Saturday Night Live: The Tiger Woods skit

Can anyone say "how incredibly stupid are the liberal media?". I'll give anyone five seconds to repeat after me: "how incredibly stupid are the liberal media?". They're so stupid you'll end up making a stupid face like the one I'm wearing in this picture. Yes, they're that stupid! Can everyone make a stupid face like that one? I'll give you five seconds to try and duplicate the face. Anyway...seriously...this latest rant at the media and all things politically correct stems from the Saturday Night Live sketch featuring spoofs of Tiger Woods and his wife in the scandal/saga going on centering around the golfer. Was I offended by what I saw? Of course not! I took the sketch to be a satiric jab at Tiger Woods and how bizarre and strange all of these accusations and facts blending together are. What you have is a story like this centering an athlete, Tiger Woods, who up til now had what some derogatorily refer to as a "clean-cut" image. Now with accusations and what appears to be some sort of mysterious "confession" from Woods himself, the media and the comics are ready to pounce.

It's truly sad, though, to take in a belly full of political correctness and become aware that the Grand Dames of Democratic Discussion, collectively known as The View, charge the sketch with accusations of domestic violence insensitivity. Well, to be fair, not everyone on the panel of that show are rabid liberals...but 95% of the views expressed are liberal or moderate-Democrat. There's not too much conservative championing that goes on, let's put it that way. First of all, I don't find the sketch to be insensitive at all to domestic violence. Sure, domestic violence is an awful thing, but those who cry foul about the sketch need to simply lighten up. If I were a victim of domestic violence would I be ranting and screaming and accusing Saturday Night Live of being insensitive? Maybe...maybe not...but it's a free country...and those who are quote "insensitive" should have freedom of expression and that's what drives me up the wall when it comes to political correctness. It wants to silence other people's views and cause people to think only one way and have no mind of their own or voice of their own. If I'm not mistaken, though, the sketch wasn't cheering domestic violence...if anything the sketch was skewering Tiger Woods.

The domestic violence undertone of the sketch is what set people off...sending the misguided and the humorlessly politically correct advocates into a frenzy. People seem to forget that Tiger was dictating to the police how to behave and stalling and stonewalling until, in my opinion, he had time to plan his strategy and salvage his reputation somewhat. Didn't Tiger put off police questioning for a couple of days? Who else gets that treatment? So, Saturday Night Live in my opinion went after Tiger for his attitude and conduct, the fact that it had a domestic violence theme was unfortunate given how quick people fly off the handle.

So, I want to make it clear, I'm not a champion of domestic violence but if something strikes me as funny, and if a sketch is absurdly over-the-top in it's exaggeration, then I'll laugh. That's just the way it is. It doesn't mean it's okay, in real life, to abuse someone physically or verbally. It's time for some people out there to grab a hold of where reality and fiction meet and learn that there's a difference between exaggeration and realism. As a spokesperson for the show stated, the controversy and topicality of the whole bizarre scenario with the unlikely figure of Tiger Woods at the center of a sex scandal is too irresistible to shrug off.

Help!!! It's The Hair Bear Bunch

Yes, the cartoon series from 1971 will put you in a goofy mood...but let that not distract you all from experiencing the Hair Bear Bunch for yourselves. The series lasted just 16 episodes which was a common practice for Hanna-Barbera in the late '60s on through the 1970's. On more than one occasion networks that aired cartoons on Saturday mornings, which would mean all three networks, were always on the look out for material to program their fall schedules with. Unlike Warner Brothers whose major contribution to Saturday morning television were four decades of theatrical cartoon reruns, Hanna-Barbera was putting out made-for-TV cartoons in quick succession. A lot of Hanna-Barbera's cartoon series seem to have more episodes than actually exist and a large part of this feeling stems from the consistent re-runs. Jabber-Jaw, for example, had only a handful of episodes but they've been re-ran off and on for decades. A lot of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons were spoofs and parodies of pop-culture. JAWS of course was the inspiration for Jabber-Jaw but in order to trump the potential violent over-tone of a cartoon focusing on a shark they gave the title character the sound of Curly from The Three Stooges. Frank Welker mimicked Curly Howard's voice in that series. Critics and fans alike refer to the cartoon as Scooby-Doo underwater because of it's mystery/teenager concept and a talking shark, instead of a talking dog.

So, what was the inspiration behind this 1971 cartoon that focuses on three bears and a couple of zoo keepers? The full title of this series is Help! It's The Hair Bear Bunch. The program isn't based on Scooby-Doo, surprisingly enough. Instead, the series is based pretty much on The Phil Silvers Show. Hair Bear, the leader, has the smooth-talking con-artist voice that Daws Butler often gave characters with this personality. Phil Silvers never actually spoke like this but yet the personality of one cooking up schemes in order to get rich quick is so synonymous with Phil Silvers' Sgt Bilko character that it's hard not to make the connection. Hair's two friends are Square Bear and Bubi Bear. Each bear has a distinct voice and personality. Hair being the leader and the brains behind their schemes. Square is the laid-back, almost hippie-like bear with an invisible motorcycle and a huge appetite. Bubi on the other hand is the short bear who talks in gibberish. It's hilarious listening to his gibberish because nobody watching the cartoon understands him but Hair and Square do. Bubi was voiced by Paul Winchell and Square was voiced by Bill Callaway. Several other animals from the Wonderland Zoo stopped by the bears cave...one of the gimmicks is that the inside of the cave could transform into a swinging singles pad but if either of the two zoo keepers was spied making their way to the cave then the bears would flip various rock switches in their cave and transform the interior back into a barren, empty cave to hide how comfortable they lived. Peevly ran the zoo as if it were a military base...another connection to Phil Silvers' TV show.

What about those zoo keepers, though?? The head zoo keeper, Mr Peevly, was always peeved about something...taking out his anger on his assistant, Botch. 99% of Peevly's irritation came from Hair Bear. Peevly was always on the quest to expose the bears for hi-jinks but he could never catch them that much...on the rare moments that he had the bears cornered and threatened to ship them off somewhere else, Hair would use blackmail and threaten to go over Peevly's head about a prior incident involving Peevly himself. This often caused Peevly to bellow one of his catch-phrases which went something like "I'll get ya for this, Hair! MARK MY WORDS!!!! ONE OF THESE DAYS..." and he'd go stomping off with Botch tagging along beside him. The zoo keepers were voiced by John Stephenson as Mr. Peevly, doing his Joe Flynn high-nasal impression, and Joe E Ross as Botch. Joe used the voice he was famous for and the "ooh-ooh" catch-phrase he made popular in the 1960's on the sitcom, Car 54, Where Are You? Botch was incredibly stupid and Peevly was short-tempered anyway...an explosive combination...factor in Peevly's irritations at the Bears and you had a walking time-bomb of anger. Joe Flynn, incidentally, played Captain Binghamton on McHale's Navy and his voice quickly became parodied on cartoons with John Stephenson often providing the vocals. Stephenson would use the Joe Flynn parody voice on other cartoon characters with similar short-tempered personalities.

This series, much like a lot of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, is mostly memorable not for any specific episode but instead for it's theme song and characters. Once a person watches this cartoon series and gets a grasp of what it's all about the individual episode plots don't necessarily tend to stick out as much as it's theme song and the personalities/voices of the characters. I think this is true for a lot of the cartoons of this time period from Hanna-Barbera. There once was a series called Where's Huddles? and if someone with some knowledge of cartoons attempts to cite certain episodes it's almost impossible to do...but yet the person can quote some of it's theme song and tell you what the show was about.

For those interested, the series can be seen on-line at various video hosting web-sites. It also airs on Boomerang.

Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1970's, Volume One!

This DVD collection features 12 cartoons on 2 discs...6 cartoon programs on each DVD. One of the programs is an hour-long and so technically you get 2 cartoons within the 1 hour time-frame. The hour cartoon is The Batman-Tarzan Hour. There are three extra's on the DVD. First we have something called "Saturday Morning Wake-Up Call" which is narrated by Casey Kasem. Mainstream audiences know of him for radio countdown programs while cartoon watchers immediately recognize his voice as Shaggy on Scooby-Doo, Alexander on Josie and the Pussycats, and Robin on Superfriends. The second and third extra are more traditional with interviews and commentary. There is a look at the cartoon series, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, with interviews by Eddie Carroll and Jamie Farr. The two of them describe what it was like writing a cartoon with a lot of interference from the censors and parental control groups. The third extra is a look at the Funky Phantom series with remarks about the series from fans in the cartoon industry and a brief acknowledgment to Daws Butler, the voice of the title character.

The extra's are a bit more irreverent but they aren't blatantly disrespectful to the audience. There is a companion Volume Two of this series and there is a two volume collection of the previous decade, the 1960's. Each collection has similar cover art. Several episodes on the DVD collections can be found on other releases. This DVD set is more or less for the general public and really isn't meant for the avid collector...even though the avid collector will no doubt purchase the series just to have it. The DVD being a sampler means that you're not going to be seeing the same characters over and over as you would in a DVD collection of one cartoon series. I liked all of the cartoons in this set and I was treated to a few I'd never seen before. Roman Holidays is by far the one that stands out because until this DVD came along I'd never seen that cartoon before. I'd also never seen any Tarzan cartoons, either, until now. Here's a list of what's on this DVD:

THE JETSONS

THE NEW ADVENTURES OF BATMAN

TARZAN: LORD OF THE JUNGLE

HONG KONG PHOOEY

GOOBER AND THE GHOST CHASERS

SPEED BUGGY

WHEELIE AND THE CHOPPER BUNCH

YOGI’S GANG

THE AMAZING CHAN AND THE CHAN CLAN

THE ROMAN HOLIDAYS

JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS

THE NEW SCOOBY DOO MOVIES {with the Harlem Globe Trotters}

THE FUNKY PHANTOM

EXTRA FEATURES: Saturday Morning Wake-Up Call; Solving Crimes the Chan-Clan Way; and Heavens To Betsy Ross: The Spirit of the Funky Phantom.