Apathy Sketchpad

As part of NTL’s free cable package we currently receive a channel called CNX, which stands for “Toonami”. This is, essentially, the animated fighting championship channel. We can now watch a variety of Japanese cartoons which would make Quentin Tarantino go and have a little lie down.

My favourite is, I think, Teen Titans. The show features five teenagers who also happen to be B-list superheroes. (I’ve only heard on one, and he’s Robin.) It’s like the Tiny Toons equivalent of Justice League, and I like it simply because it’s so delightfully silly. The theme music is also hilariously bad, inkeeping with the Toonami Total Quality Rule, which states that any programme with good theme music is bad, and vice versa.

For example, this is a verse of lyrics from the theme tune to Ultimate Muscle:

Fighters join the operation,
From different planets and different nations,
There’s an intergalactic federation,
To monitor the situation.
Catch each and every confrontation,
Only broadcast on this station!

The actual cartoon is almost exactly like WWE, only more realistic. It features talking walruses, wrestlers who are chesspieces, and at least two ancient fighting clans. As in all anime, the secondary characters fall over if anyone says anything slightly surprising, but this one is made unique because it is full of arse jokes. I think the name Ultimate Muscle is in fact a poor translation of ‘gluteus maximus’. It is also the only cartoon I have ever seen use the word flatulence in its theme music.

But despite this, there are even better theme songs on Toonami, one of the best, I think, being Dragonball. The original Dragonball series hasn’t been shown in the UK before, although Dragonballs Z and GT were both reasonably popular. When you see the programme it becomes very obvious why noone bothered to show it before. It has very amusing theme music; just look at this section of the lyrics:

Dragonball!
Friends working together!
A boy and a girl on a struggle for truth!
Dragonball!
So come on our journey!
The fun and excitement are waiting for you!

Of course, I can’t be certain the original lyrics had exclamation marks after every line, but I expect they did. There is quite a lot of background to Dragonball. What little of this I have been able to discern is that every two years twelve Dragonballs (whatever exactly they are) appear on the planet somewhere. Then Goku and his friend have a year to find them or else the world will be destroyed. Unfortunately, the cartoon appears to be set in the year when there aren’t any Dragonballs on the entire planet, so instead Goku is being trained in martial arts by the Great Master Stringfellow so he can enter a competition and battle the smelliest man in the world. (That isn’t his real name of course, but it should be.) We first see the Master watching a female workout video a little too intently, and then he demands to be brought an attractive woman before training will commence. By the end of the second episode we had seen her almost take her top off, heard a lot of sleazy saxophone music whenever she appeared, and been shown a sequence in which Goku watches his friend urinate onto a frog. It is without a doubt the most perverted show on television, if only because it seems to be aimed at children (children being the only people with enough free time and free brain space to learn all the mythological crap that goes along with these programmes).

The very best piece of theme music on the channel is that of Star Wars: Clone Wars, on the grounds that it was written by John Williams who is respected and doesn’t write lyrics with the word ‘flatulence’ in them. Therefore, Clone Wars has to be the very worst cartoon. Samurai Jack gave it a run for its money (by failing entirely to make any sense at all), but Clone Wars took the title by the simple means of only being three minutes long, and most of that being a recap of the last episode.