Review: 'The Team-Up Companion'

In 1954, DC halved the page count of its World's Finest Comics and forced Superman and Batman into the same book as if they were a couple of recently divorced bozos sharing a flat. They mostly kept to their own sides of the room, but a new format was inadvertently born: the team-up. This was distinct from crossovers or guest appearances because both heroes were on equal footing in a shared title with both their logos on display. Pretty soon, team ups of everyone from Green Arrow and Martian Manhunter to Supergirl and Wonder Woman to Aqualad and Robin to Richie Rich and Casper to Spider-Man and Dracula (!) began proliferating funny books. 

Review: 'It’s Saturday Morning! Celebrating the Golden Age of Cartoons 1960s-1990s'

Okay, so not every cartoon Joe Garner and Michael Ashley cover in It’s Saturday Morning! Celebrating the Golden Age of Cartoons 1960s-1990s aired on Saturday morning. In fact, they aren’t even all cartoons (see the entry on Pee Wee’s Playhouse). Yet the writers do a good job a selecting the shows that best defined each of the four generations their book explores. These are not cursory, encyclopedia-style entries; each is about four or five pages long, and each gets reasonably in depth about the genesis, content, and legacy of shows never intended to have a legacy once the six-year olds lost interest: Josie and the Pussycats, GI Joe, Space Ghost, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Smurfs, and so on.

The odd part (aside from the authors’ bizarrely clueless insistence that all of these shows aired on Saturday mornings) is that Garner and Ashley deal with such a weightlessly fun topic as if has some greater value than stimulating nostalgia. The tone of the book should have been fun, friendly, and perhaps even a bit snarky, like that of Robinson and Karp’s Just Can’t Get Enough: Toys, Games, and Other Stuff From the ’80s That Rocked. The reverence seems to miss the obvious fact that most of these shows were great fun for six-year olds buzzed on Frankenberry but pretty crappy in essence. Garner and Ashley want us to believe that The Smurfs has a “complex mythology,” Garfield possessed “smart storytelling,” and that most of these shows were better animated, better written, and more educational than they actually were. All I ever learned from watching He-Man was how to perfect my Christmas wish list. There’s also a dogged determination to keep things reverent, which becomes a bit odd during a discussion of Fat Albert that continually references Bill Cosby’s artistry without at all acknowledging the monstrousness for which he is now best known.

While the tone could have been more appropriate to the material, the look of It’s Saturday Morning! gets everything right with big, color images from those delightfully garish childhood memories.

Review: 'Television Cartoon Shows: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1949-2003'

Oh, how many of us misspent our youth by rushing home from school and forgetting all about our homework to vegetate in front of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” or ancient reruns of “The Flintstones”? Well, the idea of reading a hernia-inducing, two-volume encyclopedia of such animated trifles may actually seem like homework. At least it might until you delve into Hal Erickson’s delightful though dryly titled Television Cartoon Shows: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1949-2003. The great surprise of these books is not that their 950-plus pages bulge with history (I was unaware of how troubled the first season of “The Simpsons” was…or that “Ren & Stimpy” creator John Kricfalusi, who’d address his Nickelodeon bosses as “scum-sucking pigs,” was as irreverently outrageous as his dog and cat team), production info, trivia (Wait… “Scooby Doo” was patterned after “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”? Jodie Foster voiced Pugsley on the “Addams Family” cartoon? Belgium produced nine Smurfs feature films in the sixties?), and criticism; it’s that Erickson captures the fun of his topic with writing that is polished and informative but also cracks wise quite regularly. What a relief.

I defy anyone to pick up these books and not immediately leap to her or his favorite shows, and Erickson generally does not disappoint by giving due room and attention to cult items such as “Duck Man” and “Liquid Television” as well as perennial favorites like “Space Ghost” and “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show”. If there’s a significant flaw to this collection it's that it does not live up to its “Illustrated” designation a bit more, but I guess more pictures would have necessitated a third volume, and I’m not sure my puny, sunshine and exercise-deprived, “Groovie Goolies”-weakened muscles would be capable of lifting it.

Television Cartoon Shows: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1949-2003 was originally published in 2005, and it is now going be reissued in its third revised edition. I received the second edition for review, so I'm not sure about what those new revisions entail.