On one of my usual evenings at the local bar (The Dominion Tavern, the place to drink in Ottawa, located in the diseased downtown heart) the subject of conversation drifted toward the nostalgia ridden conversation of Saturday morning cartoons we all grew up watching. Most of the time my friends are blown out of the water by how much useless information my brain has retained from spending countless Saturday mornings (and weekday afternoons) watching television between the years 1982 to 1996. After rhyming off countless different cartoons I realized many of these children's cartoons were based on movies. I stop for a moment and consider for a second just what movies these were based on, and I realized a helluva lot were films obviously not actually intended for children.

 

Take Beetlejuice for example, it was based on the Tim Burton movie of the same name. Beetlejuice, for those of my readers who have spent the past two decades in a cave, is about Adam and Barbara Maitland (played by Alec Baldwin, and Geena Davis) who have recently passed away and are becoming accustomed to the afterlife. Of course they end up having to spend all eternity stuck in their old home with the Deetz family who bought their home after the Maitland's died. The Deetz's have turned it from an old style, small-town living to a new-age artistic abomination thanks to Delia Deetz's (played by the talented Canadian actress Catherine O'Hara) artistic ambition. In trying to haunt the Deetz's out of their home, they befriend their daughter Lydia (played by Winona Ryder.) However when the Maitland's fail at scaring the Deetz's away they (in spite of warnings from their afterlife consultants) hire Beetlejuice (played by the always amazing Michael Keaton) to scare the Deetz's away. However, Beetlejuice decides to take things a step further and try to kill the Deetz's and their house guests and force Lydia to marry him.

 

Okay, so, here we have a psychotic specter who is a complete and disgusting pervert who wants to marry a living sixteen year old girl and have his way with her. This apparently translates into a Saturday morning cartoon. They changed Beetlejuice from a sexual predator from beyond the grave into a really gross and flatulent best friend for a girl who is just too spooky for her small town. Tim Burton's classic film goes from being a surreal story about the afterlife to what amounts to a "buddy" show, and seemingly nobody has any issue with a sixteen year old girl who had adventures with a dead guy who looks like he's in his thirties. Toss in some awful puns, a french skeleton, tap dancing spider, cowboy monster and his "poopsie" as well as a were-car (I am not making this shit up) and you got yourself a very popular Saturday morning cartoon.

 

Let's not stop there: tv writers turned First Blood into the Saturday morning cartoon, "Rambo and the Forces of Freedom" . You know what they did? They took John Rambo, ultra-violent, near psychotic 'Nam vet who holes himself up in the woods is turned into a G. I. Joe-esque action hero fighting a terrorist organization called S.A.V.A.G.E. - and he was given high tech weaponry. Great idea.

 

The forces of huh? continue: does anyone remember the cartoon based on Teen Wolf ? Cartoon land turned Scott Howard from the awkward teenager who uses his wolf powers to gain popularity and getting laid into a metaphor for people with disabilities and has magical adventures with his family. Flowing through the same veins, they turned the sex comedy series Police Academy into a children's cartoon, eliminating all the sexual comedy, violence, swearing, social commentary, and David Spade to come up with this horrid cartoon full of slap stick comedy.

 

Stretching the credulity halls a bit further is yet another sex-centered parody film Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (actually more specifically, the characters were all based from it's sequel Return of the Killer Tomatoes ) into a Saturday morning cartoon. They turned the character Chad Finletter into a 12 year old boy, and turned his sex-pot tomato human hybrid girlfriend Tara into a tomato/human hybrid that was his best friend -- mind you, they had some obvious nods to the fact the film version of her character was a sex object.

 

Rounding out this hybrid collection, who can forget the Troma classic The Toxic Avenger ? Which went from gory super-hero sex comedy and turned into a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles clone when it translated into "Toxic Crusaders" . Toxie was pretty much the same freedom loving crime fighter; however, he was less inclined to decapitate, eviscerate, or otherwise murder and maim the criminal element. Claire goes from being a blind bimp who plays the accordion to being just a clumsy girl who can't see properly. Toxie also gets a rag-tag team and he still fights the corrupt industrial machine, controlled by a cockroach alien thing called Dr. Killemoff, and focuses heavily on environmentally conscious super-heroes (which was the trend at the time, see "Captain Planet", "Widget: The World Watcher", et al.) Fellow Micro-Shocker Rhonda Baughman even had the Toxic Crusaders coloring book - actually not even giving it up so much as resigning herself to the fact a douchebag ex threw it away. See my snide comments on this marketing scheme below.

 

When you stop and think about it, a lot of the cartoons we grew up watching as kids were based on some less than child orientated material. It strikes me as funny, with pretty much all the examples I named above the reasons are simple: There was a market for it. The 80's and 90's were rife with cartoons that were used as vehicles to sell other products, namely lines of toys. Television executives would grab onto any idea for a cartoon series they could and in turn market and pump out figurines, coloring books, sticker albums, and so on and so on, ad infinitum,

 

However, these days you don't see a whole lot of that anymore, heaven forbid you base a children's cartoon based on Ghostbusters , that movie has demon dogs in it! Lawd no! It seems that cartoons based on R-rated films are a bit of a lost art. But we here at Micro-Shock want to revisit this bygone era of children's television and give you our visions of what five of our favourite horror films would look like if they were turned into Saturday morning cartoons.

#5) Fright Night

The Film: The original Fright Night followed the story of Charley Brewster (played by William Ragsdale), a horror movie buff who's new neighbor, Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon) turns out to be a real live Vampire. When Brewster stumbles upon his neighbor's secret, nobody believes him and, refusing to let go of the issue, he becomes a target of Dandridge, who goes so far as turn Brewster's girlfriend Amy Paterson (Amanda Bearse) and his friend "Evil" Ed Thompson (Stephen Geoffreys) into vampires. Teaming up with late night monster movie host Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), Brewster manages to kill Dandridge and save his girlfriend from the curse of the Vampire. The film spawned a sequel and at the time of this writing there is a ridiculous remake slated for a 2011 release.

 

Changes to the Basic Plot: The title would likely be the same, but mind you I've seen them change titles of shows to make them sound less violent or scary. For example, when Mainframe Entertainment released "Beast Wars" and "War Planets" into the Canadian market, they renamed both cartoons to make them sound less violent, as such most people in Canada will know the shows as "Beasties" and "Shadow Raiders" (Yeah, I know...) So maybe they would go as far to change it into "Spooky Night" or maybe even "BOO! Night"

 

Gone would be Dandridge's perchance to stalk, seduce, and slip the icy to female victims (especially not prostitutes and call girls like in the movie). I figure they would probably simply call him "Jerry", put him in a silly vampire cape and make him turn into a bat to escape. Instead of surviving and feeding off victims, he'd probably be turned into a cookie-cutter Saturday morning cartoon villain, doing something incredulous like blot out the sun, or destroying the supply of all the city's garlic. Of course, you couldn't have just one Vampire either, you'd have to give Jerry his pack of goons. Of course Ed would be there, probably mostly unchanged in mannerisms from the movie (although probably made less offensive and more slapstick) gone would be be burnt crucifix on his forehead and if he turned into a wolf, he'd probably act more like a puppy than anything else and be easily defeated by a box of dog treats or a tossed stick. There would at least be two other vampires created specifically for the cartoon, a big muscle bound clod with a monosyllabic name (Like "Slab" or "Brick") and of course the seductive (but still child friendly) female character that would constantly be hanging off Jerry's arm and trying to romance just about everyone because she wants to get married or some other nonsense.

 

Of course, let us not forget the heroes of the show, Brewster, Peter Vincent and Amy would all be part of a ragtag team of clumsy vampire hunters. Vincent the leader of the bunch who would make them kooky vampire hunting gadgets that shoot garlic or use light. Of course, it's a Saturday morning cartoon, so no vampires would die or get staked/decapitated, so really their mission would be capture the vampires. Vincent as I said, would be the leader, but he would probably be slightly clumsy, Brewster would be the over eager go-getter of the group, blindly following Vincent wherever he goes. But, he would also unintentionally cause a lot of group grief due to his over eagerness getting them into trouble. Amy would be the doting girl who would be scared of everything and constantly telling Brewster to be careful. Of course a group of heroes has to be accessible and have characters that all walks of life can relate to, so of course there would be new characters created for the show: The token "hip" talking black character, he'd probably be named Jamal or Samuel and would be completely one dimensional, he would enjoy Hip-Hop or hamburgers or possibly "B-Ball" over vampire hunting but would get caught up in all of the adventures. He would always be exasperated in that "What you white folk doing now?" kind of way they always end up doing with these sort of characters. Finally, what group of vampire hunters in a children's show be complete without someone who is physically handicapped? They would have a name like "Wheels" and each episode they would be around to be a heavy handed message about how handicapable people can overcome their disabilities/there are no limitations/people with disabilities are people, too. Let's not forget the addition of the annoyance (aka "comic relief"). Every group of intrepid vampire hunters needs an annoyance. It would probably be a character I'd call Quiggly. Quiggly would be a vampire cat that would end up joining up with Vincent and his vampire hunters and would be friendly to everyone but always end up being an annoyance or causing more trouble than they are worth. But hey, it's a cute kitty kitty that can turn into a bat so they keep it around anyway! Amy would probably be very protective of the cat and keep it as a pet.

 

The Plot to the Cartoon: Instead of the vampire moving next door, it would probably be something very far out and removed from the actual plot of the movie. I figure Jerry and his vampire cohorts would have been trapped in like a magic vase, or haunted tomb, and the only way they can stop the vampires is by trying to collect all the pages of a magic spell book and use it and the vase or tomb or whatever and suck the vampires back in. Of course in the interim the vampires are trying to foil their plot but also make it so that they can be outside all the time to do what exactly? Who knows, but whatever it is you know it can't be good. The motivation behind making it night all the time wouldn't be explored further than "vampires can only come out at night" and not go any further than that. Naturally, at the end of every episode in order to prolong the series the vampires would somehow escape either due to dumb luck or the heroes bumbling. They villains would escape screaming "We'll get you next time! We will prevail!" and the heroes would be like "Aw, shucks the vampires got away!" followed by Vincent giving them a pep-talk before going for ice cream, or some disturbance to the scene by Quiggly.