![]() Remember when the only part of Aeon Flux was the really awesome and totally freaky cartoon, and not that mediocre movie starring Charlize Theron? Those were better times. Think the charm of Rugrats meets the gothic whimsy of the Nightmare Before Christmas. (In her defense, Arnold’s head DOES look like a football.)įrom the team that brought you Rugrats came Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, three young critters– the cane-shaped Oblina, impish Ickis, and Crumb, who looks kind of like a Mister Saturn from Earthbound holding his eyes above his head –try to become full-fledged monsters, training in the art of the scare. True to form, she had a massive crush on Arnold, which always turned into abuse, and backfired more often than not. It took Hey Arnold to make me realize that a dude wearing a kilt is awesome, but the real star of the show had to be Helga, who was the epically cool unibrow bully. (But ignore All Grown Up, the “sequel” which follows the same characters as middle schoolers. But if I had kids I’d want to show them Rugrats. ![]() But now you, too, can remember the joys of the Happy Happy Joy Joy song and everyone’s favorite product, the Log.Īnd on the opposite end of the Nickelodeon spectrum we have Rugrats, which followed the daily adventures of five (later six) kids aged newborn to three, but unlike other failed attemps– I’m looking at you, “Baby Looney Tunes” –it didn’t talk down to its audience, and the charming imagination of its characters kept me as a fan for probably longer than I was strictly part of the target audience. I’m not sure I ever really understood why Ren & Stimpy was on Nickelodeon– the humor was immature, sure, but it was gross on a level I doubt any kids’ network would be gutsy enough to show these days and the dog and cat duo (more specifically, chihuahua and manx duo) did eventually wind up on MTV for a stint. On May 22nd, Netflix made the following classics available: Users could slog through entire seasons of Law and Order, classic flicks like Harold and Maude and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and certain sets of niche genre films, all at the click of a button.īut recently Netflix added a batch of titles to its library that transformed Watch Instantly into THE place for kids who watched a lot of cartoons in the ’90s (not including anime, which makes up the vast majority of Netflix’s “Anime & Animation” section). If you want to taste just one, try “Tide” (my personal favorite).Netflix’s Watch Instantly feature has been a pretty handy tool since it launched. ![]() You can watch all the good ones in slightly over 30 minutes. You can watch all the episodes on YouTube, but the Netflix WI versions are higher quality (as good as a fresh VHS copy from 1992 anyway) and commercial-free. Aeon Flux died a final and permanent death after that, except for a crappy in-name-only film from 2005. Unfortunately, whatever temporary autonomous zone that was in effect to allow Chung the freedom to make these uncompromising experiments evaporated as the character and her dystopian world were suddenly crammed into a 22-minute format burdened with tedious dialogue and labored plots, in effect becoming what the initial “Aeon Flux” incarnation had been parodying. The biological gross-out, as with David Cronenberg’s yuckier films, is high art here. And what about the transgressive depiction of tongues and orifices and oozing alien eggs? Oh yes. Totally non-verbal, these mini-non-episodes delight in carefully setting up audience expectation, then sadistically subverting it by killing off the heroine (a trope in these early shorts) or suddenly depicting the army of pursuing bad guys as abused victims crying out for help. In the early ’90s the first handful of Peter Chung’s “Aeon Flux” shorts totally blew the minds of flannel-clad, bong-huffing, MTV watchers everywhere, and it’s easy to see why: They still stand up as quite unlike anything before or since.
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