TOMORROW MORNING! 7:00 ON THE WEST COAST! 10:00 ON THE EAST COAST! ARE YOU READY?!?!?!
Tomorrow morning, every half-hour or so, I'll be posting an updated link to
The LiveStream Channel so you can come and watch cartoons with us the way they were MEANT to be watched - ON Saturday, WITH commericals, NO pausing, IN your jammies, ACCOMPANIED by a big bowl of cereal!
Why do we do this?
We live in an age of miracles. An age where nearly every bit of entertainment ever recorded is available at the click of a button, whenever you want to see it. As a Cartoon Nerd in the 80's and 90's, I spent a lot of time hunting and gathering old cartoons on VHS that reminded me of my childhood. The thrill of finding a tape full of something like Trollkins episodes was often diminished by the reality of watching a tape full of those boring, unfunny episodes back to back.
What was wrong? What was missing?
The majority of the cartoons I collected from this era had the same problem - watching them alone at my leisure was okay, but they rarely stood up to the test of time. I still collected, I still loved, but I rarely watched my tapes more than once. Wonderful, high-quality collections of episodes, all commercial-free, carefully edited using state-of-the-art video recording equipment. The tape-traders of the day really knew their stuff, but the stuff we were trading in had diminishing returns.
But then a miracle happened; a video tape simply marked "Cartoons" that I had completely forgotten about. An 8-hour, low-quality tape somebody had made of Saturday Morning 1987; like somebody was going to be out of town but didn't want to miss their cartoons so they set the VCR to record at the lowest quality. The picture quality was pretty bad, like the person who recorded this didn't have cable. All the commercials were intact. I almost threw the tape away, but decided to let it play in the background while some friends and I sorted comic books, just to see if there was anything good on it.
We ended up watching the whole tape and LOVING IT. The terrible cartoons that I had hated in those carefully edited tapes were now somehow ENJOYABLE since I was sharing them with somebody else who also hated them, and we laughed at the terrible jokes despite our "Too Cool For These Cartoons" attitude of the day. We saw commercials for cereals no longer available for purchase and instantly craved sugary cereal. My comics went unsorted that day, as we just sat there eating cereal and watching all 8 hours of that tape - even AMERICAN BANDSTAND AT THE END - and having an incredible time! My love of 80's cartoons had been restored and... modified.
Flash forward several years (maybe a dozen?) to the day I posted in my journal a bit of my thoughts on this subject, where
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aurora77 heard my lamentations and helped me to refine (and execute) our mission. Without her, there would BE no watch-along :)
It was agreed that cartoons of the 80's are great, but they're much better in their natural habitat - kind of like animals in the zoo. A Tiger in a cage is kind of lame, but a Tiger surrounded by a natural habitat is AWESOME!
And so we try to recreate that entire Saturday Morning Experience. Think of it as if we just had a giant sleepover on Friday night, and we're all waking up to watch cartoons together :) Care Bears are great, sure, but they're even BETTER if you choose to keep watching them till the commercial break despite having to go to the bathroom!
JOIN US! Go sign up at
http://www.livestream.com now! This is a test screening to determine if LiveStream is the way to go from now on! We look forward to seeing you there whenever you show up in the chat :)
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