kat universe, Ariel would be
half-kat instead of half-human.

hmm, well, maybe you could explain it away with enough backstory.

say that animation in its earliest forms was brought to the height of
popularity by a certain Walt de Cegny, and one of his early creations
was an irascible naked mole-rat named Ronald. (they were doing their
usual flour-sack drawing exercises one day, then someone added teeth
and nostrils to one of the sacks, Walt said it looked just like a
naked mole-rat, and the rest is history.)

Ronald the naked mole-rat eventually got relatives, and then a whole
naked-mole-rat world was built around him. (with a few suricates
thrown in for variety.)

however, with the rapid advances in computer technology in the '40s
and '50s (see The Teraflop Terror: a history of the US/Soviet
computation competition), anyone in their living room could capture an
image of, say, Marilyn Monroe as she read the evening news, and
digitally interpolate her into any $2 interactive story. so the
hand-drawn animation industry essentially collapsed.

de Cegny's studio survived though, partly because de Cegny was by then
a multinational corporation (ie, they owned Beatrice). and in the
dark ages of the '60s and '70s, the naked mole-rat cartoons were
recycled as children's programming. but eventually the kids grew up
(an unfortunate habit they have), and in the '80s and '90s started
reviving serious adult interest in this recherche art form. and as
adults, they realized that the naked mole-rats had a depth and
artistry to them unmatched by, umm, by 1 billion couch muffins
fiddling with their laseremotes.

by this time, the de Cegny corporation held patents for all the
algorithms involved in producing simulated-hand-drawn animation. so
the animation renaissance in the late '90s was corporation-driven and
consisted almost entirely of naked-mole-rat spinoffs. and suricates.

or something like that.

urg. I think the main reason I'm writing this drivel is because my
boyfriend is 3000 km away.

(bonus points for anyone who knows what a suricate is :)
--

Received on Tue Jun 13 1995 - 01:09:03 PDT