People seem to understand the appeal I find in nineteen fifties drive-in movies. It's all about the camp aspect. The same people, however, tend to be miffed about my obsession with nineteen seventies television animation. How can I stand it? How can I sit through multiple episodes of this shit? Don't I know it's horrible? It's bad, of course, but the camp aspect is entertaining as hell. Getting drunk along with it helps too. This 1972 ditty features a very unlikely cross over. Wonder Woman meets The Brady Kids. It just don't get any worse, folks.
In the actual ancient Olympics, of course, everybody competed naked.
Posted by: Andrew | May 31, 2009 at 11:26 AM
I love Wonder Woman in her original costume! Thanks for the clip.
Posted by: Ivy | May 31, 2009 at 11:31 AM
A 382 decibel sound pressure would cause the kid's heads to pop like toy balloons.
Posted by: K. | May 31, 2009 at 12:58 PM
why does her changing clothes and running merit laughter?
Posted by: trav | May 31, 2009 at 02:16 PM
That's an interesting point. I certainly can't appreciate 1970s animation, even on a camp level. I wonder if it's because I was a kid in the 70s (even then I couldn't stand it; I'd wait for the Warner Brothers reruns to come on). I enjoy watching Lawrence Welk reruns for their sheer otherworldly bizarreness, and most of my friends can appreciate that too, but I've found that my parents and people their age, who remember it from their childhood, can't appreciate it on any level. Perhaps that's a similar effect.
Posted by: Kim Scarborough | May 31, 2009 at 03:45 PM
I think TV animation of this period gets a bad rap. Of course it wasn't on par with, say, a Disney cartoon, or even Warner Brothers, but the creators of these TV shows simply didn't have the resources to put cartoons out on that level. They did what they could with the resources they had, and I applaud the creators for many of those projects. Sure there was a lot of crap, but often that was due to poor writing or concepts as often as the animation.
I salute you, TV animation, bravo!
Posted by: phillyradiogeek | May 31, 2009 at 06:58 PM
...true philly, but sometimes things were just done to capitalize on an existing popular product, like the brady bunch here. i'm sure the people that actually worked on this weren't evil, and the kids probably enjoyed getting the voice work, and people were employed,etc- but the initial reason to greenlight and give a mediocre budget to this toon...and the idea itself is rather still born and souless, so regardless of honest people working on it, the pointlessness of the venture shows through every frame.
Posted by: travis | May 31, 2009 at 09:36 PM
A 382 decibel sound pressure would cause the kid's heads to pop like toy balloons
But still less painful than listening to The Brady Kids sing "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo."
Posted by: Andrew | May 31, 2009 at 09:50 PM
The laugh track seems to kick in at rather bizarre times and for no apparent reason. Then, there was the one joke where it should have kicked in (Bobby, saying the clichéd "It's all Greek to me") and there was nothing. I remember watching the Brady Kids in the 70's and even as a 7 year old thinking that this made no sense to me. I don't think I'll need to see the Brady Kids anytime soon.
Posted by: Rick Garcia | June 01, 2009 at 12:07 AM
Kim makes a good point. Camp appreciation seemed to be limited to situations in which the intended audience is someone else, preferably someone or some demographic from another time and/or place. In this sense, the really fascinating thing in the camp situation is the imagined "innocent gaze" of the intended audience----the person or group who supposedly enjoyed or appreciated this. Who liked this? Who took this seriously? Who was really, directly moved by this (not in a way mediated by ironic distance)? This seems to be peculiar manifestation of 20th Century culture in which the speedup of technology and cultural production segments people much more along generational than geographical lines (at least with the industrialized West). The pop ephemera of earlier generations can truly feel haunted by the entire worldview that has passed so decisively out of existence. And always it seems "simpler" and more "innocent" or "pure" than our own. As another child of the 70's, I have to admit that retro 70's camp crazes embraced by 90's/00's kids left me equally cold. Of course we did the same thing in regards to the 50's (American Graffiti, Happy Days, Sha Na Na, etc.) But the idea that the 70's were more "innocent"! Only people who grew up after the big Reagan sleep could imagine a sunny-stupid 70's like the one depicted on "That 70's Show"---without Viet Nam, Watergate, Stagflation, the OPEC crisis, busing, urban collapse, etc. My appreciation of the 70's is more gritty nostalgia (a completely different kind of illusion). I've become totally fascinated in recent years by films like "The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3", "Panic in Needle Park", "The French Connection", "Dog Day Afternoon", etc. Heck, even episodes of "Barney Miller" which manage to convey the despair, malaise, and sheer dirty drabness of the NYC that I remember as a kid. But of course this is an aestheticization as well----and a kind of fascination with a gaze posited as somehow more innocent (this time my own). It's all fantasy life in the end and it enriches our contemporary drabness. But I must say I find commodified camp sensibility depressing and, how should I put it, meta-drab. Remember the first time Andy Kaufmann made us see Elvis as a kitsch-corpse? Remember how shocking and funny it was (and sad as well) to finally see him as he really had become? But Elvis as camp-kitsch commodity passed into the keeping of Hallmark greeting cards at least 20 years ago. And so it goes.
Posted by: Fatherflot | June 01, 2009 at 12:19 AM
This is the second such cartoon on here.
And again, I watched the whole thing!
Why??? What is the compulsion?
When I saw these as a kid, they were already well dated- I guess I never understood the weird, cold disconnect-affect that they had on me then.
Its like they have taken the anaesthesia of screen-based media and distilled it.
Posted by: Jrld | June 01, 2009 at 03:12 AM
Every line in this cartoon is f*cking brilliant, absurd genius. I always favored the lack of motion/action in this style of animation. I too am a 70's kid and this seems to fit right in with the rest of the creepiness Saturday Morning had to offer. I dunno, maybe everything's absurd when your 12. Thanks for the post.
Posted by: Louisville Dan | June 01, 2009 at 04:00 PM
In you're own words is the obvious answer to those people..."It's all about the camp aspect".Some don't appreciate ALL camp the way we do.Some seem to only tolerate camp to a certain degree.And getting drunk along the way helps,Too!
Posted by: texas scott | June 02, 2009 at 01:42 PM
I couldn't understand the objection until the bird showed up and started to sing. It was straight downhill from there.
Posted by: Todd | June 06, 2009 at 08:19 AM