Tragedy strikes SOTSM as voice of a generation Gilbert Gottfried departs our mortal plane and thus much time is spent on defining roles and bad impressions. Niall relates his hunt for Bruce Lee impersonators in the world of anime and tracks down his man with some help from Brave Police J Decker, while Dwayne ponders the whereabouts of obscure anima…

Overflowing with enthusiasm/lacking in focus as we are wont to be, an outlet is needed to digress on those many compact cartoon curios that may not make their way to a full bore recording. Thus our Sublimations to that effect, including a catch-up with the cunning Kaguya-sama: Love Is War ahead of its third series; the rising fortunes of Youtube sa…

Who would live in a house like this? An international team of talented stop-motion animators of course, bringing their skills to bear in a macabre anthology piece about the home renovation from hell. Laborious, time-consuming and requiring considerable skill & patience, this naturally prompts a discussion about the surprisingly healthy state of sto…

The world's most well-known cartoon comedy family have borne witness to much in their seemingly everlasting tenure on television, and within those annals are writ many a gag that then eerily manifested into our own reality some years later. From murder hornets to presidential elections to scientific wonders, could The Simpsons be a codex that predi…

Anything is possible, as long as you got FAMILY. We've followed the deranged exploits of the extended Venture clan all the way to their denouement in this last set of series. A new locale and a fresh start beckons, paring down the enormous cast to its comedic core before turning them loose with all the carte blanche a billion dollar super science c…

Before it's New Legacy dunked our collective brains 25 years later Space Jam was pioneering new and innovative ways to exploit our most merchandisable popular culture figures. With an existing working relationship Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan teamed up on the basketball court in a baffling display that somehow netted an adoring following, inspirin…

It's a monster sized edition of Drawn Or Alive as four seperate branches of The Addams Family jostle for rightful inheritance to their creator's legacy! The first live-action adaptation from 1964, and the first screen version to boot, dances a deadly tango with Hanna Barbera's 1973 effort, the dearly beloved movie from 1991 and the second go from o…

Our boys have grown up so much! And that's just us going off on a longer-than-expected tear about the Venture Brothers when we thought we had the measure of them. Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer saw that coming though, proceeding to sweep aside sizeable swathes of their world of aimless adventurers and vacuous villains to allow something new to grow…

Seasonal ailment Joseph Wade spreads the word about one Osmosis Jones, a Piet Kroon and Tom Sito cartoon film that got hit with a bad case of the Farrelly Brothers for the live-action segments of its cops & robbers caper inside Bill Murray's decaying body. It's gross, it's educational and for some it was the apex of their celebrity at the start of …

Masked avenger Brian Smith answers the clarion call of justice as the unstoppable force meets the immovable object meets the inevitable cliff edge! A Drawn Or Alive first, it's a triple header of titles all adapting comic crazy Ben Edlund's big blue maroon as he thwarts crime in animation in 1994 before becoming larger than live-action in 2001 and …

Tsui Hark, writer/producer/director plus visionary, seemed hardly content with his contribution in 1987 to the gnarly adaptation of Qing dynasty novel Strange Tales From A Chinese Studio. A decade later he saw fit to realise the true scope of the collection of fables within the supposedly boundless limits of animation. With the original already a g…

Arch-villain Brian Smith is unleashed to cast a wiser eye upon the awkward transitionary phase of the Adult Swim darling in our second retrospective chunk, comprising series 2 and 3. While we get a better sense of the cartoon it would become, and the ambitions of Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer for it beyond an outlet for coarse humour, The Venture …

The other side of a great rivalry is at bat next, the creative contemporaries to the Nicktoons outfit that were the Cartoon Cartoons from Cartoon Network. That's a lotta cartoons! A lot of very popular cartoons at that but only the finest contain an obligatory baseball episode therein: Death stalks the ballpark at the behest of Billy & Mandy; I.M. …

Brian Smith is the vital component in our merciless machine that plows a furrow of destruction into more Love, Death & Robots. A trimmed down continuation of the Netflix adult animation anthology this batch of shorts still delivers everything we've come to expect: future dystopias, literary adaptations and just how wide or narrow some folks' unders…

Having dodged responsibility for long enough we undertake a dangerous mission to uncover the true identity of James Bond Jr. Is he an established brand's attempt to reach a younger audience? How does it involve the story of the Irish animation industry? And will this be more fun to discuss than initially expected? Keep your ears peeled and find out…

Against expectations this abberation in animation appreciation has racked up 200 instalments (plus about that amount again in extra-curricular activities) and we're in a celebratory mood. And what's a party without favours, as we each perused our respective repositories of cartoon knowledge in search of a fitting gift for each other. Dwayne classes…

Those lumpier, stranger looking children get their chance on the field, which describes both our shared national school experiences and these baseball episodes from the Nicktoons stable! A subject we've surprisingly touched on only briefly in our many recordings, we give Nickelodeon's influential animation block a tryout the only way we know how. D…

Jake de Búrca joins our expedition into the world of mystery, danger and offbeat musical references inhabited by those strange siblings The Venture Brothers. Dreamed up by the even more peculiar pairing of Jackson Publick & Doc Hammer it proved an ostentatious outpouring of their influences and enthusiasms that set the show apart from its stablemat…

Joseph Wade crams into our booth to travel to the parallel timelines of the Bill & Ted live-action film franchise and their 1990 animated TV spin-off. Featuring most of the principal cast from the movies and produced under the watchful eye of the man responsible for CatDog, will the lads pass this history test in a most triumphant manner? Or be for…

His grandson may be the one who gets all the attention these days but the OG Arsène Lupin was no slouch by any stretch. Maurice Leblanc's seminal gentleman thief character got his day in the sun back in 1996, taking a few noirish cues from spiritual successors such as Batman and Diabolik to thwart the real villains in a stylish 1930s setting. But i…

The tour heads back Eastwards again for another triple-header of anime athletics, facing a team of 2000s era titles that had the good sense all those decades ago to stick some baseball episodes in and force us to confront our own mortality in the present day... Anyways, FLCL #4 dials down on the robots erupting from heads for a poignant baseball me…

The year wanes, one that we'll gladly let pass into history, but such as it is the festive season is here and that means another animated spin on A Christmas Carol is summoned to scare the share into us! Classic cartoon coot Mr Magoo gives it a go this time around, and with his patented brand of poorly sighted mayhem this version of Chuck D's famou…

The second game in our stellar series has us putting on the throwback jersey as we cast our minds back to some of the baseball episodes that lay within the earlier seasons of fan favourite animated sitcoms! Homer Simpson gets called up to the big leagues; Hank Hill finally makes manager at Strickland Propane; and Bob Belcher has yet another idyllic…

Anthony Askew braves our dread waters on a moonlit Halloween night in search of his faithful old dog who's still got a few tricks left in him! For a direct-to-video movie with no great weight of expectation on it Scooby Doo On Zombie Island sure did push the boat out in terms of doing much more exciting things with the Mystery Inc gang after decade…