Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Clerks, the cartoon ::
by William the Bloody
Way back in the year 2000, ABC took a chance and produced the Clerks cartoon, based on the Clerks movie by Kevin Smith. Having been picked up by a major network and not say, HBO, they had to make several compromises for broadcast such as no cursing and Jay and Silent Bob weren't drug dealers any more. Despite all of this, ABC almost immediately went back on their deal and only aired two of the six episodes they helped to make (episodes #2 and 4, oddly enough). All six shows are available to buy on DVD with the full run of extras Smith is known to shower upon all his releases.
If you've never seen the film Clerks, and have no idea about the premise, here you go. Basically, it's everyday life in two store clerks, namely Dante who works in a convenience store and Randall who works for the video store next to it. They get visited and tormented by Jay and Silent Bob, two dealers who hang out on the sidewalk in front of their shops. The film revolved mainly around normal, everyday type stuff, like dealing with the public and their idiotic questions and behavior, making movie references all the while. The cartoon also touches on this, but takes it up a notch in that bizarre cartoony sort of way.
The Good: Clerks the cartoon has such a weird sense of humor that it fit me like a glove. Also, it ran in prime time, so it was able to make jokes of a slightly more "adult" nature, like sex and gay jokes (not in the bad way, don't worry). Movie references still abound with such films as the Bad News Bears, Temple of Doom, the Last Starfighter, Outbreak, Star Wars, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the Matrix and many others. Oh yeah, the best Matrix references ever. Not the overused kind. The show also got the original actors from the movie to reprise their characters, Jeff Anderson as Randall, Jason Mewes as Jay, Brian O'Halloran as Dante and Kevin Smith himself as Silent Bob. There were many well done guest appearances by celebrity voices such as Alec Baldwin as millionaire industrialist Leonardo Leonardo, Judge Reinhold as himself and numerous NBA all-stars (?!?) as themselves. The animation style is sort of a streamlined and customized version of some of the art in the comics by Jim Mahfood, and it holds up pretty well. Every episode also benefited from an original score, and NOT just recycled music clips! Props to you boys on that, really. Each episode also gets a full commentary by many of the people involved in the making including Kevin Smith, Jeff Anderson, Brian O'Halloran, Jason Mewes, Scott Mosier, Dave Mandel and Chris Bailey. They mainly discuss ABC and what went horribly wrong, but there are also many episodic goodies to hear.
The Bad: There were a small handful of animation goof ups, like Randall throwing away a soda can, and yet when we cut back to him he still has it in his hand. But these were pretty minor. SOME people might get offended by the Challenger joke and ALL of the gay and lesbian jokes. The "running gag" of the "why are we walking like this?" get repeated WAY too often in the second episode that it gets nauseating. The Disclaimer at the start of every episode stating that it's all fictitious and the celebrities are mainly impersonated tends to get annoying. If you watch them all back to back, you can sorta see that this style of humor may have been exhausted after a while and that you can kind of be glad that there are only six of them so that it's ended before it gets redundant.
Overall, I love it, I really do. It's got a fun sense of humor not often explored these days in any television show, not just cartoons. A movie goon like me could just absorb all of the references all the live long day and laugh my keister off. I have to say, I found the second disc (episodes 4,5, and 6) to be a little funnier than those on the first (the Korean ending on episode 4 anyone? holy cow talk about funny!), but they were all fantastic.
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