Rimmi's Cartoon Challenge #10

Today's cartoon is Talespin. I did watch this cartoon as it aired.



I'm sure I don't need to describe what it's about, but here goes anyway. Talespin was an odd Disney cartoon that took three characters from it's version of Jungle Book and made it into a weird World War 2 era-ish adventure period cartoon. All the characters are anthropomorphized animal characters like all Disney cartoons from that era. Talespin was shown on the Disney Afternoon with shows like Gummy Bears, Rescue Rangers, and DuckTales. I'm not using the f-word, despite the fact that it would fit, because the Internet hadn't ruined everything yet at this poin in history.

I remembered when ABC actually aired the 2 hour premiere of this show, like it had for Rescue Rangers the year before. The movie was generally darker than the show, even though Talespin had episodes with vaguely Soviet(?) countries attempting to shoot Baloo the Bear.



Anyway, the intro starts with Baloo's airplane, a yellow cargo plane that is important to the show. It flies toward a mountain with a small crevasse in between it. In the show, this was wear several armed cannons were placed to fend off air pirates. The main town was hidden here. Many episodes would have Baloo and his crew do their adventure and then rush back into the city.




The intro is fast and shows many scenes from the show. It's hard to poin them out, so I'll jst say that the intro tries to paint the show as fun and adventure filled. At one poin we see the show's most famous image, which is the sidekick's air-gliding surfboard. Kid Cloudkicker would often fly behind the plane as if he was jet skiing. It doesn't make sense but it makes cartoon sense, which is enough for kids.



We get several cast members, including the female boss who hhas to put up with Baloo's lazy attitude. She owns his plane so he has to work despite the fact that he rather party with the monkey. Louie from the Jungle Book apparently meant that he wanted to serve drinks like "you-ou-ou." Shere-Khan was some evil businessman who didn't appear into too many episodes and I was too dumb a kid to know what to make of him. There's also a girl who really liked the radio and some comic relief. He wears a baseball cap backwards, of course.



Other highlights visually is the pineapple trick that somehow takes out the head pirate and Baloo wearing a dress. I still blame you, internet.

The song is lyrically deficient but catchy. It's filled with "Oh-Ee-Oh"s and that's enough. I'll admit that it's not as catchy as the other cartoons I listed.

I apologize to Rimmi for taking so long to write this and for focusing more on the show than the intro. It's hard to describe random scenes sewn together.


These were all great shows. I probably would have picked up the dvd sets except I feel really embarrassed about wanting to own these sets. Not that I haven't done a lot of other things to be embarrassed about. I wouldn't mind watching these series again to see how they've aged.

According to wiki, this show has 65 episodes, which I think is standard for Disney cartoons of this era. It has a late 30s era setting, which makes sense. I always thought it was weird that they made a show for children and they set it before TVs were popular. I was old enough to get it, but I'm sure a lot of kids had to ask their parents about why the Webbigail bear was so into the radio.

There are two episodes of the series that were banned. One was because it was filled with Asian stereotypes, or something. By the way, I like how wiki has to explain this:

The fictitious nation may have been a take on Japan, which attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941. That incident ushered America's entry into the Second World War.

Thanks, I didn't know about that!

The other episode was about terrorism. The weird thing is that this episode, about Baloo delivering a rigged clock to a dictator to start a war, doesn't seem to be that big a deal. Didn't Mickey or Donald have to deliver a bomb in some classic cartoon? And didn't Aladdin have the same "let's start a war between two countries so we can sell amunition to both sides" plot? So why did this episode offend the suits so much? It was the nineties so people forgot about terrorism for the most part. Do I want to know?

The Disney Afternoon went on to make one more good show, an ok show, then a crappy show, then a great show that wasn't like the rest. It also made Aladdin, which I liked but I was getting to old for this stuff at that time. I saw a couple episodes of Quack Pack but I had already lost interest by then (I was a high school senior for frick sakes!) Not that I needed to watch Huey Louey and Dewey ALL EXTREEEEEEMED up.