Black and Blue all over

If You Want to Make a Good Smurf Omelet, You're Gonna Break a Few Smurfs: I heard about this UNICEF commercial a month ago, this is my first chance to actually see it.  You'll never see it on U.S. TV screens, for obvious reasons.  Okay, we get it.  War is bad for kids.  ("But think of the children!")  But why bomb the Smurfs when a common bulldozer would do the trick?  There's only one female in the whole damned village (actually two if you count Sassette, but she's not legal), so it isn't like Mushroom Hollow is exactly boomtown.  A better question, since when did Gargamel acquire WMD?  I realize he has a lab and all (yellow cake?), and a bitchy cat.  How did the inspectors overlook this?  Did the CIA completely misintepret the "chatter" coming from the forest?  Or, more chillingly, did Papa Smurf (clearly a Marxist) use Smurf gas on his own people?   We may never know.  A sad end to a race of people with such a broad range of vocations.  Au revoir, mon petit Schtroumphs.

Boondocks Review: Without spoiling too much of the first episode for you, Boondocks was a howl, and is a perfect, edgy fit for Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup.  It's also a triumph for comic strip-to-animated series adaptations, as the characters do and say things on the show they've only alluded to in the strip.  Clearly Aaron McGruder had full creative control, and he's exploiting it, as he should.  I can easily see how this would have never run on Fox.  My only pet peeve, and I suppose I'll get used to it: Regina King (of 227 fame) does the voices for both Huey and Riley.  It's not a stretch to say the siblings would have similar voices, but they almost sound too similar, and perhaps a bit too feminine.  Maybe it's because I'm aware a woman is doing the voices.   Other than that, we see Uncle Ruckus straight out of the chute at his self-hatin' vilest.  The song he performs at the garden party may be the most shocking 45 seconds of animation most people have ever seen, white or black.  And the animation is breathtaking.  Boondocks' animated debut does boldly what the strip can only do with a few panels: establish Huey's militance, Riley's thug lean, Granddad's old school sensibilities (his protest flashback had me in tears), Uncle Ruckus' intense self-hate, exposing stupid white people, with liberal but appropriate use of the 'N' word.  A rare case where something was better than advertised.  Now I can't wait for the DVD.  Here's a taste of next week.

More Can't Miss TV: Lewis Black, tonight on the Weather Channel.  Why didn't someone think of this before?  If this goes well, and why wouldn't it, he should become a regular feature.  Could you imagine Lewis Black during hurricane coverage?  "Let's go to Jim Cantore, who's standing by live on the Florida coast, wearing a windbreaker.  Oh, that's peachy.  Like they've actually DESIGNED a FUCKING WINDBREAKER that is capable of standing up to a CATEGORY 3 HURRICANE!  The think about hurricanes...(jowls begins to shake)...they tend to break...EVERYTHING in their path.  Unless Columbia Sportswear  and NASA knows something I don't, all the window dressing in the world is not gonna keep YOUR ASS on terra firma when "Hector" or whatever the fuck they call the storm, makes landfall.  And that's another thing.  Could we come up with a stronger word than "landfall" to describe TOTAL FUCKING DEVASTATION?   Y'know what else makes "landfall"?  AIRLINERS, right before they CRASH!  But I digress...our Jimbo is standing by live...how the hell are ya?"  If tonight's experiment goes half as well as this, Comedy Central may need to start their own weather network.