I love Aunt Slappy. The episode about 90's junk tv shows is hilarious.
Such a cool cartoon...
Slappy, the Good Feathers and Pinky and the Brain.
I actually dislike that the Warners are in every episode. Some of their skits are just... not funny, and somewhat predictable. Just an entire 21 minutes of Slappy would make me happy. Haven't found an episode of those three segments I don't like, yet, while there's been a few duds. And every time the Hippos come up, I just fast forward.
Watching this show also made me realize it likely could never happen again. The Warners being wacky and weird would come across as "lolol so random look at how random I am" even though in the Warners' case, it works well because it's not terribly overused, but it would go so wrong these days, because they wouldn't "get" what makes it work. There's also quite a lot of musical numbers, but unlike Family Guy, they're used well and work because the Warners are singing them at strangely inappropriate times while a "normal" person sits and wonders what the heck they're even doing singing. That's another part of the show that could have gone horribly wrong, and likely would be a lot more awful if the cartoon came out these days.
Yeah I feel like most kids cartoons nowadays explicitly avoid direct pop culture references, maybe so they don't date themselves.
Regular Show will have parodies of nerd things (like an expy of Billy Mitchell showing up in a few episodes, and the episode that parodies The Wizard) but overall it's pretty timeless.
Fun fact, the "While Bill Clinton plays the sax" line was penned by the writer's son. He also plays Slappy Squirrel's nephew.
The nice part of the pop culture references in the show is that they're "timeless" references. Nods to old movies, cartoons, actors, stuff that remain relevant and well known forever, versus very specific 90s jokes (unless they're explicitly making fun of 90s culture).
Like, there's a parody of Jerry Lewis in the show as a re-occuring character. What 90s kid even knew who Jerry Lewis was? There's an entire sub character arc about birds reliving old mafia movies and are parodies of the Good Fellas. There's an Orson Welles mouse (and a full on War of the Wolf's parody! And a line by line reproduction of the pea commercial). Stuff like that works to not make the show feel dated. Versus having random 90s crap in there that nobody even remembers anymore.
