Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. Marshmallow
Even if I didn't grow up on toon characters similar to the Tree friends in my cartoon days, I still cannot for one minute stomach such a god awful, heart wrenching, and unnecessarily brutal show that not only pushes the gore factor over the edge, but does it to characters who DON'T belong in that element.
Now sometimes its funny, like when South Park did the imagination land 3 part episode, that was funny because some of the toons did adult things and the jokes weren't solely based on ripping the cartoons to shreds because they hated them. Tree friends takes characters who are innocent and essentially harmless and puts them through worse treatments then your average horror movie does.
Now maybe some people find the reversal of cute and cuddly to gory gruesome funny, but not this way.
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That's why I prefer Pib and Pog - I think they did a funnier and more appealling job of nailing the whole "extreme cuteness meets sick and twisted-ness" factor, for a couple of reasons (both of which, needless to say, are just a matter of my own personal preferences).
1) The HTF gang are cute and innocent. P&P, on the other hand, are "cute" and "innocent". While the central joke of HTF basically involves the juxtaposition of sweet and harmless little characters with gruesome and horrific situations, the central joke with P&P kinda works on the reverse principle. Pib and Pog themselves are actually quite nasty and hateful little beings who get massive sadistic kicks out of seeing one another suffer, the irony being that the setting and execution of their shorts is done in the style of a show for pre-schoolers. Consequently, most of the humour here springs not from P&P's misconduct itself, but from the kindly-voiced narrator's efforts to put a cheerful spin upon each and every one of their viciously mean-spirited antics. That narrator is a brilliant foil and, I don't know, she makes me laugh.
2) Compared to the violence in HTF, the violence in P&P is, at best, incredibly mild, and for me that's a real plus point. There's no blood or gore, and the worst that really happens to P&P is that their plasticine bodies get temporarily contorted out of shape. A lot of their antics, such as going at each other with machine guns, dunking each other into concertrated sulphuric acid, and impaling one another on beds of nails, are an ounce more extreme than you'd expect from the usual spectrum of cartoon violence (certainly for a show aimed at pre-schoolers), but the fact that they respond in a very traditional cartoon manner somehow makes it a more effective and better balanced mixture of irony for me.
As for Itchy and Scratchy, the Tom and Jerry pretext ran its course very quickly for me. I always thought they worked most effectively whenever they were used as a foil for the Simpsons themselves. Had they been introduced as an independent cartoon on their own, then it's my opinion that they wouldn't have had much to sustain themselves.