Thursday, January 21, 2010

Where credit is due

You know who doesn't get enough credit for combining the child's imagination-captivating concepts of dinosaurs, dragons, giant apes and shapeshifting blobs into a nuclear-family-with-monster-pets brew of geektastic potency?

They team up to protect their planet from sinister invaders, using stock footage and recycled music cues!
Hells yes, the Herculoids. (Or, more accurately, Alex Toth, the actual human intelligence that created them.) I suppose it's because once you get past the high concept, all of the Hanna Barbera World of Super Adventure episodelets from Space Ghost to Frankenstein, Jr. have an undeniable ultra-cheap assembly line formulaic quality which does not reward repeat viewing or deep analysis.

Still - the dinosaur shoots exploding rock bullets out his horn! The dragon shoots fricking laser beams out his eyes AND his tail! This should come off as overkill but it just seems appropriate to the evolutionary precepts of whatever crazy jungle planet the Herculoids lived on. Brilliant.

Other than that, I got nothing today - who knew that taking one day off from work to get over encroaching illness could set me back so far? Someone threw the gears into flesh-shredding mode while I was out, apparently.

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