9 December 2006
tell your friends...
Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Abby Rodriguez
We’re so different now than we were back in 1990 when we were given the World Wide Web by an Englishman, wouldn’t you say? We used to be so normal. We didn’t have everything out there in the world available at our fingertips 24 hours a day. We used to be so boring. “The Brak Show,” its original program “Space Ghost Coast-To-Coast” and most everything on Comedy Central’s Adult Swim programming schedule would be lacking if there was no World Wide Web. The reason you ask? The absurd couldn’t travel as quickly or it didn’t travel at all. For something to be a phenomenom or for humor of this schroomed up nature to get anywhere, it took writers in the New York Times or the USA Today (and that’s only been around since 1982) to catch wind of it. Back in the 80s there were fewer ironic tee-shirts. There were fewer cult classics because the mode of promotion for these items didn’t exist. For anything to be out there, it had to be big — or at least bigger than it is now. A weird looking alien cartoon character named Brak wouldn’t have been seen on television fighting Zorak with a hair sword on TV and there would be no online outlet for it to gain any kind of recognition. He wouldn’t be telling Mr. Bawk Ba Gawk a story that ends, “And that’s why Hansel and Gretel could never get married. Their doctors say their babies would be monsters.” There would have been no platform for Squigglevision, the shaky style that “Home Movies” and “Dr. Katz” used to amazing successful early in the process of Comedy Central introducing more animation onto it’s channel. We used to have “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons,” and now we’ve got these perfectly sick and twisted and amazing toons like “The Brak Show” that bring everything out of leftfield and features talking meatballs popping wheelies, giant killer ants that speak like employees of the Geek Squad and dream of jet-skiing and insistence that dinner parties lead to being forced to take an animal wife.
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