Saturday Mourning Cartoons

Hulu has resurrected the Warner Brothers and the Warner Sister for the highly anticipated reboot of Animaniacs. The 13-episode first season (of a total of two ordered so far) is now available to binge-watch on Hulu. Not everyone is super thrilled at the manner in which Yakko, Wakko, and Dot return -- evidenced by our own Gregory Lawrence's review, which you can read here -- so we thought we'd take a look at this "legacy-quel" for ourselves.  I was joined by regular Collider contributor Rafael Motamayor for this super-fun episode in which we picked apart the new Animaniacs to bring you the Good, the Bad, and the LOL. Rafael brings a different perspective to the show from both myself and Greg, so you'll have three slightly skewed looks at the reboot thanks to our combined critical powers. You can also check out our own Drew Taylor's interview with the creative minds behind Animaniacs (keep an eye out for it on Collider) and read Rafael's own articles at Rotten Tomatoes, Observer, and here on our own site for m

'Blood of Zeus' creators Charley and Vlas Parlapanides talk about how their reimagined Greek mythology epic made its way to Netflix.

Whether or not you're a child of the 1990s, you can probably appreciate the adorable cuteness of Bobby Generic, the lead character of Bobby's World. It might creep you out a little bit to learn that the Fox Kids' animated series co-creator Howie Mandel wasn't just the voice of dad Howard Generic, but also Bobby as well. (He also voiced Gizmo in the Gremlins movies, so that cutens things up a bit, yeah?) But since we're keeping it creepy, we wanted to revisit the spookiest stories in Bobby's World lore for this special Halloween episode of the podcast. Just how scary did the Minnesota-Nice family get, anyway? Over the course of the Emmy-nominated animated series' seven-season run to syndication, Bobby's World included a couple of Halloween-themed episodes. For this episode of the podcast, we revisited the Season 1 episode "The Night of the Living Pumpkin" and the Season 2 episode "Nightmare on Bobby's Street." I can absolutely recommend revisiting Bobby's World for yourself, especially these holiday-themed ep

October means it's time for spooky toons! We've covered our fair share of supposedly scary (but usually just silly) cartoons on the podcast over the years, but somehow we missed out on an all-time classic: The 90s animated series The Addams Family! This ooky, kooky, mysterious, and spooky series came at a time when interest in the titular family -- Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, and Puglsey, with Uncle Fester, Lurch, Thing, Cousin It, and Grandmama -- was running high. The cartoon was released in between the live-action The Addams Family movie and its sequel, Addams Family Values. And everything old is new again as a pair of new animated movies based on the title family is here again, courtesy of MGM. We'll get around to the 2019 feature film at some point (maybe when the sequel arrives next year), but for now, it's back to the 90s to see how The Addams Family holds up.

Looking for some outstanding animated action the whole family can love? Check out Season 3 of the Emmy-winning series The Last Kids on Earth, which is now streaming on Netflix. The story of Max Brallier's bestselling book series comes to life with action-packed animation from Atomic Cartoons and a stellar voice cast led by Nick Wolfhard as the main character, 13-year-old Jack Sullivan; be sure to read our recent chat with Wolfhard here. stars Garland Whitt (Quint Baker), Montse Hernandez (June Del Toro), and Charles Demers (Dirk Savage) round out the core cast, complemented by guest stars Catherine O’Hara, Mark Hamill, Rosario Dawson, Bruce Campbell, and more. It's an out-of-this-world animated series you don't want to miss! With the launch of Season 3, which adapts Book 3 of Brallier's series dubbed "The Nightmare King", I had a chance to chat with Brallier and showrunner / executive producer Scott Peterson about all things Last Kids. The duo reflected on the year so far, their pleasantly surprising Emmy wi

Season 3 of the Emmy-winning series The Last Kids on Earth, with action-packed animation from Atomic Cartoons, is now streaming on Netflix. It hails from bestselling author Max Brallier and showrunner Scott Peterson, and continues the adventures of Jack & Co. as the kids attempt to survive a monstrous post-apocalypse. The new season adapts Brallier's Book #3, "The Nightmare King," and uses clever storytelling techniques to explore the dreamscape nestled inside the kids' minds as the narrative unfolds. It's definitely worth a watch so put it on your list now at the very least! With the arrival of the new season of Last Kids, I had a chance to chat with star Nick Wolfhard about the events of "The Nightmare King" and where Jack's head is at this season. Jack and the kids will have to face terrors both real and imagined, but they'll also have to deal with internal conflicts within their friend group. It's not all doom and gloom though! Above all else, The Last Kids on Earth is a super-fun ride into the post-

The bittersweet news is that Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts has come to a close after only 30 episodes released over less than a calendar year. But what a year. Kipo, one of the best new animated series in recent years, is definitely a silver lining in 2020 and will be a memory I chose to revisit more often than, well, pretty much everything else from this year. The sweet part is that all of those episodes are still available to stream on Netflix and will be fore the foreseeable future. Who knows, maybe if enough people out there (re)discover the fantastic and progressive Dreamworks Animation story, we might just get more of it. That's what I tried to get co-creators / showrunners Rad Sechrist and Bill Wolkoff to confirm when I chatted with the duo recently. Looking forward to a hopeful future full of possibility was a better topic of conversation than lingering on the show's natural end, which was apparently planned from the very beginning. Equally enjoyable was looking back at the show's brief but meteo

Ben 10 vs. The Universe: The Movie producer Will Patrick talks to the Saturday Mourning Cartoons team about the all-new adventure!  Cartoon Network’s #Ben10 takes on the whole galaxy (literally!) when “Ben 10 vs. The Universe: The Movie” premieres worldwide Saturday, Oct. 10. The TV movie will be available for fans across the globe with the US/Canada airing taking place at 10:00 a.m. ET/PT, only on Cartoon Network. The movie will also be released digitally on Oct. 11 on all major platforms as well as on DVD Oct. 13 by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment. The action-packed TV movie will focus around a blast from Ben’s past returning to do double the damage on Team Tennyson and planet Earth itself, forcing Ben to go interstellar to save the day. Meanwhile, Gwen and Grandpa Max team up to help protect the world in Ben’s absence. But when our boy hero is confused for the villain in space, Ben must figure out a way to get back to Earth to help save it! New episodes of "Ben 10," currently in its fourth season, will

Arriving on DVD and Digital tomorrow, October 6, 2020, and just in time for Halloween, it's Warner Bros. Home Entertainment's Happy Halloween, Scooby-Doo! I had a chance to sit down with writer/director/producer Maxwell Atoms (The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy) to chat about the latest holiday special for Mystery Inc. This flick features guest stars Bill Nye the Science Guy and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark along with the sleuth crew you know and love, but keep an eye out for some special guests along the way. Atoms and I talked about how he came to be on this project, his history with Scooby-Doo and notable voice acting legends Frank Welker and Grey Griffin. Plus, Atoms revealed the unplanned but not-so-surprising connection to his Halloween work on his hit show The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy and this new Halloween special; fans of Atoms' cartoon should spot it pretty quickly. But we also talked about some of the surprising crossover characters from the wider Warner Bros. universe who show u

Today, I'm not just bringing you the latest episode of our long-running animation podcast Saturday Mourning Cartoons, I'm bringing you a very special and personal project. After 6 years and well over 300 episodes, our little animation-fandom podcast has finally made its own original animation in the nightmarish and hilarious IRONFACE. We made this short animated teaser trailer for the ongoing Kickstarter campaign -- of which I'm the manager and community liaison -- as a proof of concept for what the franchise could look like as an animated series. It was a labor of love and a learning process, all of which we talk about in the video above. If you've ever wondered how the animated sausage is made, this is the podcast episode for you! As background on IRONFACE, it all started decades ago when Dan Paul wrote a bunch of scary stories between the ages of 9 and 11. Those stories were steeped in 80s pop culture, brutally violent, darkly comic, and totally innocent, as told through the mind and imagination of a chi

Fifteen years ago, The Boondocks changed the course of modern animation by not only featuring Black characters as the leads, but by being absolutely unapologetic in its content. That boundary-pushing show gained its own following along with a fair share of backlash, all of which is now par for the course for executive producer Carl Jones and producer Brian Ash. They've had celebrities like Oprah and Tyler Perry take issue with (and aim at) The Boondocks, just as they've had Adult Swim axe an episode before it was ever animated and HBO Max fully removing a previously aired episode from their listing. Censorship and button-pushing isn't new to Jones and Ash. Their newest animated series, Sugar and Toys, is cut from the same cloth, and the razor-sharp humor and laugh-out-loud variety sketches cut across all social, cultural, and political divides. It's first and foremost good comedy, but it's also another step in the rise of Black Animation. I had a chance to chat with Jones and Ash about Season 2 of Sugar and

It's back to the park we go in this week's cartoon review with Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous. The new Dreamworks Animation series, now streaming on Netflix, takes a different approach to storytelling for the continuation of the late Michael Crichton's phenomenal franchise, powered by Universal. Rather than focusing on an elite team of adult trainers, scientists, and covert spies, this version makes their characters a little more kid-friendly ... even if the carnivorous dinosaurs and rampaging giants are as dangerous as ever. But how does the new animated series compare to the story we know so far? Tune in to find out! Here's the official synopsis: Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous follows a group of six teenagers chosen for a once-in-a-lifetime experience at a new adventure camp on the opposite side of Isla Nublar. But when dinosaurs wreak havoc across the island, the campers are stranded. Unable to reach the outside world, they’ll need to go from strangers to friends to family if they’re going to survive.

Tonight, a brand new episode of Disney Channel's animated series Big City Greens premieres at 8PM ET/PT, and it's special for a couple of reasons. First, it continues the second season of the Annie and Emmy-nominated series from co-creators and showrunners Chris and Shane Houghton, and second, guest cast members Lorraine Toussaint (Orange Is the New Black) and Colton Dunn (Superstore) return as Rashida and Russell Remington, with Danny Trejo (Machete) back as Vasquez. But even more importantly, this episodes gives one of the cast members a chance to show off their writing skills! If you're new to Big City Greens, the series follows the offbeat adventures of 10-year-old Cricket Green, whose natural curiosity and enthusiasm lead him and his family – older sister Tilly, father Bill and Gramma Alice – on epic journeys and into the hearts of his new neighbors. In the new episode's first segment tonight, titled "Present Tense," Cricket struggles to get the best birthday present for his best friend, Remy. Marieve

If you want to see a bunch of powerful comic book superheroes team up to fend off extraterrestrial threats to our home planet, there's no better place to look than Marvel's Avengers Defenders of the Earth! This 1986 animated series from King Features, with development by Marvel and production from a trio of overseas studios including Toei Animation, united the bigger-than-life heroes of King Features Syndicate. Flash Gordon, Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, and Lothar joined forces to defend Earth (hence the name) from the villainous intents of Ming the Merciless. Helping to fight back for the fate of their planet were the second generation of heroes, including Rick Gordon, Jedda Walker, the adopted son Kshin and his space-alien pet Zuffy, and Lothar "L.J." Junior. While these characters might not be the first that come to mind when thinking about comic book superheroes, they're definitely classics for a reason. We're coming up on their 100th anniversary -- a pretty monumental task for any character, really -

Glitch Techs Season 2 arrived on Netflix just last week. This new batch of 10 half-hour episodes continues the adventures of glitch-hunters Miko and Five and their all-star team of Hinobi technicians. New relationships will be explored, new insight into families and friends will be revealed, and tons of pop culture and video game Easter eggs will be scattered all over the place, virtual and IRL. But how does Season 2 compare to the fantastic first season released earlier this year? As gamers from a certain generation, there's a lot to love about Glitch Techs. But you don't need to get all the references (we certainly didn't) to enjoy this beautifully animated, wonderfully acted, smartly written, and brilliantly executed animated series. Right now, we're at the end of the current selection of episodes originally ordered into production by Nickelodeon before the show went to Netflix, but there is so much more story to tell, mythology to explore, and mysteries to solve. Glitch Techs deserves at least one more s

It's rare that we absolutely shred a cartoon on our weekly animation podcast, but it's also (thankfully) rare that shows like Hoops make it all the way to a finished, widely distributed production. I guess that's the price we play for today's ubiquitous streaming services; little to no standards and practices allows artists to deliver some cutting-edge animation you wouldn't normally get on network, cable, or premium TV, but it also lacks a quality filter. That's where we come in. From Ben Hoffman and featuring the voice talent of Jake Johnson, Hoops centers on a foul-mouthed high school basketball coach who hates everyone around him but manages to hate himself even more. If you're thinking that this could be a BoJack-like series or an animated take on Eastbound & Down, don't; aim much, much lower. While Hoops might -- I say again might -- have been edgy and boundary-pushing back in the late 1990s, its swings at being offensive just for the sake of being offensive miss 100% of the time in the comedy depa

This week's cartoon review comes courtesy of a Listener Recommendation, so we're legally obligated to check out Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles. With 44 episodes -- 4 of which are clip shows -- this 1999-2000 series tells the story of Rico's Roughnecks, a squad of space-based troops carrying out orders in defense of Earth. It continues the tales laid out in Robert Heinlein's book as well as Paul Verhoeven's '97 movie that started a fan-favorite franchise. But does Roughnecks live up to that pedigree? The computer generated-animated series definitely shows its age 20 years later. CG looks great when it comes to bugs and alien worlds but it's an absolute abomination when it comes to human faces, hair, expressions, and even lip sync. It's a mess. It quite honestly should be thrown back into the Uncanny Valley from whence it came. But is it worthy of being dipped? You'll have to tune in to find out! - Support the Show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/saturdaymourningcartoons - Want to f

DreamWorks delivers more Tales of Arcadia animated action in Wizards, the closing chapter of Guillermo del Toro & Co's excellent, action-packed, fantasy franchise. (Except it's not really the closing chapter; there's a movie coming out in 2021 that aims to resolve everything the 10-episode Netflix season didn't quite tie off with a bow.) But how exactly does the magic-focused series stack up when compared with fellow Tales, 3Below and Trollhunters? Listen in as we walk through the Good, the Bad, and the LOL of Wizards in the latest episode of our long-running animation-focused podcast. Be sure to let us know where you think Wizards ranks in the Tales of Arcadia and what you're hoping to see in next year's movie! - Support the Show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/saturdaymourningcartoons -   Want to find our cohosts online? Dave Trumbore collider.com/author/dave-trumbore Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrClawMD Buy the book 'The Science of Breaking Bad' - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/sci

Laura Bailey, co-star of the recent hit video game 'The Last of Us: Part II', will star in the upcoming release of Amazon's 'Starfinder', an Alexa-assisted RPG based on Paizo's popular tabletop game.    We chatted with Bailey about her unique experience recording the branching story paths for 'Starfinder', just what sort of story arc her character follows, and what she hopes that players discover about her character and others. Plus, she talks about getting to record with Nathan Fillion once again and checks in on the status of the 'Critical Role' animated series. All that and more follows, so listen in!    - Support the Show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/saturdaymourningcartoons -   Want to find our cohosts online? Dave Trumbore collider.com/author/dave-trumbore Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrClawMD Buy the book 'The Science of Breaking Bad' - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/science-breaking-bad Sean Paul Ellis IG and twitter @seanpaulellis Performer at Washington Improv Theater wh

Get out your nippers, files, and X-Acto knives, it's time for Gunpla! We're digging into a listener recommendation and checking out Gundam Build Fighters, an anime series in the vast and varied Gundam universe that puts the focus on fans of the giant mobile suits and their small-scale plastic model kits. While this may be a kid-friendly version of the Gundam story that focuses on model-building and battling instead of space-based warfare and using orbiting colonies as a weapon of mass destruction, don't let that fool you; there's plenty of action to be found once the Gundams get going. But is it worth a watch? We're joined by Charlie Visconage to find out!   - Support the Show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/saturdaymourningcartoons -   Guest: Charlie Visconage Twitter: https://twitter.com/sweatyinthecity Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cavisconage/ Want to find our cohosts online? Dave Trumbore collider.com/author/dave-trumbore Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrClawMD Buy the book