Show #157: Rock-A-Doodle

Rain delays play but now you finally get to hear us wade through the washed up mess that is Rock-A-Doodle!

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Don Bluth, Donny old boy, we keep coming back to you despite our best interests and we're starting to wonder why. Rock-A-Doodle is expectedly the incoherent muddle that unfortunately has come to overshadow the bright spots in your career, but perhaps we're drawn back because of the infinitely more fascinating circumstances surrounding the inception and production of this film. Literary history, real life tragedy and obvious better story ideas that somehow got passed over are uncovered within!

THE SHORT VERSION

Horny animator strikes again

Evil owl fellas

Seamless interplay

Show #155: Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos

Because we're about due for a bad idea we try and ascertain an explanation for the persistent notoriety of Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos.

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Our foray into Ruby Spears-fronted celebrity tie-in cartoons was surprisingly fruitful last time with Mr T and his gang of mystery solving teens. Can the formula work again for Karate Kommandos, a show more often experienced solely via out-of-context video clips? Colourful ninjas, high henchman turnover, moral codes and not-so-secret agents get in the mix!

THE SHORT VERSION

Para-gators

Super ninjas

Sweaty wisdom

Show #149: Iria - Zeiram The Animation

Time to put on our thinking caps and get down to solving the mystery of the persistent popularity of Iria: Zeiram The Animation!

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Stop me if you've heard this one before: a lethal alien lifeform is unwittingly unleashed by an evil corporation and it's up to one woman with a bunch of taped-together guns to vanquish this menace for good. Iria treads familiar ground, already well trodden by anime OAVs preceding it, yet its charms are not immediately obvious at first glance. Tokusatsu tours, heinous haberdashery and more lie in wait!

THE SHORT VERSION

Gadget girls

Evil hats

Archaic aviation

Let’s Go JoJo! Episode 26 – Here Comes Janken Boy!

There's important crime solving to be done, but enough of that for now. Let's enjoy twenty or so minutes of Rohan playing Rock Paper Scissors with a small boy FOR KEEPS. On the subject of annoying children an evil presence arrives in the form of Heybot and Reigen attempts to reason with some developmentally arrested supervillains before it gets all serious again in 91 Days. Oh, and a torrent of Thunderbolt Fantasy talk that broke the Internet!

• Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable #26
• Heybot #1
• Bananya #12
• Bono Bono #11
• Shonen Ashibe Go Go Goma-chan #16
• Thunderbolt Fantasy #8-12
• 91 Days #11
• Mob Psycho 100 #11

Listen up!

Show #127: M.A.S.K.

Working overtime to get this show out to you, Greg Driver of Ace Comicals stops by to take us for a spin into M.A.S.K, aka Mobile Armoured Strike Kommand!

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The lesser cousin to the 80s cartoon stalwarts it borrows from, MASK has some nifty ideas but finds itself lacking in the execution. All the usual suspects are here; relentless background music, inconsistent visual quality, an irritating child character taking up precious screen time. Pockets of quality exist in the mechanical design and the better directed episodes, but spread all too thin over a long series. We can all agree that the opening theme is still fantastic though!

THE SHORT VERSION

Sweet rides

Time to try and not get fired today

Scott Trakker: Robo Racist

Show #107: The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo

That most blessed of holidays is upon us and we get into the Halloween spirit with a most horrifying chapter of a long running franchise, The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo!

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For our first foray into the venerable annals of Scooby Doo we picked a more obscure offering that sounds great on paper; beloved actor Vincent Price is a wizard helping the gang capture some runaway revenants. However the transition to actual ghostbusting does not fit so well for the mystery solving teens, already hamstrung by a roster of repulsive replacements dealing out gags that were stale a decade before the show came out and essentially doing away with most of what makes Scooby Doo work in the first place. Vincent Price deserved a better class of cartoon than this, a terrifying apparition that will curse one with nightmares on these late October evenings!

THE SHORT VERSION

Scooby skits

Too good for this show

Scrappy Doo ver. 2.0

Show #87: My Spoons! They're Still Here!

It's the start of a wonderful new holiday tradition here at SOTSM, with this year's stocking stuffer-sized entry being 1997's adaptation of A Christmas Carol!

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How many animated versions of A Christmas Carol are there? A lot, so we should be in fine standing for the next couple of years at least. This does mean we have to wade through a couple of the more dubious versions such as this example from DiC Entertainment. Don't let the cast list fool you, although Tim Curry is a wonderfully sassy Ebenezer Scrooge, it's a real slog to get through and not just because of the awful songs. It does feature a Frank Welker dog however, and isn't that reason enough to watch? (Nope.)

THE SHORT VERSION

Terrifying apparitions

Bad accents

Remember Scrooge? He's back! In dog form!

Show #59: Tiger Doesn't Make Any Sense

There's big trouble in Little China and all over the world as well in the third season of Jackie Chan Adventures!

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It's Jackie Chan Adventures! So obviously we love it, although this season is littered with caveats. The writing feels a lot less sharp in places than previous episodes, with dialogue and storylines clearly targeting a younger audience than before. On the plus side we have the wonderful James Hong channeling Lo Pan to great effect and the better plots take enough crazy turns to justify viewing.

THE SHORT VERSION

Better call Jack Burton

A makeover

You guys suck!

Show #24: NO LITTLE ROK

Fighting caveman crime in a not-so-future time, we delve into the exploits of the ridiculously overpowered Hanna Barbera superhero Mighty Mightor!

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What of the good old days? A simpler time when men were men, or Vulturemen or Tigermen or Abominable Snow Men. When cartoon studios could get away with severely restricted animation and recycled plots because them kids don't know any better. Good riddance to those days, but Mightor gets an A for effort from us if only for Alex Toth's design work and the possibilities of these characters and setting in the right hands.

THE SHORT VERSION

Hang in there baby

Discover agriculture already you lazy Vultureman

Sometimes you just gotta be a dick