Thursday, May 25, 2006

Yes! Yes!

Do you know what it's like to try to tell people about a cartoon that you saw as a child and never ever have them know what you are talking about? Indeed, to have them look at you as if you are spouting barely comprehensible and almost completely content-devoid sentences of purely syntactical language? To look into their faces and read in them consternation at being able to find nothing grammatically wrong with sentences that ne'ertheless have somehow ceased to *mean*? Well, I don't know who LJ user OrmondSacker is in the not net-world, but I have my suspicions. In any case, he or she has unwittingly led me to the name of a cartoon long buried. I was first aroused by the comment about the revived corpse of Sherlock Holmes taken into the future in the DiC feature "Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century." I knew this was what I had been searching for for sooooo many years. Then, I saw that it aired in 1999, and I was crushed. How could the beloved memory I had of the revived corpse of Sherlock Holmes deducing that Moriarty had hidden the transceiver in plain sight--THE EIFFEL TOWER!?!--have anything to do with this Scottish latecomer? Well, it couldn't. However, over the course of the Wikipedia article, they, too, noted that this had been done before, but instead of the hyper-detailed reminiscences of Jonathan Tanner--said hyper-detailed reminiscences being stripped of any possible context in which to situate it such as air-dates, time of day, channel, cartoon studio, etc. (except perhaps for the insertion into the memory-nexus of a weirdly zomboid cowboy with bionic implants and a distinctive gun that I tried to describe to Szteve and Adam on at least two drunken occasions and a giant, brawling, horse companion)--instead of these, they had actual information! Lo! It has finally been revealed to me. Behold the face of BraveStarr!!! You have no idea how many different fragments of memory were finally made whole, here. No, it is more significant than any oblique reference to the reconstruction of potsherds could ever convey. It is like brushing away the intervening years with a fine-bristled brush and revealing the original sacred topography of the temple of memory intact beneath the overwhelming detritus of years.

5 comments:

Jessie ᏤᏏ said...

You really dig your cartoons, brother.

JC! said...

I know the feeling. I had many agonizing years of being the only person alive on Earth who remembered the Monchhichis. To make it worse, the fucking extra H prevented me from gathering any more information about this show, and, more importantly, prevented me from showing people what the damn Monchhichis looked like.

Oh, and... you didn't quite exhaust your cartoon-name-identifying resources.

Anonymous said...

OrmondSacker should be none other than the brother of a certain tall, goofy, obscene-sausage-eating mutual acquaintance.

-!TIMF! (insert smell of brimstone)

sadkingjonathan said...

I know. But thanks for being an informer.

Anonymous said...

All I know is you must have been super drunk if you tried to describe Bravestar to me and I didn't ID it. I would have been all over that. He had the strength of a bear you know.

Adam