Cynical Cinema

Last year, at about this time, Alliance Films released a box set called the Original Christmas Classics. It contained Christmas shows and movies with which we are all, I’m sure, familiar. The claymation stuff - Rudolph, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, the Frosty movies. It was a really nice nostalgic set. This year, Alliance is releasing The New Christmas Classics on a similar box set on November 4th. This time, the content of the box is decidedly less familiar. George of the Jungle, Casper The Friendly Ghost, Gumby, and Fat Albert are not generally thought of as Christmas Classics. At least, not that I’m aware.

The first series in the box is Gumby. This is the first time I have ever seen Gumby, a show from the 1960s about a weird little dude made out of clay with a pointy head who travels into books with his weird little clay horse friend. In this manner, the two manage to travel through history, observing the events as they take place and in some cases affecting the outcome. The books they enter are sometimes classics, like A Christmas Carol, and other times they are books that have never existed. Like The Big Snow Hill. The first episode appears to have nothing to do with Christmas at all, it is about Thanksgiving and the Mayflower. The second episode sees the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock. This episode features some 1960s-style questionable history and attitudes toward Indians, and the theft of a bunch of corn.

Then there are episodes with no dialogue, that just see Gumby running around and falling into toasters and cement mixers and then putting himself back together. He and Pokey the horse visit fairy tales involving poor kings and princes and the goose that lays the golden eggs. There is an episode called In a Fix that involves a bunch of strange bird-like clay creatures that hop around. It is a genuinely bizarre collection of Gumby episodes, and of the 12 that are featured on this set, only three are even tangentially related to Christmas. The main theme of the Christmas episodes is Ebeneezer Scrooge, who keeps escaping from A Christmas Carol to wreak havoc on Christmas. Apparently the Grinch wasn’t yet the anti-Christmas villain yet in 1967, so Scrooge became the bad guy. He keeps trying to kidnap Santa, or at the very least discredit him. In one particularly memorable episode, Scrooge uses the word “humbug” as a verb, a noun, a preposition, an adverb, an adjective, and an epithet. Sometimes within the same sentence. Another great one involves a couple of little clay building blocks who drive a tank that shoots lasers. And then there are nine other bizarre episodes of Gumby that may appeal to stoners in some way.

The next series in the set is Fat Albert. And because every single cartoon, ever, does a Christmas episode that rips off A Christmas Carol, this one is no exception. The boys are trying to put together a Christmas pageant at their clubhouse, a shack in the junkyard. The mean old Scroogey owner of the junkyard wants to bulldoze the shack, and hates the kids, and is miserly with money, and is generally a nuisance. A young couple with no job and no money end up in the shack to have their new baby, because there is nowhere else for them to go. There is a Tiny Tim character named Marshall, the son of the downtrodden couple, and there are some standard Fat Albert style cheesy lines. “You remind me of school at vacation time - no class!” Of course, in the end, the old Scrooge sees the error of his ways, and all is mended. There are two other Fat Albert episodes on the DVD, neither of which has anything to do with Christmas. One is about a girl who is embarrassed about her poverty and her rundown house, and the other is about Fat Albert’s friends helping him with his chores so he can go to the zoo and feed an elephant.

Then there is George of the Jungle. This show is reasonably funny, for a kids’ cartoon, and the six episodes here are pretty good. But again, only two of them have anything to do with Christmas. Again, we get the Christmas Carol cartoon cop-out, as George is visited by three goats. Get it? Goats? The Goat of Christmas Presents? You see, he has tried to make Christmas happen for some irritating city girl who lives in the jungle. Not being familiar with Christmas, he gets overwhelmed by the Christmas spirit, and makes every day a Christmas celebration, much to the chagrin of his friends. He is visited by three ghosts. Three ghost goats. Who show him the error of his ways, blah blah blah, and everything turns out fine.

The other George of the Jungle episodes involve a crazy rash George can’t scratch, and a weird baboon who hogs George’s heroism for himself. Although he calls himself a marmoset, he’s clearly a mandril. He has the coloured nose and all. There’s one about a magical bathroom that gets stolen, and all the apes begin disappearing from the jungle. And then there is the George’s Birthday Present episode where George has his first birthday ever. A premise which is virtually identical to the one in the episode where he tries to provide Ursula, the annoying city girl, with her Christmas.

And that brings us to the final series in the box set, Casper. Not the TV series, but a made-for-TV movie called Casper’s Haunted Christmas. This is an 80-minute movie with the computer-generated Casper and his computer-generated uncles taking up residence in Kriss, Massachusetts. Get it? Kriss, Mass? Anyway, after a Randy Travis theme song and the appearance of a ghost who is clearly Slimer from Ghostbusters, we get into the movie. Apparently, some giant green ghost god will revoke the ghost licenses of the uncles if Casper doesn’t scare someone by Christmas. You see, ghosts have to scare people, and blah blah blah. At the very least, in this movie they make the point - Casper does, indeed, scare people all the time when they discover he’s a ghost. But in this case, it is scaring people on purpose that matters. He has until Christmas to do so, or the four of them will be banished to some dark-space purgatory for eternity.

This set-up takes about seven minutes. Which means that the next 73 minutes need to be filled with something. And that something is cheesy, awful jokes. Like the kind I used to see on Hallowe’en cards when we were forced to exchange them with our classmates in the second grade. See if these phrases make you laugh - smellular phone! Shocking days until Christmas! No? Yeah, me either. There is an incredibly painful few minutes of dialogue about “scare mail”, the “ghost office”, and the dead letter department. Basically, it is the same show that Casper used to be when it was a cartoon, years ago, only much worse. And with slightly better animation.

Overall, with a total of 22 episodes of various series in this box set, only 7 of them actually have anything to do with Christmas. Of the seven Christmas episodes, five of them are takes on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. If you count the Casper movie, six of the seven involve three ghosts. And very few are worthwhile. But the box set could, conceivably, keep your kids entertained from December 1st all the way until Christmas.

Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing Shrek The Halls on DVD November 4th. I sort of get it - it’s Christmas soon, and all these things are hitting the shelves a couple of months early because there are some crazy Christmas fanatics who want to load up on Elmo’s Christmas and Fat Albert’s Christmas and Shrek’s Christmas so they can watch a new one every day between now and December 25th. I guess. I don’t really understand the Christmas fanatics, and I also don’t understand most Christmas DVDs. Like this one. Shrek The Halls is a 22-minute made-for-TV episode that is, I suppose, a spin-off of the successful series of Shrek movies. It isn’t the Star Wars Holiday Special, in terms of being truly awful, but it certainly seems equally pointless.

It was pointless to make this episode. The main joke here, as it was with the last Shrek movie, is the lame “ogres fart and burp and eat gross stuff” joke. He’s farting. Get it? The baby ogres eat slime that smells gross. Get it? And then there is the same plot as there is in every Shrek movie. Christmas gets chaotic, Shrek gets angry, he fights with everyone, Donkey gets sad, Fiona admonishes her husband, Shrek feels bad, everyone makes up and everyone comes together in one big ball of happy. So…why was this even made? More to the point, why is this on DVD? It’s 22 minutes long. Why wasn’t this a special feature on the DVD for Shrek 3? Or thrown into the New Christmas Classics DVD alongside Casper, Fat Albert, Gumby and George Of The Jungle? How did this 22-minute clip merit it’s own DVD?

Frankly, I can’t understand how this even got approved for television. Here is a sample of the wittiness of this show - the song to close it all out:

“Shrek the halls with Puss and Donkey,
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la.
Christmas time can be so wonky
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la.”

If you couldn’t have written something like this when you were eleven, then you were a pretty slow eleven-year-old. And that means that even the slowest of eleven-year-olds will find this DVD unfunny, because they will recognize that it could have been written by a classmate. Or by some Hollywood writer with forty seconds to spare between takes on the set of Cavemen.

I am getting pretty sick of reviewing Madagascar. I reviewed it when it first came out on DVD, and I said it was “meh”. It then came out on Blu-Ray September 23rd, and I said it was “meh” with nicer pictures and a few more special features. And now, Madagascar, Holiday Edition is coming out November 4th, from Paramount Home Entertainment. What makes it a “holiday edition”? Well…there is a cardboard sleeve over the DVD with a red border, and what look to be Christmas lights. There is also a special feature called The Penguins In A Christmas Caper. So…Christmas edition, then?

No. Here’s the deal - that Christmas Caper short? It’s on the original DVD. And on the Blu-Ray. In fact, there are no new special features at all. Everything on this DVD was on the original DVD. Except for that red border and the Christmas lights. That’s the only new thing in this entire package. So why bother? Well, it puts it in a better location on store shelves in time for Christmas, and people might pick it up, but more than that - it calls attention to Madagascar 2: Escape To Africa, which hits theatres this Friday. So consider this a success, Paramount - Madaagascar 2: Escape From Africa is in theatres Friday. Tell your kids!

As a child, I found My Little Pony to be very perplexing. I could not understand why girls in my class had these little plastic horses, and combed their hair at recess, and played at tea parties with Sparklestar and Twinkletush and all the other bizarrely named creatures. Dolls I got. Sort of. They’re like little people, and you can pretend like they are actually talking, and you can live out your fantasies through the world of dolls. Like we boys did with army men and transformers. I suppose I knew, deep down, that My Little Pony fed into every little girl’s desire to own a horse (or, a pony, as most would say), much the same way transformers fed into a little boy’s desires to own a robot. And that the little dinosaur figures I played with were a manifestation of my own latent desire to own a Dimetredon. God, how I wanted a Dimetredon! He could have fetched my slippers, and store solar energy in his fin to keep me warm after those long hockey games where my feet froze, and he could have bitten my sister and eaten some neighbourhood cats…anyway.

Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing a special holiday treat for those girls out there who have not outgrown My Little Pony. And I’m sure they exist. After all, My Little Pony couldn’t still be around if there weren’t still some freaky members of the sparkly-pink-pony brigade still kicking. Much like the comeback of Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, there are 30-year-old nerds of both genders who won’t let some of this old school crap die. And so we get A Very Minty Christmas. It is a Christmas story, starring Minty the Pony. Yes, the pony’s name is Minty. The characters of My Little Pony, you see, are either named as though they were the long-lost children of Frank Zappa, or like strippers. I am certain, although I didn’t see her in this episode, that there is a My Little Pony horse named Vanilla, and one named Candi, and one named Diamond, and several more named Sun Station and Moon Unit and Paisley Horseradish. Unfortunately, those characters do not appear in A Very Minty Christmas. Instead we have to deal with characters with even more irritating names, like Thistle Whistle, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, and Sparkleworks.

I am a firm believer that no child playing with toys named things like “Sparkleworks” can grow up to lead a normal, adult life. Being exposed to this kind of stuff in childhood will lead to an adult lifetime of dotting your i’s with hearts and happy faces, an obsession with cutesy emoticons, the purchase of Anne Geddes paraphernalia, and a collection of CDs by the Olsen twins. And that’s a best-case scenario. At worst, a career as a stripper, dancing enthusiastically to songs by Aqua, ABBA, Air Supply and the Starland Vocal Band, saving one dollar bill from each customer to be pasted into your scrapbook with shiny star stickers and glitter, next to your magazine cutouts of a shirtless Ryan Seacrest. And that path can only lead, inevitably, to your being murdered in a back alley somewhere in a glitter-for-oral-sex deal gone awry.

Anyway, A Very Minty Christmas is a far-too-early Christmas release that opens with the most irritating theme song this side of the new Dr. Phil theme. I rewound the theme song about nine times, because I was convinced that I had heard the word “darkies” used in the song. I am still not convinced that I didn’t hear that word, but then I was drinking a little at the time. I could swear they sang “there’s a twinkle in the darkies”. I don’t want to add racism to my litany of complaints against the My Little Pony cartoon, but it certainly didn’t start things off on a good note for me. The show stars Minty the pony, who accidentally shatters the candy cane that will summon Santa Claus, and must go on a quest in an inexplicable hot air balloon to replace it. The rest of the ponies, who are all apparently sorority girls at a slumber party, must set off after her to rescue her from the perils of single-person hot air balloon piloting. Before they go, however, they make a few important decisions. Like, pink glitter? Blue glitter? Silver glitter? They settle on pink and mint. And then they set off on their rescue mission.

The most fascinating character in the show is Rainbow Dash, who is either British or Southern, with a completely undecipherable accent. If she is British, then she must be the matronly mother of this bizarre sorority house. If she is Southern, she seems to be the matron of this bizarre brothel. There is also a pony reminiscent of Starchild Ace Frehley in Kiss And The Phantoms Of The Amusement Park, called I believe Starcatcher. Throughout the episode, the ponies are continuously giving each other medals. My girlfriend (a reformed My Little Pony enthusiast), watching this with me, explained this to me - “they’re show horses - whaddya expect?” I thought this was a prescient statement, a window into the culture that is My Little Pony, one from which I will be forever excluded.  I should have let my girlfriend review this one too.

There is another episode on this DVD too, a bonus episode called “Dancing In The Clouds”. It’s just as irritating. Oh - the box set comes with a little plastic horse, Minty, wearing a Santa hat. So you may want to pick it up after all. Good luck with the rest of your life.

VeggieTales is usually pretty good.  And The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything, another feature-length film, is pretty good too.  The characters you might be used to seeing in the VeggieTales TV series are not all here - the cucumber, the gourd and the little old grandpa pea are the only ones who really factor into this movie.  But that is enough to make it fun.  And that’s really all this movie is - fun.  Kids like watching fun stuff, and VeggieTales delivers with this film.  Elliott, Sedgwick, and George are three bus-boys at a restaurant where people come to see some pirate-themed dinner theatre.  The idea that the kids look at the stars of the dinner theatre production as Big Stars and Heroes is a stretch, but a charming and amusing one.

Of course, our three “heroes” are anything but.  They try out for the dinner theatre play, so they can appear to be superstars to the kids in the audience, but they fail miserably.  Then, through a series of strange leaps in logic and bizarre circumstances, they find themselves in a rowboat on the open seas in the seventeenth century, tasked with rescuing a prince from an evil pirate at the behest of a young princess.  But, as we know from the title of the film, they are The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything.  So they laze around and do nothing.  Until eventually, like in all films of this nature, they have a crisis of conscience and do the right thing and save the day.

This saving-of-the-day involves some solid comedic moments, and solid comedic songs (”Rock Monster” being one of the better ones).  Giant rock children, killer cheese doodles, and some amusing pirate dialogue exchanges keep the ball rolling throughout, and the gaps in plot and leaps in logic can usually be forgotten pretty easily.  The three stars are compelling (considering that they are vegetables), and the banter among the three is quite good.  Nothing about this movie makes it a classic, but it is about what one would expect of VeggieTales.  It’s funny, it’s cute, and it’s better than most kids’ fare.

I have one complaint about the DVD, however, and it’s a big one.  The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything is a movie based on a song of the same name from the TV series.  That song was hilarious, it was one of the best they have ever done, and if you were going to spin one song into a feature-length movie, this one almost makes sense.  But it appears nowhere on the DVD.  It appears in the movie, in short little musical stings, but not the whole song, and never with lyrics.  Even in the credits at the end of the film, the song starts, it’s a cheesy punk-sounding cover of the tune, but even that doesn’t go through the whole song.  It goes through about thirty seconds of the tune, and then stops.  I was going to put a link up to the actual song here in this review, but I can’t seem to find one on the internet.  How disappointing!

When I was a kid, I loved The Smurfs.  I had smurf sheets, smurf curtains, little plastic smurfs and little stuffed smurfs.  My favourite smurf was one that ran across our lawn outside our kitchen window.  My mom, looking out the window, freaked out a little.  You know that moment in cartoons where someone sees something bizarre, and goes to their liquor cabinet and pours all their booze down the sink because they think they are going crazy?  It was like that.  Mom grabbed the can of frozen juice from the freezer and read the ingredients to see if it contained PCP or LSD or any other three-letter drug that could possibly have produced this amazing hallucination.  Because there was, really, a smurf hopping across the lawn.  It turns out it was a squirrel that had found a tiny little stuffed smurf, grabbed it in it’s mouth, and run across the lawn.  The sun reflecting off the squirrel made it virtually invisible, and lo and behold, there was a smurf.  Being a small child, I was worried because the appearance of a real, live, hopping smurf surely signalled the arrival of Gargamel hot on that smurf’s tail.  It was a frightening proposition for me.  I didn’t want to face Gargamel as a six year old, I preferred to wait until I was a little more mature and could perhaps find a way to defeat the evil wizard.

Well now, at the age of thirty, I decided to confront Gargamel once and for all, and I rented Season One, Volume Two of The Smurfs, more for nostalgia than because I thought it would still be good.  And through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, I still very much enjoyed The Smurfs.  Season One, Volume Two contains the best episode of The Smurfs ever, the one where Lazy Smurf gets bitten by the purple fly, and he turns purple and hops around and says “GNAP”, and bites other smurfs on the tail, turning them into GNAP smurfs as well.  Amazingly, I remembered the episode a lot differently than it actually is - the show does not actually show the smurfs biting each other on the butt.  I suppose that would have violated the family-friendly ethos of the smurfs.  It could have led to kids biting each other on the butt, and where would that have led society?

The one thing I was really hoping for was the option to watch the episodes in either English or French.  The DVD didn’t have that choice, but it’s a great idea for future issues of Smurf DVDs.  As I recall, most of the English smurf voices are high-pitched, little-kid voices.  So when Gargamel appears, they scream “It’s Gargamel!”  like a chorus of second-graders.  In French, they all have deep adult voices, which lends a certain gravitas to the phrase “Oh non!  C’est Gargamel!”  The smurfs have cooler names in French too.  “Jokey Smurf” is a silly name in English.  “Schtroumph Farceur” just sounds so much cooler.  Likewise “Schtroumph Bricoleur”, and many others.

I may well be giving this series more credit than it deserves, simply because of an innate bias that has existed since childhood.  But I do believe that it is smurfin’ well worth your smurf to smurf up this smurf before it’s too smurf and you have smurfed all about smurf.

The first episode of Lil’ Bush: Resident of the United States begins with a spoof of the Sarah Silverman “I’m f***ing Matt Damon” bit from the Jimmy Kimmel show. Only in this case, Lil’ Bush is f***ing John McCain. Because McCain was in the news at the time. It’s a painful, unfunny spoof to kick off the second season of a show that is, in itself, painful and rarely funny. Paramount Home Entertainment releases Season Two of Lil’ Bush on October 14th, and although it is slightly better in the second season than it was in the first, it is not exactly great. It’s mostly better because of the addition of a few more recognizable characters. Lil’ Al Gore becomes a prominent character, as Lil’ Bush and his cronies (Lil’ Rumsfeld, Lil’ Condoleeza Rice and Lil’ Cheney) give Gore a swirly in the toilet, and are caught on tape by Lil’ Wolf Blitzer. Why Wolf Blitzer? Who knows. It strikes me that if they wanted to bring in some new figures worth mocking, they could have done better. Like a Lil’ Keith Olberman or a Lil’ Bill O’Reilly. But then, I wondered why, in the first season, there was no Lil’ Karl Rove.  I’m getting pretty tired of typing the word “Lil’”.  But here goes more.

There is now a Lil’ Dennis Kucinich, a Lil’ Mitt Romney, a Lil’ Rudy Giuliani, and a Lil’ Fred Thompson. All of which make very brief appearances. You can tell when the episodes are being made simply by the characters that appear. The St. Patty’s Day episode was clearly made during the Democratic primaries, what with the Lil’ Obama - Lil’ Hillary fights. The problem is, it’s tough to tell when this series was made, because of the cultural references from different eras. It appears to be set during a time when George Bush, Sr. is president, because it makes references to He-Man. But then, moments later, the show makes reference to last night’s episode of House. It’s a little disconcerting.

The best part of season two, however, is the addition of a character who ought to have been added early on in the series. And, in fact, he should be as much a part of Lil’ Bush’s inner circle of cronies as is Lil’ Rumsfeld or Lil’ Condoleeza Rice. Lil’ Karl Rove makes a big splash when he is introduced, as a solitary, demented, anti-Democratic maniac. The bit with Lil’ Rove is pretty smart, certainly better than the average fare you get from this series. But although the Lil’ Rove episode is very good, the rest of the series is not. It’s OK, but the satire is not nearly as biting as it ought to be with this subject material. It feels lazy. Like, Lil’ Al Gore wants to save the environment. And Lil’ Barack Obama keeps saying “yes we can”. And Lil’ John Edwards shows up to chase skirts. It isn’t exactly brilliant, it’s merely an obvious reflection of the stories that are in the news at the time. And it feels like just about anybody could do that. And why would you want to buy the box set of a TV show that you could have produced yourself?

Paramount Home Entertainment releases another Spongebob DVD on October 14th. WhoBob WhatPants features a special episode of Spongebob where he screws a bunch of stuff up, makes his friends angry, decides to leave town forever, develops amnesia, and becomes mayor of New Kelp City. He runs afoul of some gangster fish who appear to have just emerged from an underwater version of West Side Story. I am going to put this out there right now: Spongebob is still one of the best shows on television. Not just one of the best kids’ shows, but one of the best television programs, period. And it’s actually…smart? Like a kid-centric Simpsons or Family Guy, Spongebob remains consistently hilarious and totally watchable. I didn’t pick up this DVD for the kids, I grabbed it for myself. I love this show.

Included on this DVD are five other episodes of this awesome show. One where Plankton turns Mr. Krabs into a baby in order to obtain this formula for Krabby Patties, and one where Squidward becomes disfigured in an accident, but his disfigurement leaves him looking handsome, and the whole town of Bikini Bottom goes crazy for him. There is an absolutely fantastic episode, when a harsh wind blowing through the town makes music when it passes through Spongebob’s pores, which attracts jellyfish to him. This creates one of the most memorable lines I can remember in recent Spongebob history - “they’re attracted to my whistly holes”. It also leads Spongebob to build a strange yet awesome underwater version of Stonehenge. Or, Spongehenge. Then there is the episode featuring the United Organization of Fish Against Things Fun and Delicious, which bans Krabby Patties, and the episode where Spongebob’s cousin comes to town and messes up everyone’s life.

The special features are nothing interesting. The best one is a series of four shorts, entitled “What If Spongebob Was Gone?”, but each one is about 20 seconds long, and it’s fairly worthless. But the DVD is worth picking up just for the Spongebob show itself, which remains one of my favourites. Go Spongebob!

Alliance Films releases 3-2-1 Penguins: Save The Planets on October 14th. While 3-2-1 Penguins is done by the same people who do VeggieTales, this series does not make it to the level of VeggieTales in terms of humour and fun. The fun in this series seems to be derived simply from the fact that there are penguins. And they’re in space. Whee! Simply having a ridiculous premise seems to be enough for 3-2-1 Penguins. The characters are all the standard ones you find in cartoons all over the world, especially the leader of the penguins, a big dude with Elvis hair who is a complete idiot. So…he makes the wrong decisions, and the rest of the crew have to compensate. Nothing we (or our kids) haven’t seen hundreds of times before.

This particular DVD features three episodes of the show, and the humour in each individual episode comes from more ludicrous ideas. So…they’re on a planet, and it’s populated by talking sheep! Hilarious, no? They throw peanut butter at their computer! This is about all the funny they can manage. And it isn’t that much. And then at the end of each episode, the human characters, Jason and Michelle, learn some kind of moral. Like, the grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence. It’s a pretty irritating show, and it’s no VeggieTales.

Anyone who watches South Park knows that without Eric Cartman, this show would not be close to what it is. And now, Paramount Home Entertainment and the people behind South Park have acknowledged this fact with the new DVD set The Cult of Cartman: Revelations. A series of 12 episodes, the very best (or worst) of Eric Cartman, combined with Cartman’s philosophies of life. Philosophies like, of you are sinned against, be prepared to retaliate a thousand-fold. Which is exactly what he does in the opening episode, the truly shocking and heinous “Scott Tenorman Must Die”. This is Cartman’s most despicable (and therefore most brilliant) moment in all of South Park. Watching him lick Scott Tenorman’s tears at the end of this episode might be the freakiest, creepiest moment in TV history. Well, next to that time a drunken Joe Namath hit on Suzy Kolber on the sidelines during Monday Night Football.

Every episode here is a winner, and each one comes complete with an introduction by Cartman himself, inviting you to worship at the altar of the most despicable character in cartoon history. His wisdom is suspect, his morals are corrupt, his motives are selfish at best and heinous at worst. But boy, can this kid ever preach! Great episodes like “Awesome-O”, an episode where Cartman dresses up as a robot to put a mean practical joke over on Butters, but upon finding out that Butters has an incriminating video tape of him, he must stay in his robot costume for days on end until he can find that video. The Tourette’s episode, where Cartman pretends to have Tourette’s Syndrome so he can swear whenever he likes. Then there’s the one where he pretends to be mentally handicapped so he can win money at the Special Olympics. And, although it isn’t the most despicable moment in Cartman’s career, it is likely the most offensive: The episode where he contracts HIV through a blood transfusion, and then purposely gives it to Kyle when he laughs at him.

I am not exactly ready to worship at the altar of this horrible, horrible little boy. But I am certainly ready to watch him doing what he does, and I will indeed sign up for his fan club. The Cult Of Cartman: Revelations DVD set comes with a sticker for your bedroom wall when you pray, and an official membership card for the Eric Theodore Cartman Society. All of this is great. All of Cartman is great. Well, in the worst possible way.