http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/01/don-martin-in-department-store-4.html
Boy, Don Martin sure was nice to kids. He just knew what we thought was funny.
Women's undergarments are inherently funny and we would have to read gags like these under the bed. We really thought we were getting away with something.
I wonder why so few animated cartoons are this purely entertaining? Maybe Sponge Bob is the last one to try to do crazy stuff that kids naturally crave.Hot wet fertilizer is good kid's fodder too of course.
If you go back and read this whole story, you'll see that there is no story - not in the way animation execs and "writers" think stories should be - predictable. Do Martin loves to set things up to make you think the story is going to be about something predictable, the takes you into left field.
There's a place for plots and resolutions if you are good at writing them and can make them actually entertaining, but I think most kids would take pure controlled lunacy over formulaic animated cartoon plots any day.
In the classic tradition of the Three Stooges, there is no resolution or happy ending to this great story. The protagonist (Fester Bestertester) just gets shot off into the distance and we don't know what happens to him. We also forgot his best friend Karbunkle.In an animation studio you'd be made to go back and explain everything. you'd also have to explain Bestertester's and Karbunkle's personal histories and why they have the personalities they do, what traumatic events in their childhoods caused them to be such unbalanced creatures. We'd need some pathos too. By the time you stuff your stories with all this filler, there's no time left for "hot Wet Fertilizer", Fat Lady or lingerie jokes.
And the latest horror that is inflicted on cartoon creators is "aspiration". Execs in the last few years have decided that kids want to watch cartoons about characters they can look up to, rather than laugh at. I can't imagine anything so counter-intuitive. "The Three Aspirational Stooges".
