Tuesday, November 6, 2007

The Best Damn Cartoon Period



You all know that I'm not the biggest television watcher, but when I find something I like, I watch the hell out of it. Being that The Daily Show's writing and overall funniness is going down, the Colbert report is only funny 2 or 3 days out of the week and the Writer's strike is gonna have us watching re-runs for what looks like the next few months, I've had to find another show to watch religiously, and that show is The Boondocks.

I watched the entire first season and have rented the DVDs at least twice, but so far, this season has got to be the funniest ever. Too bad we couldn't have this show at the same time as Chappelle's Show. While Chappelle was funny as hell, we all know that it could go over the top and nose dive into being completely silly or fictional, which served as both its gift and curse at times. But with Boondocks, each topic it covers and every person it mocks, is never really that far removed from the truth.

The latest episode was the one that I've been wanting to see since they leaked the Season 2 preview on YouTube, "The Story of Thugnificent."



Similar to last season's "The Story of Gangstalicious" the episode revolves around a gangsta rapper character. While Gangstalicious was obviously based around an East Coast rapper, Thugnificent is based on a rapper from the "Dirty Dirty" repping for a city called Terra Belle (terrible), Georgia.

Now, if you been down with my blogs since the Myspace days you already know how dead on I thought that Gangstalicious piece was with what was going on at the time. This Thugnificent episode rings a bell too. From the moment he opened his mouth he reminded me of at least four Southern rappers. If not appearance wise, definitely behaviorally.

What makes it even funnier is the fact that show creator Aaron McGruder went as far as to get Busta Rhymes and Snoop Dogg do voice overs in the episode as Thugnificent's crew, and get them to appear as themselves (with Nate Dogg on the hook) on the hilarious "Eff Grandad" diss record. Getting people to act as caricatures of themselves has been an ongoing theme this season with folks like Mo'Nique and Snoop Dogg willingly re-acting their coon roles in the episode that mocked Soul Plane. Is it me or are they not realizing they are clowning themselves? Maybe they are and I'm just thinking too hard about what is obviously supposed to be a joke.

Damn I can't wait until next weeks "Invasion of the Katrinans" episode.

2 comments:

Janee TMB said...

I watched the rest of this episode today after you sent me the link to the first part -- I'm going to make it a point to start watching the show Mondays... Hey whatever happened to David Banner's cartoon? Does that still come on?

Anonymous said...

david banner's cartoon will start coming on again in jan. 08 on adult swim.