Posted 8:00 PM by Gene

HEY ANT! I was all ready to buy the complete Ant and the Aardvark cartoons till I learned someone beat me to it and posted all seventeen of them on YouTube, saving me from paying for nothing. They're not 720 resolution but at 360 they're pretty good for stuff ripped from a DVD. (The Seal of Valenti disconcertingly graces the credits, a wan joke.) Anything from the likes of Friz Freleng will have that Warner Bros. touch but by now it had grown so wan as to be missing, replaced by the heavy hand of bad sitcoms. (Or rather the bad fin de siecle Road Runner cartoons with dialogue; both were made on the Warner lot.) The animation's okay for TV -- and face it, they were made for TV; several bear post-theatrical laugh tracks that United Ar...MGM was too lazy to remove from the disc -- but it still cheats. Doing the same things they did far better twenty-five years before the hacks under Freleng and his producing partner David H. DePatie telegraphed their gags as baldly as Seymour Kneitel, treating their audiences much as rocks, anvils and Tabasco sauce treat the Aardvark. (They were not helped by a mickey-mouse all-star jazz band playing the theme music in ten different tempos.) They earned their reward in more wage-slavery as DePatie-Freleng became a second Hanna-Barbera. And who remembers either but cartoon buffs -- who may not want to? These moth-eaten shorts would be well nigh unwatchable less the brilliant mimicry of John Byner as Jackie Ma -- the Aardvark; I cannot regard that acidic comedian without expecting him to bellow "HEY ANT!" And what's best, Byner's funnier than Jackie Mason.

But even he can't save the fourth remake of some wood shavings off Termite Terrace; the cartoons are still bad free or not, but at least I have an excuse not to collect any more dust with my video library than I have to.

Confession: I own an unopened five-disc box of Pink Panthers because Oldies.com sold it for $30, and I don't expect much pleasure from them either.

P. S. I originally posted this yesterday with the unforced error that only the Aardvark's head and neck were animated to save DePatie and Freleng money; but then look how the lack of humor was animated.

P. P. S. on 2/20/2011 at 3:15 p. m. The great non-sequitur Friz never thought of: How many ants live in the whole world -- and why must the Aardvark pick on one ant?