In the weeks to come, we’ll be exploring the world of Nick Zedd. I chose to start with Electra Elf & Fluffer . It forces one to retain their patience through occasional banal dialogue that is salt and peppered with nuggets of hilarity, clever wit, sarcasm, super gross stuff, and insanity.
The premise of the show is a classic civie by day, superhero by night scenario. Electra Elf, played by Rev Jen, is an elven superhero. Her sidekick Fluffer is a talking Chihuahua with radioactive pee that paralyzes her enemies. To say the show is low budget is an understatement. (Which is brilliant!) Overlays of dogs licking over a beaver shot, sea monkey monsters, goth band divas that try to take over the world, traces of a very Tim and Eric style in technique and humour way before Tim and Eric.
It’s available on DVD and it gives one the sensation of watching a brilliant show that you and your art star friends made. It’s difficult to believe that someone else made it. Why didn’t you make this, and watch at home with your friends?
My favourite segment to the show is the “One to Grow On” segment that happens at the end of some of the episodes.
Everything good about MTV lives in a world that exists, long since passed, in the memories of those who were there called “Remember When”. It’s a world where Music Television was actually music, on television and where the newest and craziest in modern animation was shown on something called Liquid Television accompanied by shows like Beavis and Butthead, Aeon Flux, The Head, and The Maxx. It is a place that many look back on with great fondness with good reason.
My relationship with MTV was not immediate. It was instead something that I had to acquire through a middleman, my family not having cable. It was something that I could only watch whilst visiting a friend or, in the case of The Maxx and Aeon Flux, by having it taped by my friend Will. It was a weekly ritual, the same VHS cassette exchanged back and forth, previous episodes taped over to make room for my fix. If I had more foresight, I would have no doubt bought extra cassettes so a to preserve the series but, alas, I was not the forward thinking in my youth.
The Maxx remains a show that, upon repeated viewings all these years later, has lost none of its impact. It still works, at least for me. Surely, it can be argued that, in its abbreviated form, it is lacking in comparison to the comic book that spawned it, and there is some truth there. The relationships that tie all of these wounded characters together are explored far less here, especially the relationship between Julie and the titular hero. This can be forgiven though, no television series could have really handled Sam Keith’s twisted, meandering story and psychological musings. The man himself could barely handle it, his panels cramped and scattered, requiring arrows to guide the reader’s eye.
The TV show is, then, The Maxx distilled and in that regard it succeeds brilliantly. Keith’s artwork animates beautifully and the voice work and music are some of the best in a cartoon. It is a starkly melancholy show, something I’m not sure everyone was expecting from a cartoon. Featuring none of the bombast of Aeon Flux or The Head it was instead an exploration of trauma, violence, and, ultimately, redemption. It is a show well deserving of your Saturday morning if you’ve not seen it before and well worth it for those who have; to sit down and look back to the world of “Remember When”.
Just a note: Take a look at this while you can for the YouTube Police’s wrath is swift and brutal.
A 1979 documentary focused on gang culture in the South Bronx. The film focuses on two gangs, the Savage Skulls and the Nomads — whose members have such colorful sobriquets as Fly, Comanche, and Crazy Joe — as well as Bob Werner, a member of the Youth Gangs Task Force that oversaw the area at that time. While it doesn’t spend a whole lot of time really digging into just how violent these gangs were, it does offer an interesting snapshot of New York at the time. Crime in the 70s was on a slow and steady upward climb as the city verged on the edge of bankruptcy and the increase in gang activity was one of the more direct results of an ever growing under class confined to the outer boroughs. Few perhaps realized how bad it would become in the 80s with the introduction of crack until its peak in the early 90s.
Also, notable for the plethora of 70s pornstar moustaches on display.
Note: the video itself is fine, however the language contained therein is of the NSFW variety.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
