Friday, June 11, 2004

Cartoon Chronicles: Teen-Sleuth Toons #1

When your job consists of standing in an open space for an extended period of time with very little interaction with others aside from asking them to fill out a questionaire... you start to think things. Weird things. You realize stuff you never figured out before. You compose full thoughts on subjects you don't often think about... And on that note, I'd like to introduce The Cartoon Chronicles. What exactly are the Cartoon Chronicles? Well, the CC are a series of short essays I'll be writing for this dandy little online journal, basically reminding you all of some cartoons you used to watch or probably never even saw. The first topic I'll be covering dates all the way back to the 1960s and 70s; Hanna Barbara's cartoons about mystery-solving teens. Now, when you think of a cartoon about teenagers solving mysteries, Scooby Doo might be the first thing that pops to mind. While Scoob's gang are arguably the most popular, they weren't the only meddling kids with a lot of free time on their hands. For the next couple of days, in alphabetical order, I'd like to discuss some of Hanna Barbara's other popular shows with a similar theme. Let's start with... The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan Charlie Chan is a world famous detective, but his 10 junior-sleuth kids want in on the action. Henry, Stanley, Suzie, Alan, Anne, Tom, Flip, Nancy, Mimi, and Scooter Chan (somebody's father liked to get down) idolized their father, and wanted to be famous detectives just like him. So naturally, they interfere with their pop's cases whenever possible. Aided by their stealthy, transforming van and a dog named Chu Chu, the 10 kids of the Chan Clan often found a clue overlooked by their pop, and took that as a reason to solve the mystery themselves. They weren't bad, mind you. In fact, they were usually close to solving it all by themselves, but their dad naturally did his job and concluded the mystery himself. Nearly a dozen Chinese characters animated into a Hanna Barbara cartoon before the more politically correct times of the 1990s... full of radical and insultful stereotypes, right? Well, not so much. The Chan Clan got away cleaner than Apache Chief (but that's for another entry). There weren't any horribly fake accents or pretending not to speak English every other word (something that gets on my nerves in cartoons featuring non-white characters). Charlie Chan is from Honolulu (check out the Charlie Chan book series), so he and his kids actually had American accents. On top of that, they casted actual Asian-American voice actors to play the whole family... at first, anyway. Cast members had to be replaced, Jodie Foster came into the mix at some point, ect. Despite this show having the benefit of being the only "Teen-Sleuth Toon" without a Fred or Shaggy lookalike, it fell into a pattern that mimicked all of the shows that came before it. Perhaps the downfall of the Chan Clan is that it made its debut at least 2 years after Scooby and his gang did. In fact, out of the Teen-Sleuth Toons I'll be going over, Chan Clan is one of the latest. The mystery thing had been done before, 10 kids was far too many characters to keep track of, and the episodes got a little formulaic. It lasted a good 2 seasons, but never got around to being as popular as it should've been. So hey! If you've got Cartoon Network's Boomerang, I'd suggest catching it. Next time: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids (Never heard of it? There's a damn-good reason why...) Much Love

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