Cecil (who's, like, square -- dig?) meets Gogh Man Van Gogh, the "Wildman of Wildsville."
Since it was first released back in 2000, Image Entertainment "Special Edition" DVD of Bob Clampett's BEANY & CECIL has become a prized collector's item, with used copies nowadays selling on Amazon.com at a starting price of $122.00. It's an amazing disc, and one I recall with mixed agony and ecstasy because it was so jam-packed with data, it loaded up in some early DVD players like peanut butter. The memory of that wealth of material has become misleading with time, and it came to my attention only recently that the disc contained only a dozen actual B&C cartoons, along with a lot of very interesting and worthwhile supplements! Twelve cartoons is equal to only two of the original BEANY & CECIL VHS tapes that were released in the 1980s by RCA/Columbia Home Video, each of which collected the equivalent of two episodes -- three cartoons each, and occasional bumpers and other filler.
For the record, the twelve cartoons included in the Image Entertainment DVD (and the VHS volumes in which they were originally issued) were: “Beany Meets the Monstrous Monster” (VOL. 3), “So What and the Seven Whatnots” (VOL. 9), “Beany and the Boo Birds” (VOL. 4), “Super Cecil” (VOL. 1), “Wildman of Wildsville” (VOL. 1), “The Spots Off a Leopard” (VOL. 1), “Beanyland” (VOL. 11), “Cecil Meets the Singing Dinosor [sic]” (VOL. 1), “The Mad Isle of Madhattan” (VOL. 12), “Dirty Pool” (VOL. 10), “D.J. the D.J.” (VOL. 13), and “Snorky - There’s No Such Thing as a Sea Serpent” (VOL. 13).
Wot the heck! That means there's still a ton of BEANY & CECIL not yet available on DVD! The scorecard of available B&C toons on DVD amounts to this: VOL. 1 (three), VOL. 2 (none!), VOL. 3 (one), VOL. 4 (one), VOL. 5 (none!!), VOL. 6 (none!!!), VOL. 7 (none!!!!), VOL. 8 (none!!!!!), VOL. 9 (one), VOL. 10 (one), VOL. 11 (one), VOL. 12 (one), and VOL. 13 (two).
I don't have all the individual B&C VHS volumes, but fortunately, I have the majority (including the swell gift box edition of VOLUME 8, which came with a nifty Cecil hand-puppet), so I've started burning these onto DVD-R for myself. The B&C cartoons are deeply hard-wired into my brain, as they came along at just the right time in my childhood; they gave me a love of puns that almost certainly pre-dated my discovery of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND, and I had all the toys -- the Beany copter hat (I must have lost all those propellers on the roof the first day I had it -- programmed obsolescence at its finest), the Cecil jack-in-a-box, the hand puppets, the B&C ukelele, the Cecil Soaky bottle, the comics, the talking dolls. Watching these cartoons again, I am astonished by their enduring vitality and by how they invigorate me. Thirty minutes of cartoons is usually my limit -- certain classics aside, cartoon features are almost always too long for my liking -- but I find that I can burn three volumes of B&C (that's 18 cartoons, plus bumpers) to disc in a sitting and still be ready for more. They are smart, hip ("So What and the Seven Whatnots" is not just a Disney gag, but a Miles Davis reference!), silly, and brilliantly designed -- and the secret, I think, is as simple as that.
In the course of my dubbing project, I discovered that my attic collection harbors three episodes of the 1988 BEANY & CECIL Saturday morning revival series masterminded by John Kricfalusi. These I hadn't watched since I'd recorded them 18 years ago (!), and the picture quality was enough to remind me of how the cards were stacked against this program. I watched the first episode on the local Cincinnati network affiliate. Said affiliate dumped the show after that single broadcast, so I had to seek out the next two episodes on the Dayton network affiliate, which was thankfully part of our cable package at the time. But after those second and third episodes, the new BEANY & CECIL disappeared from the Ohio airwaves and went over the rainbow in toto. I've read online that five episodes were aired, but the truth is: five cartoons, but only three episodes. An equal number of shows were produced -- "Cecil Meets Clambo," "The Courtship of Cecilia," and "The Golden Menu" -- that never received their public unveiling.
There are things about the Kricfalusi B&C that don't quite work -- notably its updating of Beany into a more expressive, pro-active character, which I think misses the joke of the poker-faced Beany and reeks of network "advice." I also wish that the show had been as punny as it was funny. But, over the course of the three shows I have, it was clearly coming more fully into its own. At the time, when the show was cancelled, I paid an anonymous call to Bob Clampett Productions and left a message on their machine bemoaning the cancellation and congratulating them on their effort. I didn't know who Kricfalusi was at the time, but it wasn't terribly long after the cancellation that I saw in TV GUIDE a color picture of two new cartoon characters called Ren and Stimpy who were about to be unveiled on Nickelodeon. I didn't make the connection to the new BEANY & CECIL, or even the new MIGHTY MOUSE which I also enjoyed, but I instinctively knew that I was going to like these guys; I clipped the picture, posted it on our home bulletin board, and became quite the REN & STIMPY buff for the first couple of years it was on the air.
One of the reasons I'm writing about BEANY & CECIL today is in the hope that somebody out there has the unaired Kricfalusi episodes, and might entertain the idea of a swap of some sort. I don't usually do this but, as I say, Beany & Cecil are characters that touch a special nerve in the old Watchdog. For those of you who never saw Kricfalusi's B&C revival, You Tube is making available the amusing episode called "The Bad Guy Flu." Fun and disease are just a click away.
It seems that The Watchdog is on a cartoon binge
He's making puns and having fun out on the lunatic fringe
He's watching BEANY & CECIL morning, night and noon
And now he's hoping you'll help him find
Those John Kricfalusi tooooooOOOOOOOOONS!
