Toon In

By Justin Peters, Washington Monthly. Posted June 18, 2004.

Every era has its hotbeds of cultural innovation, its gathering points where original thinkers and brilliant minds assemble and produce high-caliber works of art -- London's Bloomsbury, Paris' Montmartre, New York's Greenwich Village. My candidate for the modern day Left Bank is the corner of Williams Street and 12th Street in downtown Atlanta, Ga., where you'll find a decrepit-looking old warehouse.

Inside, there are no ceiling tiles -- the writers ripped them out by hand as soon as they moved in. The production staff works in a broad, rectangular basement-like space with open-doored offices lining the mural-covered walls, ping-pong and foosball tables in the hallway, and life-sized robots (presumably not real, although I'm not quite sure) guarding the back entrance. The place resembles nothing so much as a real-life Wonka World for people who like cartoons instead of candy (but if you do like candy, don't worry, there's a gigantic bowl full of it on the table). Moving through this scene -- sauntering from office to office with various drawings in hand, congregating around the big table in the rear for a script read-through -- are a mixture of pudgy gawkers and rail-thin middle-aged guys, most of them Southern natives. Several are married with families and wouldn't be out of place at a college football game or a PTA meeting. And every afternoon (great art doesn't get made in the mornings), these guys can be found sketching hillbilly squids or French fries with goatees, debating the funniness of various voices, all of it destined for eventual use in a block of subversive cartoons, known collectively as "Adult Swim," that airs late-nights, 11p.m.-5a.m., on Ted Turner's Cartoon Network.

Unless you're one of its growing number of insomniac fans, you may not have heard of Adult Swim. But these shows are among the most innovative, and increasingly popular, new programs on television today. The block includes such off-kilter postmodern cartoons as "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," a send-up of classic action-hero shows starring a life-sized talking milkshake prone to such bizarrely ill-informed pronouncements as "plaque is a figment of the liberal media and the dental industry to scare you into buying useless appliances and pastes"; "Sealab 2021," a workplace comedy where nobody can ever leave the underwater office; "Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law," a "Perry Mason"-like spoof in which a winged superhero with a law degree defends famous cartoon figures accused of various crimes; and "Home Movies," a show about a single mom, her movie-making son, and his alcoholic soccer coach, all united in their mutually amiable incompetence.

The Adult Swim fare now consistently rates as the top block in its time slot on cable among the coveted young adult demographic. In the last year alone, the ratings for the entire three-hour block jumped by over 60 percent, from around 180,000 viewers to 431,000 viewers (as of April); a few shows in the block, like "Family Guy" (about a dysfunctional Rhode Island family), regularly draw more than a million viewers. Most of those viewers are young men. In fact, for males age 18-24, Adult Swim now demolishes the ratings of broadcast standbys like Leno and Letterman -- beating Leno by 36 percent and Letterman by a whopping 87 percent.

The Adult Swim entourage is only the latest in a series of consistently witty and original cartoons that have emerged on television in recent years -- from "The Simpsons" to "South Park" to "King of the Hill." And this is on top of the plethora of fine feature-length animated films that have graced movie theaters such as Monsters Inc., and the Shrek series. Indeed, if novels, pop music, and live action movies have been going through a bit of a fallow period, we are arguably living in a golden age of cartoons, one that rivals in creativity and appeal to the era of "Looney Tunes" and "Betty Boop" over half a century ago.

The emergence of such high-quality commercial animation poses an intriguing question about the entertainment industry as a whole. How is it that the same economy that gives us bland fodder like Vin Diesel, Evanescence, and "According To Jim" can sometimes suddenly produce the sort of wonderful, bizarre material that we see on Adult Swim? It's because the good stuff tends to come when nobody's looking -- created by those on the fringes of the studio system, occupying marginal creative real estate with minimal supervision. In the natural world, punctuated evolution occurs when small groups find themselves geographically isolated and free from natural predators, allowing creatures with rare mutations to thrive and develop into entirely new species. So it is in entertainment: The best material has often come from the back alleys of the studio system. Though only 200 yards across the street from the Turner Entertainment corporate complex, the Adult Swim's Williams Street warehouse is miles away in terms of sensibilities -- and it has given rise to an entirely new species of cartoons.

Justin Peters is a writer in Washington, D.C.

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