Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Fred Flintstone as a mob boss! Yogi's pal BooBoo as a terrorist! Jonny Quest as the subject of a gay child-custody battle! All these outrages and more can be found on Cartoon Network's hilarious, hallucinatory "Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law."
May 29, 2003 | Forget for a second that we're talking about an animated short on Cartoon Network that airs around the witching hour, a time when not one kid in North America is burning the midnight oil -- at least not with his parents' permission. And forget also that we're talking about an ornithological superhero who wears a three-piece suit and litigates for a living.
Rather, pretend we're witnessing a bizarre discourse on popular culture, fictional systems (including their explosion) and psychosexual norms. Because it is then that Larry McCaffery's theories on metafiction and intertextuality -- the mechanisms of postmodernism outlined in his seminal work of literary criticism, "The Metafictional Muse" -- come into play. If, as McCaffery argues, "we inhabit a world of fictions and are constantly forced to develop a variety of metaphors and subjective systems to help us organize ... experience," then metafiction is the pomo tonic for our time, a Derridean (the name-dropping will end soon, I promise) playfulness that "becomes a deliberate strategy used to provoke readers to critically examine all cultural codes and established patterns of thought."
To get more specific, we're talking about "Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law," the show that has reimagined Fred Flintstone as a Soprano-style mob boss, Scooby and Shaggy as potheads with the munchies (of course, we always knew that was true) and Yogi Bear's companion, BooBoo, as a gay radical terrorist. And that's just for starters. Michael Ouweleen and Erik Richter, the Ginsu-sharp creators of "Harvey Birdman" (part of Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" block, which airs Mondays through Thursdays from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m.) are busy assaulting the previously "locked systems" (McCaffery again) of everything from classic TV sitcoms and dramas to Hanna-Barbera cartoons and famous movies. Birdman himself is a revision of a "third-rate superhero" from the obscure 1967 Hanna-Barbera cartoon, "Birdman and the Galaxy Trio." Everything old is indeed new again.
What McCaffery's pomo theorizing has to do with the outrageous "Harvey Birdman," which premiered a batch of three new episodes last week, depends on who's watching. To the adolescent who sneaked out of his bedroom to catch Cartoon Network's groundbreaking bloc of mature animation, it most likely doesn't ring a single bell. But to pop-culture fans immersed in the "Matrix" franchise -- a metafictional smorgasbord that draws on Jean Baudrillard and William Gibson -- it might have more resonance. If you're Richter and Ouweleen, it partially explains how and why your show is able to explode and reinscribe narrative convention and history at warp speed.
"It's weird how lightning-quick you see something on TV and have an immediate understanding of where it is going to go," says Richter. "You know what's going to happen. People who are watching immediately can fill in the blanks, and you don't have to take the time to actually show what happens. That formula allows us to take an off-ramp. Is that postmodernism? Probably. When we first started doing this it was like, 'Will anybody get what the hell any of this is?' And the answer is, not always! But we're trying. We're not trying to be intentionally obtuse. We're really trying to tell a pretty straightforward story most of the time."
"I've actually been surprised by the broad appeal of it," adds Ouweleen. "It's broader than I, for one, had thought. And you've got to give people credit. This is our common language, man, and people are really savvy. And so they can catch a lot of what we're referencing. We're not really setting out to do a lot of inside jokes, but when we tend to go a little bit more obscure I'm finding that people are following it. Big time."
That is most likely because there is literally so much to follow. Part of this deliriously intertextual show's broad appeal can be traced to the fact that it covers such broad territory, jumping from conventional cartoon to genre-busting experiment to inside joke, onwards and backwards, all in the span of about 15 minutes. That's one hell of a compression rate and, ironically enough, it is sometimes too much to take in one sitting.
"We are blazing a new path and, in a sense, we aren't," explains Richter. "'Adult Swim' is much more free-form as a bloc than anything on TV has ever been. But it's no different than 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' or you know, [the '70s comedy troupe] Firesign Theatre. It's just that now there's a corporate substratum that has allowed this to happen across a three-hour block of time -- and that's new. And if you tune in, you can be assured that, whether it's 'Home Movies' or 'The Oblongs' or 'Futurama,' it's going to be different and feel of a piece in a weird way. Because we're all kind of talking to one another."
Like a shotgun blast, "Harvey Birdman" explodes outward into postmodern reconfigurations. "The Dabba Don," referenced above, embroils the cast of "The Flintstones" in a mobster universe. Even minor characters, such as the various creatures that mundanely function as household appliances, are called to the witness stand to testify against Fred's illicit gambling and "white slavery" empires; "You're dead to me, can opener!" Fred shouts at one poor dinosaur that rats him out. Birdman himself, pressured by organized crime to defend Flintstone, ends up with more than one severed head at the foot of his bed; only one of them (Hanna-Barbera's Quick Draw McGraw), however, is a horse. Meanwhile, in the fan favorite "Shaggy Busted," Scooby Doo and Shaggy are unmasked as stoners, nabbed at the beginning of the episode in a live-action "Cops"-like bust as they drive down dank streets in their smoky van (Cheech and Chong's "Up in Smoke" anyone?) while blasting the opening riffs to the Doobie Brothers' (get it?) "China Grove." And that's just the beginning segment. We haven't even gotten to Birdman's opposing counsel, Spyro, a literal drama queen who phrases most of his arguments in Shakespearean meter (his version of Shaggy and Scooby's pot bust is titled, "As You Smok't It"). Or Hanna-Barbera bit player Magilla Gorilla propositioning Birdman in prison. Or the heavy-lidded montage featuring Scooby and company's various pizza binges and herbal appreciations. Or the bizarre resurfacing of a decades-old Tab commercial spotlighting Birdman's more-than-platonic relationship with his favorite one-calorie soda.
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