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So typically this spot would be used for the show's theme song.
Unfortunately, the only version I could find online
was poorly upscaled and had serious audio/video sync issues.
This is very
annoying for me, as it's one of my favourite theme songs of all time.
You can, however, find an audio version of the second, and superior, theme here,
and please to enjoy
this static title card.
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It's the yellow-and-black
sheep of the Disney Afternoon lineup. Nobody seemed to pay attention
to it at the time, and it seems to have been all but forgotten;
erased from history and collective memory by wistful Gen Yers,
nostalgic Disneyphiles and ashamed Disney Corporate executives alike.
Naturally, it's my absolute favourite of the whole bunch. For the
longest time I thought I was its only fan in the entire world, and I
still get that feeling not infrequently to this day.
It was one Saturday morning
in early December. My family had just put up the Christmas tree and
were planning to spend the weekend decorating it. I was up early that
morning and, as was often the case, spent some time channel surfing
for something interesting on television. As it happened I stumbled
upon a bloc of Disney programming to find a show I'd never seen
before called Raw Toonage. The prospect of a Disney show of
which I was unaware was somewhat unusual, so I was naturally rather
interested to see what this show was. It turned out to be a sort of
cartoon variety show, where familiar Disney icons would come
onscreen, and, as a way of “hosting” the show try to teach some
lesson (nothing boring or didactic; this was stuff like how to be
better pirate with Don Carnage from TaleSpin or
building a Rube Goldberg machine for brewing coffee with Ludwig von
Drake and Gosalyn from Darkwing Duck) while interjecting
various assorted cartoon shorts in the mould of the Golden Age
theatrical shorts. The shorts themselves were mostly random, one-off
affairs, although there were two reoccurring series: He's Bonkers
and Marsupilami. The
former starred Bonkers D. Bobcat, a character I recognized from other
places, while the latter I had never heard of. It
would have been
physically impossible for me,
given my prior experiences and
dealings with Disney and its style of animation, to
ever come up with even the most loosely accurate, broad-strokes
prediction for what Marsupilami turned
out to be.
The
story of Marsupilami and how he came to be a fixture, however brief,
of Disney's tentpole Saturday Morning franchise is one I've told to
countless people who made the unfortunate judgment call to engage me
in discussion about it time and time again to the point I know it
instinctively. Now that I have a blog set up to tell exactly this
kind of story, I get to tell it to you
in the most complex and detailed form yet! Lucky you! See, what's
most immediately interesting about Marsupilami when compared to the
other Disney luminaries of the time is that, in point of fact, he's
not a Disney character in
the slightest.
And I don't mean that in the typical Disney sense where they take a
fairy tale or other public domain story and turn it into an obnoxious
rubbery Broadway-tinged animated blockbuster, no:
Marsupilami is literally the intellectual property of another
company. This
means that,
for quite possibly the first and only time, we're looking at Disney
putting out a licensed
work.
Which is, to understate the obvious, somewhat unheard of. So now, in
the December of the year that marks 20 years since Marsupilami first
showed up on Disney-made TV and the 60th anniversary of the character
himself, it seems the perfect time to tell my version of this
unbelievably twisted tale.
For
the benefit of readers who might not know, in
Europe, Marsupilami
is
something of an icon. Part of a triumvirate of legendary and
ubiquitous bande
dessinée
charactersXfranchises alongside Tintin and Asterix, he is an
important cultural symbol across continental Europe and
French-speaking territories. Marsupilami
first appeared in the 1952 Spirou
et Fantasio
album Spirou et
les héritiers.
Spirou et
Fantasio is
an ongoing Belgian graphic novel serial that is an iconic part of
Belgian and larger
Northwestern European culture that has been published consistently
since 1938. From 1947 to 1969, the series was written and drawn by
André Franquin, considered one of the greatest Franco-Belgian
cartoonists, and this period of the book is generally seen as
something of a golden age for
it.
Franquin's work on Spirou
et Fantasio
is generally comparable to that of the more famous Adventures
of Tintin
series by Hergé, if only to point
out how different the two are.
Both are globetrotting adventure
stories featuring young, noble,
boyish
protagonists with cynical, sarcastic companions, but where Hergé
ranged from apolitical and borderline reactionary to tentative
utopianism, Franquin was often righteously and very loudly angry, and
spent a significant portion of his page count shouting about social
injustice (though admittedly far more in his later self-published
work than in his stories for Spirou
et Fantasio).
The contrast between the two is
embodied in their differing art styles as well: While Hergé is
famous for the tight linge
claire
approach his pioneered, Franquin's work is bright, colourful, flashy,
bouncy and caricatured.
In
the
album
Spirou et les
héritiers,
Fantasio
learns he has been mentioned in the will of his late uncle, but must
compete in a series of trials with his unscrupulous cousin Zantalfio
in order to claim the inheritance. The last challenge requires
Fantasio to travel to the fictional South American country of
Palombia and locate the mythical jungle creature known only as the
Marsupilami. Marsupilami is a curious being indeed, resembling what
can best be described as a cross between a cheetah and a monkey
except with a seven meter long prehensile tail that can be used in a
myriad of ways, such as being coiled into a spring, tied into a lasso
or as a way to quickly and nimbly swing from tree to tree. He
doesn't speak, but instead
vocalizes
different variations of his trademark cry “houba” According
to Franquin, the idea for the character came about due to the
collusion of two different events: A discussion with some cartoonist
friends about an overworked tram conductor who could use a prehensile
tail to help with the various operations he needed to oversee, and
Franquin's own
nostalgia for Eugene the Jeep from Popeye.
Combining the two concepts, Franquin came up with the name
Marsupilami from “marsupial”, “Pilou-Pilou” (the French name
for Euegene the Jeep) and ami.
After
the events of Spirou
et les héritiers,
Spirou
and Fantasio bring Marsupilami back to Belgium with them where he
becomes something of a comic foil. His misunderstandings about the
human world lead him to unintentionally cause mayhem and chaos as he
doesn't understand how life works outside the jungle and certainly
couldn't explain himself if pressed. Marsupilami
proved to be a big hit with Spirou's
fans, not to
mention Franquin himself, and he became a regular in every successive
Spirou et Fantasio
comic Franquin wrote. After retiring
from Spirou
in 1969, Franquin decided to keep the rights to his original
character, feeling he was too personal a creation to allow other
writers to use him. After a few decades of writing one-page gags
featuring Marsupilami, Franquin eventually founded his own publishing
house, dubbed Marsu Productions, and began producing
an ongoing graphic novel series centered around a family of
Marsupilamis
living in the Palombian rainforest in 1987 that continues to this
day.
Fans
attest the series' longevity and continued popularity to not only to
the inherent endearing nature of the title character but the very
socially conscious message Franquin imparted him with. As he got
older, Franquin became increasingly concerned with the environmental
movement and growing social inequality, and the early evolution of
the Marsupilami
book reflects this. Starting out as a comedy adventure series, it
quickly swerves hard into social realism and satire as Franquin
becomes neither subtle nor quiet about how enraged he is about
deforestation, pollution and basic human pettiness and corruption.
Although not quite as venomous and preachy as his Gaston
Lagaffe or
the shockingly morbid and lurid Idées
noires,
Franquin's work on Marsupilami
is still completely unafraid of putting its politics front and
centre. Indeed,
Franquin often said the reason Marsupilami was possibly his favourite
creation is that, as an innocent animal, he could be kept separate
from what he perceived as a tragic, doomed human world. Marsupilami
knew nothing of human strife and suffering; all he cared about was
having a good time and making his friends and family happy and
Franquin found a kind of solace and kinship in this.
Before
we go any further, I want to take
a brief detour into
semantics as this is a very difficult franchise to get a hold on for
the uninitiated. This is mostly due to the fact that the name
“Marsupilami” can refer to several things simultaneously and
accurately, and
the series does not bother to explain this in any of its numerous
incarnations.
These
include, but are not limited to, a species of legendary fictional
creature discovered in the Palombian Amazon by Spirou and Fantasio,
the individual of that species found by Spirou and Fantasio in
Spirou et les
héritiers
and subsequently
brought back to Belgium, the name of an unrelated individual of the
same species who lives deep in the Palombian jungle with his family
(who are also each
known individually as Marsupilami), the title of the graphic novel
series chronicling the adventures of said Marsupilami family, the
title of the first season of the Marathon TV cartoon show based on
that graphic novel series and, most importantly for our purposes
later on, the title of a completely unrelated Disney Afternoon series
from 1992 based on the franchise but set in an alternate universe and
starring a character named Marsupilami who is
a Marsupilami but
also happens to be completely unrelated to any of the previously
mentioned Marsupilamis. Follow all that? No? Good.
So the question remains, how did this distinctly European icon gain a
seat at the very US-focused Disney Afternoon table? The answer to
that is equal parts confusingly complex and completely ludicrous. The
story goes that on a business trip to Europe in the late 1980s,
Michael Eisner become infatuated with Marsupilami and, in what must
have been a brief moment of psychosis, asked his Disney contacts to
get in touch with Marsu Productions to see if there was some kind of
cross promotion deal they could work out. As luck would have it,
Marsu were looking to expand their brand name recognition to a more
global level, and one of the markets they'd yet to tap and were very
much interested in tapping was North America. Marsu felt, somewhat
bewilderingly, that the best people to help them break into the US
market and make a big name for themselves were Disney themselves.
This pleased Eisner who, aside from being fixated on the character,
knew Disney needed a big marquee property to help spearhead the
comeback he had planned for the company and felt, equally
bewilderingly, that Marsupilami was just what Disney had been looking
for.
It
may not be immediately clear to everyone reading this how absolutely
pantslessly insane this entire business deal was. Nothing about it
makes anything that could conceivably come anywhere near the vicinity
of being described as a remote semblance of sense. It's worth
spelling out again: Disney is fiercely
protective of its intellectual property and anything that goes out
under its name. Why on EARTH would they agree to promote a character
they didn't own 100% of, let alone try to use him as the
face of the Disney Renaissance?
If they can't make every penny it is possible to make out of a
property in royalties, traditionally Disney wouldn't go anywhere near
it. But, under Eisner's request, they dove headlong at Marsupilami in
a manner that can only be described as “impulsive”.
Those
peculiarities aside though, there is the larger issue that I can't
think of a property *less* compatible with late-80s Disney then
late-80s Marsupilami. Though
they had redefined Saturday Morning Cartoon Shows by setting a new
baseline for production quality using the format to tell strong
adventure serials, Disney has still never been known for embodying the
most progressive values in the business and, as their film output
from this era shows, they like nothing more when at the top of their
game then being safe and marketable to the widest audience possible.
Marsupilami,
while tacitly designed for kids, is still fundamentally a very
intelligent and deeply cynical series that loves finding harsh and
uncomfortable things to say about the world we live in. Franquin
himself was, as I've said, a fiery political activist nigh-obsessed
with social justice. In
fact, as I'll explain a little later, Franquin was so violently angry
and bombastic in his work it may have been his own undoing.
This doesn't exactly sound like it fits in Disney's
wheelhouse.
From
Marsu's perspective this
deal seems equally puzzling.
Why would they, then something of an upstart imprint, sign the rights
to their literal trademark character (who was, I reminded you,
already a beloved icon throughout Europe) and franchise away
to anyone, let alone Disney?
However, there's an
additional wrinkle I've yet to bring up here that makes Marsu's
overture a bit
more credulous, and that's the fact that Disney's
standing in continental
Europe significantly
contrasts with
how it's typically thought of in the United States. This is not to
say Disney is not still seen in Europe as a media conglomerate mega
corporation, it definitely is, but the manifestations of this are
somewhat different. Put most briefly, Disney is even more of a
fundamental cultural institution in Europe then it is in the US (and
I'm led to believe the UK as well, though I can't speak of it with
quite the same certainty).
While
in the US everyone tends to
know Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy from the theatrical shorts
or be intimately familiar
with the animated canon, in Europe, Disney comics, particularly
Donald Duck comics, are revered foundational blocks of an entire
genre of media. Bandes
dessinée are on the
whole far more ubiquitous and accepted forms of creative outlet in
Europe then comic books tend to be in the United States. That doesn't
mean they're not still
by-and-large considered
kids' fare, but there is far more of an
acknowledgment of
them as a legitimate and respected art form then in the US or even
the UK. And a primary reason for this is, believe it or not (and
despite the unavoidable Cult of Hergé),
Disney.
The
key figure here is Carl Barks, a one time animator who did in-between
work for Disney in the mid 1930s before becoming a writer for their
comics division in the early 1940s. From 1943 until approximately
1974, Barks almost singlehandedly ran the Donald Duck comic and
created much of what we now associated with the series, most notably
the setting of Duckburg and the character of Scrooge McDuck. While
mostly unknown in the US (where
books not about superpowered
runaway
id complexes tend to be
ignored), Barks' influence
on the European comics scene and European pop consciousness on the
whole was incalculable. It would be nothing short of utter madness
for me to try and summarise Barks' legacy in
half a paragraph, so I'll instead direct you to this fantastic project to collect and restore his entire oeuvre and give it some
long-overdue serious historical media analysis. The critique is spot
on and honest rather than reverential, though reverence is certainly
called for in some places. The
scholars in charge of that
endeavour are far more
capable of giving Barks the reappraisal he deserves than I could ever
hope to.
If
I *were* to grossly oversimplify Barks' work for the purposes of a
blog post (though
admittedly a rather lengthy
one), I'd say the most
important thing about it is its straightforward honesty. Barks made
no concessions for his child audience, infusing Duckburg with a
painfully bittersweet humanity, being as he was primarily interested
in the oftentimes cruel and confusing realities of everyday life and
the struggles an ordinary everyman must go through just to live
day-to-day. These books were not
cheap pratfall gags or cut-and-dry battles between heroes and
villains: These were vignettes populated by real people making real
mistakes and
living real lives. Barks
spoke from a lifetime of hardship and experience that is perfectly
reflected in his stories, and his poignant musings remain utterly
timeless. This is exactly
the kind of keen
observational sense people like Franquin inherited from him and the
kind of theme that permeates books like Marsupilami.
Given Barks' status in Europe, it would also go a way towards
explaining why Marsu felt compelled to approach Disney to ask
them to break Marsupilami
into the US. However, there's a flip side to the European reverence
of Carl Barks that I think Marsu may have overlooked when they signed
the deal with Disney.
See,
the thing about Barks is part of the reason he was able to get as
good as he did is that he was most closely associated with Disney's
comics division, and the European branch of it to boot. Or, in more
blunt language, he worked for a branch of the company Disney
Corporate didn't really care
about. The fact that Barks'
Donald was absolutely nothing like the character in the theatrical
shorts was irrelevant because the impact and recognition the
comics division had, if any,
was considered somewhat negligible. Then, as now, Disney was
concerned first and foremost with its blockbuster movies and mascots.
Disney Corporate certainly did not expect Barks to become an artistic
trailblazer and a breakout folk hero overseas. Once he did, of
course, they made damn sure to keep him on the payroll and give him
as much creative freedom as he needed because they're not complete
idiots, but the fact remains that Barks would most likely not have
been allowed to get as experimental and mature with his stories if he
stayed with Disney's animation division-The
trademark Disney quality control and brand uniformity fanaticism
would have sunk him almost immediately.
And furthermore,
in the mid to late 1980s,
Disney was not looking for the next Carl Barks comic book. They were
looking for the next Snow
White and the Seven Dwarves
or Cinderella,
and there's a tremendous
gap between those
things. Nevertheless, the
deal was signed and Disney promised Marsu a 13 episode run of
half-hour cartoons and a massive merchandising campaign to introduce
Marsupilami to the US in style and take the country by storm.
But
of course, I knew none of this when I first saw Marsupilami come
bouncing toward me on Raw
Toonage. All I knew is
that it was like no other Disney cartoon I'd ever seen and I
immediately began to praise Disney up and down for their bold
creativity and for finally taking the risk on a thoroughly unique
original character and world. Of course, Marsupilami
was in truth anything but, though there's no way I could have known
that at the time. All I knew is that it was a bloody genius show.
Not, by the way, for exactly
the same reasons Franquin's book was genius, for you see Disney took
several...creative liberties with the source material when they
adapted it for Saturday Morning TV. By this I of course mean the show
is damn near unrecognizable when compared with the original comic
series.
Aside
from the most superficial basics about the character and the setting,
Disney changed everything. While the comic series has a strict canon
set in the fictional Palombian Amazon, Disney's show is apparently
set in Africa. Marsupilami has a close friend named
Maurice who is a gorilla and
is later joined by an elephant named
Stewie (although bizarrely
he also runs into a jaguar, toucan, echidna and platypus which leads
me to believe the Disney Marsupilami
team may actually not
have known anything about basic geography, or more likely just
didn't give a toss, which
would make a great deal of sense now that I think about it).
Another major change is that instead of being an actual species
(though rarely seen and endangered), Disney's Marsupilami is
apparently the last of his kind. By far the biggest break from
Franquin's work, at least in terms of basic setting, is that this
Marsupilami can speak fluent English, and
is a fast-talking smartass to boot.
Here, “houba” becomes Marsupilami's catchphrase, or his best stab
at one.
This, like many things in the show, goes completely unexplained and
is presented entirely without context.
The
other massive departure from the book
series is, predictably, a
dramatic reduction in the scope and frequency of Franquin's trademark
social commentary to the point it's almost not even immediately
visible. This is unfortunate and, like pretty much everything else
about this show, sent loyal European fans into a violent uproar, but
upon reflection it was probably necessary. See,
there's another, altogether more troubling side to Franquin's
commitment to social justice that doesn't get brought up all that
often: While Franquin is to be commended for attempting distilled
social realism and social commentary in Marsupilami
and elsewhere, he had a tendency to make an appalling hash of it. The
thing is, while Franquin
was very good at spotting and calling out social injustice, his own
cynicism proved more often than not to be his tragic flaw in addition to his greatest asset. On top of the unfortunate “noble savage” overtones to Marsupilami
himself (in fact some
critics have actually described him as exactly that)
Franquin was frustrated and angry to the point of being
actively misanthropic, and
he frequently didn't know enough to realise not
everyone was a depraved megalomaniacal evil bastard and that some
people probably deserved to be spared his wrath.
I
get the sense Franquin may actually have hated humanity as a basic
concept, as he goes at great length to extoll and glorify nature
while at the same time flat-out vilifying humans and the damage they
do to themselves and the natural world. The
most archetypically problematic case comes in
book 3, Mars
Le Noir, which concerns
a project to build a superhighway through the heart of the Palombian
forest. Franquin explains in minute, graphic detail the catastrophic
effect this would have on the plants and animals, particularly the
Marsupilamis,
while completely refusing to address the similarly destructive effect
it would have on the native Chahuta people who also live there, whom
he relegates
to comic relief. This kind of thing is uncomfortably
common for Franquin, and it
perfectly encapsulates his
core failing as a social
critic: While white
male European neo-imperialists and ruthless capitalists are
rightfully condemned, native peoples are also portrayed as
obnoxiously backwards, ignorant gullible savages. Ironically, Franquin makes them both equally human by making them both equally horrifying.
Unfortunately,
Franquin doesn't stop there and extends his lens to every country and creed to
depressingly predictable results: The second book features a pair of
Chinese investors, and
Franquin draws them as uncanny
twin yellow-tinted robot people who
can't pronounce words with “r” in them and
whose motives remain unknown for the majority of the story. They
do eventually turn out to be heroic, but the fact they're coded as
red herrings from the start is distressing.
Franquin draws a tourist couple from the US; the husband is a fat,
boorish, drawling bully and the wife is an equally fat, shrewish
shallow and vain gold digger. Franquin draws a German cargo pilot;
he's an alcoholic
opportunist with terrible hygiene. And so on and so on. This
kind of dirty bomb social criticism and hamfisted handle on race
relations and basic decency
*might* have been allowed to slide in the 1950s, but by 1987 this is
was absolutely unacceptable.
The
only human characters during
Franquin's tenure to get a modicum of sympathy are the Forest
Children Sarah and Bip, two siblings who abandoned society to live
in the Palombian jungle as
one with the forest (who Franquin at least had the good sense to make
Ginger), and Franquin's own author avatar character Noah, a sad and
lonely clown who ran away from the circus to live with the animals
and frequently rants for literally pages on end about how awful
humans are and how they do nothing but corrupt the purity and
innocence of the natural world (who Franquin at least had the good
sense to have interrupted and shut up by Sarah every time he ran the
risk of taking over the book). These
are actually quite compelling characters, Sarah
especially: Despite his general disdain for humanity on the whole, Franquin was
very concerned with the plight of women around the world on at least
a conceptual moral
level. As a result, Sarah
is commendably and admirably
strong, capable,
intelligent, caring and wholly self-sufficient,
although I suppose it says
something that Franquin felt the only way for her to be empowered was
to completely extricate her from society entirely.
Nevertheless,
Sarah is
probably one of the best female
characters in European
comics: Sarah and Bip
eventually take on pseudo-Tintin and Haddock roles, and she
inherits Tintin's moral sensibilities and his take-charge attitude
while also being a more defined character with a more complex
worldview (which,
this being Franquin, is naturally
jaded with cynicism).
She's works very well as the series' moral compass in a way the
naive, mute Marsupilamis
can't. Sarah alone sets this book head and shoulders above its
peers in some important areas, although much of that I have to credit
to Franquin's successor Batem
(in Europe there is a custom
that cartoonists are known only by their pen-names), who
takes over
the series' day-to-day duties starting in book 4,
rather than Franquin
himself. Sarah
aside though,
the book in its early days is simply put an absolute mess of abortive
social critique. While the
series does
rein itself in and gets notably less vicious and considerably
more nuanced
when
Batem takes over,
Disney would only
have had
access to the earliest books
when planning the show,
which were loaded with
Franquin's overtly nihilistic material.
There is no way in hell any
of this was going out under the Disney banner.
So,
we have a show conceived in the archetypical “You know what would
be AWESOME” planning session starring a wisecracking African
Marsupilami with none of the supporting cast one would expect to see
him with and, thanks to Disney presumably freaking out over
Franquin's sloppy social criticism, it's been heavily defanged to
boot. By all accounts, this should be a spectacular disaster whose
tales of magnificent failure we are destined to sing epic poetry
about to future generations. But the truly remarkable thing about
this whole fiasco is that...it isn't. It's bloody fantastic. But,
seeing as how I'm almost at a total loss to explain how on Earth it
manages this given everything that went wrong for it, let's try and
look at it piece by piece.
The first inarguable success the show ought to boast about is its
Marsupilami: He's a positively charming, charismatic and electrifying
crowd-pleaser and thoroughly unlike any contemporaneous character. On
paper, Disney's Marsupilami doesn't sound like anything special:
Fundamentally, he's very much in the spirit of fast-talking “totally
radical”, “too cool for school” mascots-with-attitude like
Sonic the Hedgehog and, er, Wishbone, actually, who defined
children's entertainment in the early- to mid-1990s. What sets
Marsupilami apart is that he's *aware* this is what he is. The
writers are too, and this knowledge gets written back into his
character on a regular basis. Indeed this awareness seems to permeate
even further, as Marsupilami is not only aware what kind of character
he is, he knows what kind of show he's on. He talks to the audience,
makes occasional references to being in a cartoon and constantly
cracks subtle jokes that poke merciless fun at a myriad of other
Disney properties (how did those get through, I wonder?). This
in and of itself is not rare for cartoon characters during this time,
but it's practically unheard on Disney shows, which usually take
themselves too seriously to have this sort of fun. To top it off,
Marsupilami is one of the most polished and effective uses of this
type of character I can think of.
Though the writing and conception of the character is quite strong, a
large part of why Marsupilami works as well as he does is due to
voice actor Steve Mackall who absolutely throws himself at the role
with an unparalleled zeal and enthusiasm and embodies him so
perfectly he all but leaps out of the screen at you. Mackall gives
Marsupilami a very distinctive pattern of speech and peppers his
dialogue with slang and turns of phrases that don't seem to belong to
any era of youth culture, let alone that of the early '90s. However,
he is also unwaveringly confidant in his delivery and doesn't seem
self-conscious at all, which is even more impressive as this is one of his only voice over credits. Mackall is having *a lot* of fun here, and that
translates into making Marsupilami seem really fun too (actually I
daresay Larry Brantley could have learned a thing or two from him).
The overwhelming impression is of someone desperately trying to be
hip and cool, and who indeed thinks he's the coolest thing around.
He's almost painfully not, but he's so unbelievably enthusiastic,
charismatic and genuine we completely forgive him.
The remarkable thing is that this is a surprisingly fitting
personality to give Marsupilami, and it only serves to make him more
endearing. Marsupilami has always been first and foremost an observer
into human culture. Unlike someone like Mr. Mum though, Marsupilami
actively engages with society as an outsider in his own quirky,
unique and unafraid way. He has the potential to bring an
ethnographer's perspective to things not usually given that
treatment, which is the primary thing that makes him such an
attractive character to me. Furthermore, since he can now talk,
Disney's Marsupilami also seems to have absorbed some of the roles
and traits usually reserved for characters like Noah or Sarah. He's
now in the position to directly challenge threats to his forest home
on an intellectual level himself rather than simply being the
sidekick or secret weapon of those who do. Delightfully, he
approaches these situations as a trickster, applying a veritably Bugs
Bunny-esque level of panache and cleverness towards dispatching his
foes. Of course the flip side of this is that without Sarah and the
rest of the supporting cast the series goes from having the ability
to do strong, female-led stories or ensemble pieces to being an
animated sausage fest, which is a tad unfortunate.
But as much as I miss Sarah (and I do miss her) I really can't say
the same for the rest of the cast jettisoned by the adaptation. I
particularly don't miss the Marsupilami family, who in a good 95% of
the books show up in the first page or so and the fall off the face
of the planet for the rest of the story, or at worst get kidnapped.
Mrs. Marsupilami bids a tearful goodbye and waves her palm frond
kerchief as she goes back to looking after the little ones and daddy
goes off on another adventure. Apparently, heteronomrative values
know no boundary and can be found even in the deepest, densest
jungle. Ditching them was probably one of the wisest moves Disney
made here and, after all, there was only one Marsupilami in Spirou
et Fanatsio. Disney also swaps out the Chahutas for their own
fictional natives, the Wannabes. Instead of making them uncomfortable
comedy relief primitives or using them to say something intelligent
about indigenous rights, both of which are paths the books take at
various points, Disney turns them into...The Beatles. And I mean
literally The Beatles, with Liverpudlian accents and everything.
Which, I mean OK, I could jump up and down and say it would have been
nice had Disney even attempted to use them thoughtfully, but, given
Disney's own track record on race, especially in this period, it's
probably best they didn't.
In fact, the show has a remarkably small supporting cast in general,
consisting really of only one other major character (though
Marsupilami's gorilla pal Maurice oftentimes comes along for the ride
too): Reoccurring arch-nemesis Norman, played with impeccably
charming sleaze and pomposity by veteran voice actor Jim Cummings.
Norman shows up in the first short as a poacher working clandestinely
for an unethical biological research firm who experiments on animals,
although he has a different profession in each of the successive
shorts as Disney's show operates via a system of negative continuity.
Each and every time, however, he is the absolute perfect foil for
Marsupilami. While Franquin's book has its own “Great White
Hunter”, a disheveled, grungy, gangly impotent-looking character by
the name of Bring M. Backalive who is meant to completely invert the
archetype, in my view the burly, square-jawed Norman is a far more
appropriate antagonist, especially for this interpretation.
Norman is a delightfully grotesque parody of masculine power fantasy,
with his ludicrous barrel chest, limbs resembling oaken logs and
pear-shaped head. It's a really surprising and unorthodox design for
a Disney character and Cummings' portrayal is simply fantastic,
making Norman a wonderfully egotistical, ill-tempered, overblown
asshole. He's not an evil mastermind or a cold, calculating
psychopath, he's just a colossal dick who likes chopping down the
rainforest and abusing small furry creatures for the hell of it. He's
the absolutely perfect antagonist for this show because his
broad-stroke dickishness means he works equally well as a poacher, a
mean foreman, an obsessive chef or a sociopathic self-absorbed CEO.
He's just as likable as Marsupilami, despite being unabashedly the
villain. It also helps Cummings and Mackall have unbelievable
chemistry together, elevating Marsupilami's and Norman's rivalry to
the ranks of legends. In any fair and just world, this double act
would go down in history alongside Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam.
The Marsupilami/Norman relationship can also be read as a microcosm
of themes the series has dealt with in all its incarnations. Every
time Marsupilami comes into contact with Norman, he starts out being
nothing but friendly to him, as he bears no ill-will to any creature.
When Norman inevitably betrays, offends or threatens him or takes
advantage of his trust, Marsupilami switches to payback mode, just
as Bugs would have, and in rare occasions doesn't even ever find out
Norman had it in for him. The show adds its own twist in that
Marsupilami's interactions with Norman, and thus humanity, tend to be
staged in terms of his desire to fit in and prove his coolness.
Typically, when Marsupilami meets Norman in a given short, he is not
in initially aware of his full intentions, instead believing he's
doing something really fun and exciting he'd like to be a part of.
The resulting humour comes about first from Marsupilami's fumbled
attempts at coolness and good-natured misunderstanding, Norman's
inevitable meltdown as Marsupilami either derails his plans or simply
annoys him to the point of eruption and the climactic battle of wits.
In essence, Disney's Marsupilami seems at least in part to be
a commentary on the nature of what it means to be a cool, popular or
accepted part of society, and the title character a kind of Glam or
Drag interpretation of the concept.
Despite the insistence of die-hard Franquin fans that this show is a
disgrace to the franchise and an abandonment of its core identity, I
feel precisely the opposite is true: It's a distillation of it. As
the only real representative of the human world we get is Norman, the
show can be said to have just as cynical an attitude towards society
as the books, with the crucial difference that it has a sense of
humour about it. Instead of wallowing in frustration and bitterness
as Franquin was wont to do, the show skewers the inherent
ridiculousness of privilege, imperialism and patriarchy by making its
avatar of all of those things a hilariously explosive,
self-destructive blowhard. As ultimately unhip as Marsupilami may be,
his drag coolness presents a far better alternative approach to
living life than Norman, which makes it all the more easier to cheer
every time Marsupilami runs rings around him. While the world it
presents may not be as lushly realised as that of the books nor does
it engage with the franchise's core themes at quite the same
intellectual level, it does firmly have an eye on those very themes
and examines them in its own way. It's a perfect translation of
Marsupilami from the medium of European graphic novels to that of
Golden Age theatrical-style cartoon shorts, and one of the very, very
few adaptations I'd dare to say may actually improve on the original.
And while Marsupilami may not be Disney's intellectual property and the show
thus not as original and creative as I first gave them credit for,
this in and of itself is incredibly bold and unique by its standards.
Its format and general structure sets it far apart from its Disney
Afternoon kin, and there's no precedent for a show like it anywhere
else in Disney's history. One of the things that's so fascinating
about Marsupilami is that it really doesn't feel like a Disney
show at all. It shares far more in common with the Warner Brothers
style of animation and is actually most immediately comparable with
that studio's so-called Silver Age work: The Tom Ruegger and Sherri
Stoner breed of show that produced things like Tiny Toon
Adventures and Animaniacs. But, unlike those shows, which
all too often tried too hard to be relevant by commenting bluntly and
overtly on current pop culture trends and news stories (and which
ironically means they have dated painfully and the absolute worst of
any shows of their time), Marsupilami remains universal and
timeless because what it has to say about human nature has no sell-by
date, just like Marsupilami's slang. It remains as valid now as it
did in 1992 and, indeed, as Franquin's work was in the 1950s.
I couldn't leave a discussion about Disney's Marsupilami
without mentioning the music. It's incredible. The composing team,
consisting of Steven James Taylor, Mark Watters, Jean-Michel Bernard
and Roy Braverman put out a stunningly singular and cosmopolitan
soundtrack that's lush, evocative and full of life. Take the second
season theme song, which starts as an African chant and than builds
off of that to become a complex melody filled with ukuleles,
mandolins, xylophones, bass guitar breakdowns and filled out with
synth pads. Then there's the Neu!-quality variations on the main
character's themes (Norman's is, wonderfully, “Ride of the
Valkyries” and the suite based on Marsupilami's that opens “Mars
vs. Man” is a thing of beauty). The soundtrack has elements of
jazz, funk, rap, electronica, Soca and traditional African music, but
really defies any effort to categorize it. It's proper fusion world music penned and played by true global citizens that comes from a place of pure love
and joy and it frankly ought to put Alan Menken's bombastic
pseudo-calypso Broadway stylings for The Little Mermaid to
absolute shame.
Despite my obvious affection for it and its, to my mind at least,
self-evident quality, Disney's Marsupilami is rather an
ignored footnote in animation history. There's been no significant
home video release (though there were a few compilation VHS tapes
released late in the run), but that should be no great surprise given
how Disney treats all its Saturday Morning Cartoon Shows. More
damning however is the fact that Marsupilami seems to have
been forgotten even among its Disney Afternoon brethren by people who
tend to remember that sort of thing. You'll find no Internet memes
based on Marsupilami, no references to him in comedy articles and no
misty-eyed nostalgic tributes to him penned by aging Gen X and Gen
Yers (I mean, besides this one). Why does everyone remember DuckTales
and Adventures of the Gummi Bears and not Marsupilami?
Sadly, after spending as much time with this franchise and this
story as I have, I'm going to conclude this was at least partially
deliberate. But why? What happened that would cause Disney to
intentionally sweep the memory of one of their very best shows under
the proverbial rug?
What happened was, well, The Little Mermaid. Or, to be more
specific, the tidal wave of renewed mainstream interest in Disney
that accompanied The Little Mermaid and the copycat
Renaissance Age blockbusters that followed it. Recall a primary
motivation for signing the deal with Marsu was that Disney was
looking for a marquee brand to serve as the face of Eisner's
revitalization campaign. Once they had exactly that in The Little
Mermaid and its successors, why would Disney bother with a
property that wasn't even theirs? Astute readers will have already
picked up the warning signs: Disney promised Marsu 13 half-hour
episodes, but instead delivered 13 7 minute shorts aired as part of a
cartoon variety show comprised of odds and ends not considered good
enough to headline their own shows, including Bonkers, the
perpetually-delayed attempt to do an animated series based on Who
Framed Roger Rabbit?
This evasion got them in trouble
with Marsu for going back on the deal, which, unfortunately, is
probably the main reason Marsupilami was spun off as its own
show for its second season, not its perceived quality. And indeed,
even there Disney cheated as the full-length Marsupilami show
wasn't full length at all, but another variety show where each
episode featured one new short, one short rerun from the season on
Raw Toonage and a random short from a number of different
series Disney couldn't put anywhere else (Incidentally, the most
interesting of these was a series of shorts based on Sebastian from
The Little Mermaid which humorously posited him as an actor
and that everything else he was a part of was in-universe fiction.
The implication becomes, of course, that Ariel is one too which
delighted me, but sadly my dream Marsupilami/Little Mermaid
crossover never came to pass).
Disney also failed to deliver on their contractual obligations to
“make Marsupilami a worldwide star” (I'm not sure if this curious
wording was the exact legalese used in the contract, but it comes up
in every single article about the deal I've ever read which
horrifically implies it might have been). How exactly Disney was
going to do this seems lost to the mists of time, but from what I
gather it had something to do with a massive merchandise campaign,
which is hilarious as Marsupilami had the single most
spectacularly botched promotional campaign of any franchise I have
ever seen. Disney put out a flood of tie-in swag to accompany both
Raw Toonage and the second season series, but almost all of it
was stunningly cheap-looking: There were the predictable stuffed
toys, Colourforms, magazines and plastic statuettes, but all of them
felt rushed and below Disney's usual standards; the stuffed toys bore
only a passing resemblance to the characters and the different
plastic toys were extremely fragile and the moulds themselves looked
off.
The larger immediate problem was that absolutely none of these products made any sense
to anyone not already versed in the franchise, which is to say
everybody in the US at the time: Whereas every bit of Little
Mermaid merchandise made sure to include a brief description of
Ariel or a summary of the movie (or was designed in some way to
retell it), when Marsupilami came out, no-one knew what the
show was about or who the main character was supposed to be. Disney
didn't bother to explain the series' backstory anywhere, not even in
the show itself. Perhaps they trusted that fans of the show would
already be familiar with the comics (the show features quite a few
in-jokes that only someone who read the books would pick up on), but
since Marsu astonishingly didn't translate them into English
to coincide with the show's premier anyone in English-speaking
territories was completely lost. Even the actual PR materials sent
around to retailers and licensing partners, which I actually do have,
don't explain anything, trusting instead that puns about
yellow-and-black spots, long tails and the bizarre choice to turn
“houba” into a marketable catchphrase without context would be
enough to sell people on the show. Even I, possibly the show's
biggest cheerleader, didn't know the whole story until I got the
Internet years after the fact. As a result, nobody could
figure out what this show was, the franchise wasn't interested in
explaining or selling itself and nobody cared. Gee, it almost sounds
like Disney *wanted* Marsupilami to fail...
Marsu, by the way, was not amused and, at the end of this whole
fiasco wound up suing Disney for $4.5 million for breach of contract.
They won. I'd be a bit more sympathetic to them if I got the
impression they were doing their best to make the deal work on their
end, but I honestly don't think they were. Their decision to not
translate their books for a US audience, the very audience they
signed the deal with Disney to attract in the first place is
completely inexplicable and, to be blunt, idiotic. It's not like
Marsupilami didn't have a chance to work overseas, after all Tintin
and Asterix have significant US and UK followings (although they did
gain them by going through more upscale, art house channels and not
Disney). Marsu has gotten much better at selling itself in recent
years, with a blockbuster movie, quality products and several
animated series made in partnership with Marathon TV under their
belt, but it seems like in the late-80s and early-90s they just
didn't have everything together yet. The sad result is that they blew
the biggest chance to break Marsupilami in English-speaking regions
they were probably going to get, and it doesn't look like that
opportunity will ever arise again.
If there's an upside to all of this, it's that the brief and
tempestuous Disney/Marsu partnership produced one staggeringly good
programme. But how did it possibly manage this with seemingly
everything working against it? I think the biggest reason is that,
like so much great Soda Pop Art, Marsupilami saw its position
on the margins under duress as a strength, not a weakness. The
creative team knew they were working on a show Disney Corporate had
zero faith in or expectations for, but instead of using that as an
excuse for apathy, it became their call to arms. They could have
completely phoned it in, but instead they realised being in this
situation meant they could do whatever they wanted and turned in
hands-down the finest Disney adaptation and one of the greatest
things to ever bear the name.
We've come full circle then: Just as, decades before, Carl Barks used
his freedom and relative distance from the Disney machine to redefine
the European graphic novel, one of that medium's leading luminaries
gets to lend his name to a charming, side-splittingly funny,
global-minded and frequently surprisingly intelligent experiment by a handful of
creators in the same position who attempted a similar gamble for
Saturday morning television. The fact they weren't influential in
their time is almost beside the point: Marsupilami stands the
test of time in a way many of its peers weren't able to. It's one of
the few shows of its vintage I can unhesitatingly and unironically
put on to this day and enjoy just as much, if not more so, then I did
when it was on the air.
For me Marsupilami almost symbolizes the inverse of its Disney
Afternoon cousin The Little Mermaid. That began life as a
heavily promoted blockbuster carefully designed for maximum
mass-market appeal and discreetly played it safe while taking the
bare minimum of steps forward to give the illusion of being a bold
reinvention. It also compelled me to rewrite it completely.
Marsupilami, by contrast, was an overlooked gem of a show
produced with love and care by the red-headed stepchildren of the
Disney animation department. It was, and still is, a tremendous
inspiration on my development as a writer and a thinker: After I
first discovered Marsupilami, I immediately set to work
drawing my own comics based on the show which I continued to write
for years afterward. I simply could not accept only 26 shorts: I felt
the show deserved so much more, and if Disney wasn't going to make any more stories set in this amazing world, then I would. In fact, I wrote so many of them Marsupilami is the
only cartoon character I can draw in a reasonably
professional-looking manner to this day.
Unlike my Ariel stories, which I deliberately engineered to be as
unlike The Little Mermaid as possible, my Marsupilami
comics were consciously designed as a challenge to myself to
capture the show's humour, story structure, characterization and visual style as accurately as I could.
Any handle on satire and comedic timing I might be able to claim some
kind of skill with is probably due to Marsupilami and my fascination
with it. If The Little Mermaid was the closed-box, top-down
product of a story and idea factory I gleefully tore apart as a
Disney hacker enthusiast, Marsupilami was the weird side
experiment the engineers worked on in their spare time I was lucky
enough to walk in on or the abandoned prototype I found dumpster
diving behind the factory one night and claimed as my own.
I'm not sure how André Franquin, who died in 1997 (interestingly the
same year the Marsu vs. Disney suit was settled) would feel about
that considering how personal Marsupilami was to him, but I'd hope
he'd be pleased with the knowledge his favourite character continues
to capture the imaginations of people over sixty years after he first
appeared on the comics page. I'll probably never get the chance to
write for Marsupilami (and the fact my true love is the Disney
show, not the actual comics, wouldn't go over too well I imagine),
but if I can through my overly long reminiscence somehow introduce
more people to him and his series, I think that would probably be
enough for me. The spirit of the series' brash zeal, dry wit,
critical edge and ultimate utopianism lives on, even if not every
version of it has. That, far more than the sheer number of years it's
been around, is how a work can continue to inspire people and leave
its mark on history.
**********************************************************************************
Below are links to four of my favourite Marsupilami shorts.
Not everything the show did was an instant classic, but it claims enough
of them for itself that anyone should sit up and take notice. Here
are some of the very best, in my personal view-I've chosen two from
each season, and they're in chronological order. Apologies for the
terrible video quality: It absolutely kills the show's lush, lavish
animation style and art design, but given how rare the show is we're
lucky digital transfers exist at all.
Season
1 (on Raw Toonage)
In
the series premier, Norman captures Maurice in an attempt to sell him
off to shady research biologists who are paying him to poach animals.
Marsupilami tracks Norman down believing
he's invited Maurice to a party and forgotten him. The animation and
matte work here is breathtakingly beautiful, possibly even on
the level of the film version of The
Little Mermaid, which
makes it all the more maddening this has
the absolute worst video transfer of the uploaded shorts I've seen.
The writing, acting and comic timing is also pitch-perfect:
All in all, this is my pick for the series' crowning
achievement.
Foreman
Norman has plans to clear the jungle to build a city designed
around an ultra-modern flat of condominiums. Marsupilami
thinks this means he's being asked to move to the neighbourhood. As I
mentioned above, this is a great example of the amazing work done
with the soundtrack on this show, the opening suite in particular.
Season
2 (as Marsupilami)
After
bullying his secretary into resignation, CEO Norman needs a
replacement urgently. He gets Marsupilami and Maurice, eager to learn
about life in the world of 9-5 wage slaves. This is one of my
favourite episodes for Norman, who I think is used exceedingly well
here, and the writing and comic timing is once again superb. Probably
my second favourite short overall.
Norman
tricks Marsupilami into thinking he's running a pleasure cruise tour of
the jungle river in order to cover up his illegal smuggling operation for valuable endangered species. Another good Norman episode, who
gets quite a bit of clever dialogue, and even Maurice (who I'm
usually not amazingly fond of) has some decent moments here.
