Adult Swim: Destroying Television, Toon by Toon - NYTimes

rndmprsn

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Sun Mar-13-05 11:11 AM
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Adult Swim: Destroying Television, Toon by Toon - NYTimes

Edited on Sun Mar-13-05 11:17 AM by rndmprsn

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/arts/television/13itzk.html?8hpib

i watch adult swim religiously...aqua teen and family guy are prolly my al time fave cartoons right now, any other adult swim fans on DU?

-snip-

AT 11 o'clock each night, after the Powerpuff Girls have been put to bed and Scooby-Doo has curled up in a corner, the Cartoon Network becomes a strange place. From this hour until the early morning, a red-eyed viewer will not see combative cats and mice or rascally rabbits, but rather an anthropomorphic milk shake that argues with space aliens, a high-tech underwater lab where no one can find the fuse box, and a small-town mayor who protects his city's streets by littering them with bear traps.

This is the unconventional, unpredictable sensibility of "Adult Swim," the channel's late-night programming block aimed at animation fans who are grown-ups in age only. Since its premiere in 2000, "Adult Swim" has struck numerous perplexed channel-surfers as unintelligible madness, yet there is a consistent, if counterintuitive, method to the shows that constitute it: by turning its airwaves over to creative teams with no background in cartoons, it has repeatedly yielded programs that push the boundaries of what animation can do.

Seth Green, who played Scott Evil in the "Austin Powers" movies and is the newest initiate of the "Adult Swim" fraternity, is typical of the lineup's producers as well as its audience members: he is young, male and incurably addicted to all forms of media. His stop-motion, animated series, "Robot Chicken," (which had its premiere on Feb. 20) uses action figures to satirize retro childhood idols like the Smurfs and G. I. Joe, alongside more contemporary targets like the reality show "Blind Date" and the BBC sitcom "The Office." As inventive and willfully arbitrary as "Robot Chicken" is, Mr. Green says that those same qualities would make the program a tough fit on almost any other network. " 'Adult Swim' is one of the few places that is allowing people to take chances in any medium, not just cartoons," he said. "Their argument is, 'You wouldn't get this on any other channel, but we'll do it.' "

"I've always wanted to destroy television," said Mike Lazzo, Cartoon Network's senior vice president for programming and production, and the arbiter of all that is "Adult Swim." A 20-year veteran of Turner Broadcasting (who started in that company's shipping department), Mr. Lazzo's earliest efforts at dismantling the medium came in the form of Cartoon Network's first original series, "Space Ghost Coast to Coast." When it had its debut in 1994, "Coast to Coast" was a crude talk-show parody that mixed bits of recycled animation from Hanna-Barbera's 60's-era superhero cartoon "Space Ghost," with videotaped interviews of such off-kilter celebrities as Adam West and Willie Nelson. But its producers quickly tired of using Space Ghost to send up routines they had seen on Leno and Letterman. "There was an ongoing debate," Mr. Lazzo said, "over whether or not the character should be used in a more conventional talk-show setting, or whether he was the king of Dada."