(fwd) "Katastrophe": 'cartoony' KATS. (fwd)

From: Andy Hill <chance_at_unix.infoserve.net>
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 1995 11:28:16 -0700 (PDT)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 1995 11:24:11 -0700
From: Andy Hill <chance_at_unix.infoserve.net>
To: chance_at_unix.infoserve.net
Subject: (fwd) "Katastrophe": 'cartoony' KATS.

Newsgroups: alt.tv.swatkats
Subject: "Katastrophe": 'cartoony' KATS.
Date: 6 Jul 1995 14:10:43 GMT

     I just caught "Katastrophe" on the new Turner Home Video SwatKats
tape, and noticed something strange about the art.

     In most of the Kats eps, the animation steers completely clear of
the "squash and stretch" aspects of animating, usually keeping the 'Kat
guys and their interactions with solid objects fairly "realistic", as
though they were actual beings. Check out "Katastrophe"; there are a few
scenes where you have to actually stop and rewind them to "see what
happened" on 'pause' -- the movements of the characters in a couple of
spots seemed more at home on "Animaniacs". This was a Mook episode, but
for some strange reason, in the scene where the 'Kats have to escape the
cannery before the bomb goes off, check out Razor's "double take" as he
both ducks and pushes Callie out of harms way. Later, in the same setup,
look at Feral's face as he reacts to the impending explosion. Razor
actually stretches in a really cartoony fashion to about half again his
height, has a really cartoony look of "oh sh**", and then lunges
forward, and Feral -- well, he "looks like he hasn't hit the litterbox in
a week"!

     This is one of the "team-up" episodes with more than one of the
familiar villains; DarkKat, Dr.Viper and the Metallikats. It's a fair
episode, but because the bad-guy lines are spread among so many villains,
you don't get the same kind of good guy/bad guy taunting that you do in a
lot of the single adversary ones. Mac and Molly's dialogue is always
fun, but here it just kind of lays there, and the "tension" you'd expect
between such a disparate collection of ne'er-do-wells doesn't really
happen save for some scenes at the outset, and at the conclusion. There
are also some _very_ obvious deaths in this one; at the beginning when
two donut snarfing security types get wolfed by Viper's mushroom-dude,
and later when some of the Creeplings became appetizers. Gotta hand it
to Dr. Viper, he seems to create the appetite first, and the creature
around it.

     This ep has a great aspect I don't think we've seen in any of the
other eps -- Feral actually openly assists the guys without any of his
Enforcers, and also out of uniform (he's even back-to-back with Razor in
one scene, looking out for each other in room full of bad-guys). The
TurboKat gets wasted, unfortunately, but in a great scene at the end,
Manx and Feral more or less agree to lend the 'Kats another jet until the
city can replace the TurboKat (another fairly good argument, IMO, to
support the idea that Feral actually _knows_ the Kat guys are ex-fighter
jocks Jake and Chance).

(Canadians, I strongly suggest getting to the vid-store before the wknd --
 most Mega/Rogers stores only bought one copy of each of the three vids,
 and rent them out for a week at a time.)
Received on Thu Jul 06 1995 - 14:43:56 PDT

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