By Todd Ciolek

For the young TV addict or overgrown child, there’s nothing quite as frustrating as a single-episode cartoon, a glimpse of a full-blown animated series that often never arrives. Sure, some adults think that CBS aired a complete season of Dragon’s Blood or that they spent many a Saturday morning watching the Computer Warriors cartoon, but they’re bound to discover that their fond memories are lies built around stand-alone animated shows. And in the case of Computer Warriors, that’s all for the better.

Yet we still need to salute some of these briefly witnessed animated specials. Eschewing full-blown movies and holiday episodes, we’re delving into the most striking TV cartoon one-shots from the past thirty years, in both “this should’ve been a series” and “OH GOD GET IT AWAY” categories.

THE BEST:

5) Korgoth of Barbaria

Korgoth is a one-shot barbarian-fantasy farce and will remain so until Adult Swim actually turns it into a full series. We’re just bitter that they’re content to tease us with rumors and infrequent airings of the pilot. It aims to be a mockery of every stale swords-and-sorcery staple: the post-apocalyptic world that excuses all sorts of monsters, the wanton medievalized cultured, and, of course, the Conan-esque hero who murders his foes in the most creative slaughters this side of Brock Samson. It’s perhaps the closest we’ll ever come to an animated version of The Eye of Argon.

Then again, Korgoth also leaves room for improvement. The pilot episode gets off to an amusing start, but rapidly runs out of genuine humor after it leaves the tavern and makes us watch Korgoth’s would-be employer contemptuously spit his wine all over an uncooperative sex slave. It’s a scene that could’ve just as easily come from a zero-irony cartoon adaptation of those misogynistic Gor books. Perhaps a Korgoth series would be too much like every other Adult Swim series that wrings humor from graphic deaths, but we’d much rather get our gory laughs in a barbarian fantasy.

4) The Fluppy Dogs

You’ve got to feel just a little sorry for The Fluppy Dogs. Duck Tales, Gummi Bears, and most of Disney’s other TV cartoons from the 1980s, went on to land fat syndication deals, win critical praise, and run for over 50 episodes each. Fluppy Dogs got an hour-long TV special in 1986, and that was it.

Fluppy Dogs supposedly didn’t get good enough ratings, perhaps because the concept doesn’t stand out too much from countless other cartoons about adorable talking animals having adventures in human society. Not that it’s bad; like most of Disney’s TV projects, the animation’s decent, and the Fluppy Dogs’ journey from one world to another is established through the visually imaginative means of finding hidden doors in open space (which predates a similar idea used in Philip Pullman’s repulsively smug His Dark Materials). The concept’s explored thorough as the dogs journey to the human world and enlist the help of a 10-year-old boy as they search for a way to their home dimension. It’s possible that kids didn’t like the Fluppies’ appearances, as they’re distinguished only by color (which made things easier for the toy makers, at least). It’s also possible that kids didn’t see much appropriate menace in the Fluppies’ boring nemesis, an animal-collecting billionaire who seems to be the only human to notice anything vaguely strange about multi-colored dogs that talk and wear clothes.

3) The Butter Battle Book

Ralph Bakshi didn’t invent adult-oriented animation; he just filled it with nipples and swearing and showed it to an entire nation. So it’s a pleasant surprise that Bakshi’s best material doesn’t have rotoscoped New York pimps or impossibly curved women shooting racist caricatures of civil rights leaders. It’s just a 1989 adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ most Republican-angering work, The Butter Battle Book. And while everyone knows about the cartoon versions of The Grinch and The Lorax, Bakshi’s take on The Butter Battle Book is sadly neglected.

Bakshi’s TV special makes full use of Seuss’ Cold War allegory, in which a race of blue-clad, vaguely birdlike people called Yooks utterly despise the Zooks, who are identical but for their orange outfits and their habit of spreading butter on bread upside down. In this Swiftian world of petty hatreds, the narrator’s grandfather finds himself caught in an arms race portrayed through musical numbers that Seuss himself wrote. Of course, this is Seuss, so the guns are loaded with bug limbs and clam chowder, and the atomic bomb’s stand-in is called the Bitsy Big Boy Boomeroo. In Bakshi’s hands, there’s a savagely mocking tone in the Yooks’ patriotic anthems, and a creepy undercurrent to the weapon-waking process. It’s pretty much exactly what Seuss, perhaps regretting his more jingoistic World War II cartoons, intended in his original book.

As both a book and a cartoon, The Butter Battle Book’s refusal to completely vilify its Commie analogues upset right-wingers and narrow-minded PTA groups across the nation. Fortunately, that didn’t keep anyone from releasing it on DVD as part of a collection called The Best of Dr. Seuss. Buy two and send Rush Limbaugh a copy.

2) Gramps

Cartoon Network’s What a Cartoon Show! was a breeding ground for many future animation successes, showcasing Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy test runs and versions of the Powerpuff Girls who grind up and serve an enemy as hamburgers. Gramps, directed by future Fairly Oddparents creator Butch Hartman, was never optioned for a full series, yet it’s still one of the highlights from the clip show’s short life.

A simple tale of an elderly, oxygen-huffing man lying to his incredulous grandkids, Gramps runs through historical references, Twilight Zone riffs, and a few stabs at the sort of dark humor (note grandma’s unspecified fate) that Cartoon Network could get away with more and more as the 1990s ground down broadcast standards. Perhaps Gramps wouldn’t have worked as a full-schedule show (it drags a bit around the Monty Haul parody), but it fares just fine as a seven-minute short.

1) The Amazing Screw-On Head

Steampunk, that dirigible-riding Victorian cousin of cyberpunk, is often hard to pull off in a serious context, and that might be why Mike Mignola tried out The Amazing Screw-On Head as a mostly humorous comic. It made for an equally humorous half-hour pilot episode in 2006, when audiences were asked to vote online as to whether or not they’d want to watch an entire series about the titular head and his multiple bodies serving as President Lincoln’s secret force in a war against supernatural creatures and neatly attired zombies.

We can’t imagine audiences not wanting to see more of this, so we’ll instead blame the Sci-Fi Channel for opting to make another ten movies about nuclear sharks that eat third-rate European actresses instead of bankrolling a full season of The Amazing Screw-On Head. Perhaps the animation, which captures the look of Mignola’s comics perfectly, was a bit too expensive compared to Cartoon Network’s Hellboy animated series. Oh well. At least The Amazing Screw-On Head came out on DVD.

Dare you discover the animated horrors which await on the nest page? Well? Do you?