Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is the metal-as-hell theme from Eek! The Cat. It’s from a composer I’ve never thought of as metal: Nathan Wang, who later composed scores for a bunch of Jackie Chan flicks. Police Story 4: First Strike (the one with the legendary ladder fight scene) is the only Chan movie I’ve seen that was scored by Wang, whose score was replaced by another composer’s score in the American cut of Police Story 4. I’ve never seen Rumble in the Bronx, which remains the most popular movie in America that was scored by him. Wang also scored She’s the Man, the 2006 Amanda Bynes/Channing Tatum rom-com that was based on Twelfth Night.

It’s a shitty time for the animation industry. David Zaslav hates animation. Paramount+’s treatment of animated Star Trek shows brings to mind a Klingon at a tribble hunt.

Corus Entertainment—the Canadian mass media conglomerate that owns Nelvana, the legendary Toronto animation studio whose mascot is a polar bear—has suspended production on all Nelvana projects after Corus reported more than $1 billion in long-term debt in June.

Perhaps due to negative reactions from fans of Nelvana shows, Corus released on September 2 a statement claiming that even though it’s pausing new productions “for the time being,” it wasn’t shutting down Nelvana entirely, and the Nelvana brand will focus on “distribution, merchandising, and managing existing properties.” Like Mr. T, the star of the late ’80s Nelvana live-action series T and T, would have said, that’s a bunch of jibber-jabber.

Ketchup Entertainment rescued both The Day the Earth Blew Up and Coyote vs. Acme from the clutches of the evil albino from The Eiger Sanction. Man, I wish Ketchup would somehow step in and do something to save Nelvana, which was founded in 1971 by Clive A. Smith, Michael Hirsh, and Patrick Loubert, who named their company after Nelvana of the Northern Lights, Canada’s first female superhero.

Nelvana’s legacy is as impressive as Warner Bros. Animation’s. Smith, Hirsh, and Loubert’s company started out as a studio in a ratchet King Street apartment with a camera mounted above a toilet and grew to become what Hirsh described in a 2021 Playback interview as “one of the major drivers of [the evolution of Canada into an animation nation].”

Your first encounter with Nelvana’s high-quality animation on a TV budget was probably via Bob and Margaret in the late ’90s (“‘Bob and Margaret’ doesn’t get its flowers like it should,” wrote Iron Circus Comics founder Spike Trotman on Bluesky) or Ewoks and Droids: The Adventures of R2-D2 and C-3PO, the two animated Star Wars spinoffs the studio produced for ABC’s Saturday morning lineup in 1985. Or maybe it was earlier than that: There are people who say their first experience with Nelvana was either the animated introduction of Boba Fett in 1978’s The Star Wars Holiday Special or 1983’s Rock & Rule.

Meanwhile, there are others who were introduced to the studio via half-hour specials like 1977’s A Cosmic Christmas—one of those folks was George Lucas, who commissioned Nelvana to produce The Star Wars Holiday Special’s 10-minute animated segment because he was a fan of A Cosmic Christmas—and 1980’s Take Me Up to the Ballgame, an animated musical that spoke out against cheating in baseball. Take Me Up to the Ballgame featured Rick Danko from The Band as the singing voice of Phil Silvers, who voiced the Sgt. Bilko-esque role of a deceitful baseball promoter from outer space.

I’m from the generation that first encountered Nelvana when it made Ewoks and Droids. But I barely paid attention to those shows when they first aired because the only animated Star Wars spinoff I was interested in at the time was a show about Luke, Han, Leia, and Chewie, and none of them were ever a part of Ewoks or Droids.

The first Nelvana shows that really caught my eye because their animation and sense of humor were superior to anything Hanna-Barbera, DIC Enterprises, and Marvel Productions (formerly DePatie-Freleng) produced at the time—or anything the notoriously cheap Filmation put out in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s (except Flash Gordon, the only Filmation show that contained above-average animation)—were the Saturday morning version of Beetlejuice and Eek! The Cat.

On ABC in 1989, Nelvana’s Beetlejuice was, thanks to production designer Robin Budd, imaginative—it was less like the 1988 Tim Burton surprise hit it was based on and more like Doctor Who, which Nelvana later attempted to make an animated version of in 1990, but then the BBC pulled the plug—as well as frequently gross. It was a Nicktoon before there was such a thing as a Nicktoon. It’s no surprise that the gross-out humor-loving Nickelodeon acquired Beetlejuice reruns three years after the demise of the show.

The Daytime Emmy-winning Beetlejuice was showrun by the husband-and-wife duo of Tedd Anasti and Patsy Cameron. They both story-edited DuckTales’s first season, and during Beetlejuice, they were largely successful at demonstrating that, as Cameron said to Cracked in 2024, “Beetlejuice wasn’t cute and cuddly. It made fun of cute and cuddly.”

Eek! was even better: Unlike Beetlejuice, it wasn’t based on an IP, and it came from the minds of Bill Kopp, who voiced Eek, and Better Off Dead director Savage Steve Holland, who went back to his roots as a CalArts animator and brought the anarchic style of his animated segments for Better Off Dead, One Crazy Summer, and Press Your Luck to Saturday morning. Eek! followed the misadventures of both an accident-prone and unfailingly optimistic cat and his girlfriend, a fat and equally optimistic cat from the South named Annabelle (voiced in the first few seasons by the late Tawny Kitaen), as they try to survive a cruel and unforgiving world (but their misadventures were never as gory as the One Crazy Summer intro, of course). Eek’s “Great Scott”-style catchphrase was “Kumbaya!”

Kopp and Holland’s creation was one of three Fox Kids animated shows that debuted in 1992 and were, thanks to the regime of Fox Kids president Margaret Loesch, a far cry from the mostly repetitive 30-minute toy commercials and often bland cartoons about caring and sharing I put up with as a grade-schooler in the ’80s. (Ironically, the series of Nelvana animated movies that boosted the studio’s fortunes in the ’80s was both a series of toy commercials and a franchise about caring and sharing: Care Bears.) The other two shows that debuted in 1992 were the groundbreaking and beloved Batman: The Animated Series and Saban Entertainment and Graz Entertainment’s ambitiously written (but, compared to BTAS, flatly animated) X-Men.

Eek! wasn’t made by Warner Bros. Animation, which was, at the time, in the middle of a comeback, comedically speaking, thanks to the high quality of Tiny Toon Adventures and Taz-Mania, a pair of shows Warner produced for Fox Kids. But it felt like it could have been.

Whether it was Eek!, a Better Off Dead animated segment, or the animated opening titles for his live-action spy spoof The New Adventures of Beans Baxter, Holland channeled the irreverent spirit of ’40s and ’50s Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts while bringing his own style to it. For instance, he preferred the sounds of Van Halen—or, in the case of Eek! and its Terrible Thunderlizards shorts, Nathan Wang in Eddie Van Halen mode—over the symphonic style of Carl Stalling and Milt Franklyn.

Holland also had a fondness for rock opera. He and Kopp dabbled in rock opera in “Quadrapedia,” an all-musical Eek! short about a pair of witch twins who are jealous of Annabelle’s modeling career and threaten Eek, Annabelle, and Elmo the Elk in their castle by “releasing the lawyers.” The badass rock opera vocals of singer and Eek! voice actor E.G. Daily, who appeared as herself during the Better Off Dead New Year’s Eve school dance sequence to sing a couple of songs that were written for that Holland movie, were the best part of that short.

My favorite Eek! episode was the 20-minute “Bearz ’N the Hood,” mostly because Nelvana made fun of its sappy Care Bears past. The Squishy Bearz Rainbow Enchanted Fun Minute was the favorite show of Wendy Elizabeth (voiced by Daily), the pigtailed daughter of Eek’s owner, a single mom known only as Mom (voiced by Elinor Donahue from The Odd Couple and Get a Life). The Squishy Bearz were a quartet of saccharine bears that, just like the Care Bears and the Smurfs, included one grouchy member: a French-accented pragmatist named Pierre.

The show had a bizarre rule regarding Eek’s speech: When he was around other humans, Eek was able to carry conversations with them, and none of them ever noticed that he was a cat who could walk on two legs. But when he was around Mom and her two kids, he behaved more like a cat in the real world and was unable to speak to them. That meant when Wendy Elizabeth came down with a bad cold in “Bearz ’N the Hood” and was too sick to get an autograph from the Squishy Bearz at the shopping mall in McTropolis, he couldn’t express empathy to her in a human way like he usually does to others outside the family’s house, and he could only wordlessly listen to her as she tearfully wished for an autograph from her favorite cartoon stars.

Eek’s journey to get for Wendy Elizabeth the bears’ autograph turned into the original version of The Fugitive: He and the bears became falsely accused of stealing at the mall a newly unveiled statue of the mayor of McTropolis, and as they went on the lam, Eek, who found the bears to be kindred spirits, attempted to clear his and his new friends’ names. (“Bearz ’N the Hood” premiered a year before director Andrew Davis’s terrific film version of The Fugitive introduced the plight of Dr. Richard Kimble to a new generation.) In an amusing scene that would never have been done on Nelvana’s The Care Bears Family, a blue-collar housewife responded to the bears’ Broadway-style singing and dancing (while they were in her neighborhood to look for disguises to hide their identities) by firing a BTAS-style tommy gun at them.

Eek! isn’t as well-remembered as BTAS and the Saban/Graz X-Men, but its 20-minute episodes from the first season and its 10-minute episodes from subsequent seasons have been posted in their entirety by Eek! fans on Internet Archive and YouTube, and several of them are worth a look. However, even though Eek! frequently pointed out how fatphobic many characters were regarding Annabelle’s physique (the ending of “Quadrapedia” basically says that being full of so much hate towards a successful fat woman just because she’s fat will age you), it also had a weakness for a few very ’90s fat jokes about Annabelle’s eating habits, and those haven’t exactly aged well.

The suspension of Nelvana’s production activities has caused me to revisit many of the things I liked about the studio’s work, particularly its refusal to turn into the Canuck equivalent of Filmation, whose limited animation shortcuts were hilariously skewered by Toby Danger creator Tom Minton in the 1997 Animaniacs short “Back in Style.” But instead of rewatching Eek! or Beetlejuice, I’ve chosen to watch for the first time a couple of Nelvana productions I didn’t watch when they first aired.

The short-lived Cadillacs and Dinosaurs adapted Mark Schultz’s Xenozoic Tales comic about a post-apocalyptic future where dinosaurs have re-emerged.

The other Nelvana production I just started watching is the four-season Teletoon show Detentionaire, the slapstick saga of Lee Ping, a 10th-grader trying to clear his name while serving afterschool detention for a year for stink-bombing and vandalizing the school auditorium, a prank he didn’t commit.

The entire runs of both Cadillacs and Dinosaurs and the serialized Detentionaire are streamable on Nelvana’s Retro Rerun YouTube channel and Tubi. But I hate how Retro Rerun removed the opening and closing credits from each episode of Cadillacs and Dinosaurs and Detentionaire, and I’m annoyed by how Tubi doesn’t carry Detentionaire’s first episode, so the second episode, a story about football tryouts, is mislabeled by Tubi as the series premiere, and the third episode, the introduction of the skater clique at the dystopian high school where Detentionaire is set, is mislabeled as the second one, and so on. My favorite place for experiencing Cadillacs and Dinosaurs and Detentionaire for the first time has ended up being Internet Archive.

Bonus track: Detentionaire opened each week with a solid pop-punk theme by the duo of Asher Lenz and Stephen Skratt. I’m not a fan of Retro Rerun’s elimination of it from Detentionaire episodes.

Over on Internet Archive, I’ve ended up loving the look of Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, from the above-average animation for the epic-looking triceratops stampede in the “Dino Drive” episode to the attractive Hannah Dundee’s bare midriff. I can’t remember why I ignored Cadillacs and Dinosaurs when it first aired on CBS. For about a couple of minutes before I wrote this sentence, I thought it was because in 1993, I was still mad at CBS for canceling The Flash.

But then I remembered that I was watching Picket Fences and Late Show with David Letterman on CBS at the time—so I must have forgiven CBS by the time I got sucked into the courtroom battles between Fyvush Finkel and a young, pre-Devil in a Blue Dress Don Cheadle on Picket Fences each week—and that the only Saturday morning lineup that appealed to me that season was Fox’s lineup.

El Santo wrote an in-depth post about Cadillacs and Dinosaurs for his Made Animated series in 2020. The thing that bugged him the most about Cadillacs and Dinosaurs was the unwieldy terminology that pops up in the dialogue (“You must trust the Machinatio Vitae. Trust the machinery of life.”), while the thing that bugs me the most is the show’s casting of white voice actors as characters of color. The role of dorky Governor Toulouse, a Black politician who’s comically unprepared for the triceratops stampede in “Dino Drive,” would have been perfect for Phil LaMarr, but he wasn’t in demand as a voice actor in 1993, so the part went to a white guy. Otherwise, I agree with what Santo said about the show.

“The downside: while Cadillacs and Dinosaurs trying [sic] to aim for more lofty mature fare, it’s handcuffed by its aim to be for kids,” said Santo.

For instance, Jack Tenrec, a politician-hating garage mechanic with a loyal pet allosaurus he calls Hermes, gets into a few brawls with one of his adversaries, the mulleted Hammer Terhune, the muscle for Wilhelmina Scharnhorst, Jack’s main nemesis and the most corrupt out of the three governors who rule the City in the Sea (formerly New York City). But he never gets to punch Hammer in the face. Goddamn, CBS Broadcast Standards and Practices was so uptight.

Commando and Die Hard writer Steven E. de Souza, who developed Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, wrote the show’s first episode, in which Hannah, a scientist, gets drawn into Jack’s crusade to protect dinosaurs from poachers and prevent Scharnhorst from causing another environmental catastrophe. But the wit that makes Commando and Die Hard fun to watch only rarely shows up in that series premiere’s dialogue.

I keep wondering if the series premiere would have had snappier and feistier dialogue if de Souza and Nelvana had made Cadillacs and Dinosaurs for Teletoon, which allowed Detentionaire to get away with a lot of shit. The Detentionaire series premiere briefly shows the lead character pissing in a toilet with his back turned to the audience. That would have never been allowed on a Saturday morning network cartoon.

Animation-wise, Detentionaire is less impressive than Cadillacs and Dinosaurs—“I think [Detentionaire uses] Toon Boom, but those walk cycles are just terrible, and their movements still have the so-called ‘flashy’ look about them,” wrote My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic animation director Rexis Liwanag in a review of Detentionaire for his Blogspot blog in 2012—but it’s a better written show.

Detentionaire co-creator Charles Johnston looked back at his experiences in boarding school. He and co-creator Daniel Bryan Franklin formed out of those experiences a densely plotted whodunit set against the sinister backdrop of a high school where the new principal is a cyborg drill sergeant (voiced by Seán Cullen, formerly from the now-defunct Corky and the Juice Pigs, a band I remember from its guest spots on MADtv) and the mascot is the Tazelwurm, a red mini-dragon that slinks around the halls and lives in the school vents.

Johnston and Franklin referred to their show as “24 in high school.” Sure, I would call it that if Lee Ping grabbed a classmate during recess, shouted “Who are you working for?!” at him, and then waterboarded him.

To me, Detentionaire is not at all like 24. It’s more like Parker Lewis Can’t Lose—future Dexter: Resurrection showrunner Clyde Phillips’s surreal Ferris Bueller’s Day Off ripoff, which I ended up liking way more than FBDO when I was a teen—if it were a caper movie every week and Parker was both much less confident and an Asian Canadian kid.

After I first learned about the existence of Detentionaire in the late 2010s, the things that interested me the most about the show—even though I’m way past the target audience—were its Asian lead character and the fact that this Asian lead in an animated project isn’t a superhero with superpowers (think Jake from American Dragon: Jake Long) or a highly trained warrior (think Rumi, Mira, and Zoey from KPop Demon Hunters) or a stereotypical brainiac. He’s just an ordinary kid who gets unremarkable grades and is surrounded by some kids who are smarter than him, whether it’s Biffy, the burly thug in detention who becomes Lee’s tech wizard, or tenacious school news co-anchor Tina Kwee, Lee’s love interest.

Many of us Asian American viewers weren’t Jake Long or a KPop Demon Hunter or a Poindexter when we were teens. We were more like Lee—or the late-aughts Bay Area kid whose ambition in life is to become a Spike Jonze-style skate filmer in 2024’s highly entertaining Dìdi, filmmaker Sean Wang’s semi-autobiographical directorial debut based on his Taiwanese American upbringing in the East Bay suburb of Fremont.

One of the best jokes in Detentionaire’s first episode is that the prank the unpopular Lee had nothing to do with catapults him to one of the most popular kids at A. Nigma High School. But he doesn’t give a shit about being popular. All he cares about is tracking down the culprit who framed him. Meanwhile, tons of girls want to date him. An overachiever who wants to be accepted by the popular girls picks Lee to be her steady boyfriend without even getting to know him first. The skater clique, whose short attention spans annoy Lee, mistakenly thinks he’s some sort of legend in the history of pranks on the faculty of A. Nigma High. The skaters don’t understand that he’s always been too scared to do any pranks because the faculty includes his strict mom, who teaches math.

If Johnston and Franklin hadn’t cast an actual Asian voice actor as Lee, I wouldn’t have given Detentionaire the time of day. I’m not a fan of white voice actors taking away roles like the role of Lee from performers of color. Lee almost wasn’t played by an Asian actor. Evan Smith, a white actor who voices multiple characters in the Monster High franchise, voiced Lee in Detentionaire’s unaired pilot, but then he suddenly became unavailable due to his work as a performer aboard Disney cruise ships. Jonathan Tan took over as Lee, and wow, it’s so much better than watching an extremely white voice coming out of a Black politician’s mouth during Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.

I have a shit-ton of episodes of Cadillacs and Dinosaurs and Detentionaire I need to finish, and I want to begin watching for the first time my Peacemaker Season 1 Blu-rays to catch up with Season 2, so this is the end of the line for me. Next week, I’ll be discussing Nick at Nite, which turned 40, and Gregiffer Stevens’s remarkable essays about Nick at Nite and Nickelodeon. (I first learned about the existence of A Cosmic Christmas from one of Stevens’s half-hour, non-Nick-related essays. Stevens said, “The animation [in A Cosmic Christmas] is pretty great: lots of fluid motion; a lot of unconventional, intentionally ugly character designs.”) In the meantime, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs and Detentionaire are worth a look if the work of Nelvana has intrigued you. They’re a couple of visually dynamic and charming examples of the Toronto-based fount of creativity we are losing because the Nelvana bear has been put to sleep.