Have a care, little bear-type buddy! It looks those two little peas in a podcast have wandered into Jellystone national park. If I didn't have a better reason, I'd say that it must be Yogi Bear season! Everything should be a-okay if we let them stay, until they're on their way! No thanks BooBoo, there's no need for you to talk. Sinceriously, we're good.
After getting a distress signal from the ____, Ben and Zane beamed up their pal Nic to track their most dangerous foe yet, ASAP. An evil half-black-hole threatened to destroy the universe, but as they started planning their ambush, the Cartoncasters found their own voices strangely soothing. After getting heavily distracted, yet again, they regained focus when a cyborg ape threw his brain at them. It was kind of hard to focus on anything else, really. But through a combination of freezing temperatures and zero gravity, they managed to prevail. With apologies to Steve Miller Band.
Cartoncast Evil Incorporateeeeed! The Cartoncasters invite you all to behold our new Joke-inator. By flagrantly brandishing sitcom formula with an ironic edge, this device creates cartoons at an almost fiendish pace. And just when you think you've adapted to the formula, it fires an out of place song at you, causing disorientation, irritability, and in rare cases, thrombosis. Don't worry though - at least once an episode, you'll be rescued from the monotony by an animal secret agent in a funny hat. God bless you, Perry the Platypus. God bless you.
You will often hear Ben and Zane relentlessly make fun of shows we don't like, or get excited and rave about shows we do like, but we're starting a new hundred episodes with an oddity: relentlessly making fun of a movie we genuinely enjoyed, and which less cynical people find emotionally resonant. It's beautiful, it's meaningful, it's short, and it's just so, so full of its own message. Enjoy the cherry blossoms.
No beating around the bush on this one - we both adore this show. Jackie Chan is a knockoff Indiana Jones that gets inducted into the MIB to hunt the 7 magical crystals and make the world safe from a dragon demon statue that summons shadow ninjas. Ease off the throttle JCA - you had us at Hak Foo. Enjoy as we rightly praise a show that captured our hearts unlike any other.
Ben and Zane were enjoying a cheese tour of northern England when they bit into a local sample. Something was...off. The cheese was crumbly, but not in a good way. In fact it felt and tasted like clay! It started moving on its own, just very very slowly. Rather than touch it further with their hands, the Cartoncasters set up a Rube-Goldberg-esque contraption to do away with the dreary dairy. Ah well, at least they still had each other!
It was Ben and Zane's hardest case yet, a real Riddler of a mystery. They would need some help from the local photographer, Devan, to get to the bottom of it. And it paid off - she had taken a treasure trove of pictures and video, exhaustively researching the very same case. She found that there was one common factor behind the string of disappearances of villains in the city: massive amounts of guano left behind at the scene. But what could be doing this? Who would drain the blood of dozens of hard-working megalomaniacal job-creators, yet be smart enough to evade capture. But in a vast city of people throatily declaring "I am Batman," where could they find the elusive Man-Bat?
Ben and Zane probably shouldn't have wandered through the desolate streets of London that late at night. They were chasing a hot tip about a vampire running amok, just being generally creepy and nihilistic. Luckily, local professor of the supernatural, one Dan Caves, was willing to outfit them everything they'd need to survive the task. Silver crosses, impossibly heavy guns, and over-the-top faux british accents that'd send the ranks of the undead running. Cor and blimey, police girl.
Finding themselves under immediate threat of roboticization, Ben and Zane enlisted the help of Joshua to navigate the post-apocalyptic hellscape their humble village had become. Despite the victorious battles that soon followed, nothing ever seemed to get better. They made up slang and listened to the ancient music to entertain themselves, all the while planning how to defeat their eternal enemy: the French.
The bizarrely-memetic Bee Movie was an odd spike in the twilight of Jerry Seinfeld's career, and one he oddly but in a lot of effort to make happen. What is it that's so memeworthy? Why did Jerry Seinfeld do it? Do the tenets of Bee Law inherently favor yellowjackets or bumblebees? These questions, and many, many more are asked in this Bootlegg'd segment.
Ben and Zane were investigating the inside of their freezer when, wouldn't you know it, they got locked in and had to reminisce about a show they vaguely remember watching once. They called up Nate and Craig to join them in this Secret Room and, rather than have them help the Cartoncasters out, they all talked about pop culture references for a while. Also they own a store now.
The Cartoncasters were trying on various costumes at the mall, judging the quality of their respective bulges (someone had to), when they were enraptured by a performance in the middle of the mall. It was none other than Jem, pop idol extraordinaire. She dazzled onlookers with her fashion, glitter, fortune, and fame, not to mention the supercomputer in the back of the set working the lights. The show turned out to be truly (truly truly) outrageous, and the two knew that no matter how many concerts they'd go to, no one else would be the same. And the holograms.
It was finally time for Ben and Zane to get new anime body pillows to snuggle up with, so it became necessary to brave the greatest fantasy adventure setting: the marketplace. The merchants were formal and entertaining, but their bartering system was too complicated and the church kept showing up to accuse the Cartoncasters of various sins and abominations. Buying things was easier back when you just had to make a sacrifice to the wolf god.
Well, it finally happened. Mortality caught up with Ben and Zane and they were sucked into the Ghost Dimension (tm). Who knew eating that many raw eggs could be dangerous? Thankfully a slightly-angsty yet highly uninteresting ghost, Inviso-Bill, happened to point them in the right direction to get home. He seemed to be in some weird undead-plane feud with local vampire Vlad Plasmius. The Cartoncasters wisely decided to head back to their mortal coil, despite Vlad looking really, really cool.
Ferngully: The Last Rainforest has long been a blind spot in the Cartoncast catalog, but one we took pleasure in rectifying. This was the clearest expression of a single idea we've encountered yet, and is fondly remembered. As a piece of environmentalist literature, it falls somewhat short of a full message, but as a piece of entertainment it passes with flying colors. We found the "romantic subplot" to be especially compelling, if a little queasy. However, as Zane wisely said, our children, and our children's children, are 'the next great elder to be in the future'.
The Cartoncast was updating their servers, and everything was going smoothly until Ben and Zane found a virus hiding in the code. They tried to get in there with some forceps, but he was pretty wily. Finally, they sent in a Guardian, programmed to mend and defend, to defend its friends, to befriend to the end, and to end the virus. It did the job just fine, but it kept showing up when they played games, hacking the variables, radicalizing the AI, degenerating the graphics, until they couldn't even win at Pong. They banished the guardian back to the Net, confident it would never come back...
The Third Annual Cartony Awards are upon us, and it's a real "Slam Dunk." Eh? Eh? Our crack team of egg scientists have been working at a steady boil all year to bring you the finest cartoons. So take out your lab notebooks and be ready to write down any evidence that, once again, we have no idea what we're doing.
Well, it finally happened. The grain silo around which The Cartoncast headquarters was built finally burst open, releasing three ancient beasts (I'm gonna go with dogs?) into the world. These malicious beings of anarchy, chaos incarnate, ran amok in the headquarters, confounding the mild-mannered employees to the point of insanity. Only with the help of some good-natured lab rats and a chipper young possum could Ben and Zane seal them in their prison tomb to sleep another thousand years. Or until it got renewed, whichever came first.
Ben and Zane were just... just so tired you guys. It's been a long week. The Cartoncasters were looking forward to some well-deserved rest, spending time with a few friends, maybe go on a pizza run. Unfortunately, on Friday it looked like they would have to spend the whole weekend running around and dwelling on an easily-solved problem. After a real slog on Saturday they asked mom for advice, but it was all too reasonable. Finally, on Sunday they learned the true meaning of friendship or something. Which they forgot by next Friday.
Ben and Zane decided to take a hiatus from watching cartoons and popped down to the local basketball court. Despite some very troubling ethnic stereotypes, they had a reasonably good time, until Hanamichi Sakuragi showed up. This Kuwabara-looking goofball dramatically jumped into the backboard about fifty times before the Cartoncasters decided to pack it up. They would have asked him why he was doing it, but you just don't question a basketball genius.
