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What A Cartoon! - Smiling Friends "The Enchanted Forest" (Patreon)

Published:
2022-08-01 04:00:05
Imported:
2026-06
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Who are these garish characters and why are they screaming at me from inside the television? Why, that's just Smiling Friends, Adult Swim's latest hit and the subject of this month's episode of What a Cartoon (brought to you by premium patron Professor Gascan). This hilarious series mixes pop culture references, observational humor, and the chaotic spirit of internet cartoons for an "anything goes" animated show like no other. So listen in as we tell the tale of Pim and Charlie on their Greatest Adventure yet!

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Comments

Manic Rainbow

This is my favorite episode of What a Cartoon so far. Smiling Friends is the rare kind of show that can just make you gut laugh constantly. I am relatively close to Zach’s age. I was born in 1995, and yes I was born into a chaotic world. I was 6 years old when 911 happened. This show is the perfect representation of the younger millennial mindset. And one correction for Bob, the man on the computer in the walls in the first episode was played by Finn Wolfhard. Hope you guys cover “The Smiling Friends Go to Brazil” when ever that comes out.

bakarina

I'll take this opportunity to ask What are the lyrics of the what a cartoon theme. I could never quite understand especially the first line

Rlan's GIF & Art Extravaganza (Hedgeblog, PlayStation Park, Game Art Archive)

The thing you missed here is the thing which actually put Michael Cusack on the map - Damo and Darren 1 - 'Ciggy Butt Brain'. This Youtube video blew up, especially in Australia, and 'Ciggy Butt Brain' basically became part of the lexicon for a while. Has 9.8 million views on Youtube, and is probably what got him the Bushworld Adventure gig.

Steffen Universum

That Linkara looking guy one of the characters is watching on a tablet is actually Lucas the Magnificent, a troll channel and an alias of one of the creators.

Blargh

I’ll definitely check this show out! I don’t watch adult swim as much as I use to.

Josh Crystal

Loved the ep but one glaring omission for me was no mention of The Boss's voice actor, Marc M. of Sick Animation infamy. Along with Shmorky's work on Something Awful, these were formative flash animations for me in the early aughts. I know a lot of his stuff featured ironic racism you've discussed as being trendy at the time but he did move on to do more legitimate work for Adult Swim and with other creators like Cusack.

nina matsumoto

Love this show! I was the one who brought up in Discord that Mike Stoklasa should voice Garfield. I thiiink I also brought it up when I guested on an ep somewhat recently (Talk To The Audience?). Agreed that Professor Gascan has a great voice and more people should have the opportunity to hear it.

Alex Mitchell

Hopefully I'm not nitpicking but I feel like the Mip song (Charlie the Hero) is more of a reference to the Storybook Love song from Princess Bride. Around 1:54 it sounds super similar: https://youtu.be/svbv0ArjPGU?t=114

Professor Gascan

I'm glad people are loving this ep, as always it was a lot of fun to record with you guys. I'll miss being a top patron since there were so many more cartoons to discuss from my weird late Gen X/early Millennial perspective but it seemed about time to let someone else get their moment in the spotlight. Thanks for all the memories and kind words, and I eagerly await my successor's picks.

Alex Irish

If the $50 Patreon tier still existed and I was still on it, I would have 1000 percent requested this show earlier in the year. Smiling Friends is one of the few Adult Swim shows I actively like. There are three key elements that make it work for me: the animation quality, the varied and interesting character designs, and the fact that the characters care about the scenario. It's like if Adult Swim made The Amazing World of Gumball but for adults. In retrospect, the forgotten Cartoon Network show The Problem Solverz feels like an earlier Smiling Friends, also about a team of wacky characters solving problems around town. Whereas Smiling Friends is charming and visually pleasing, Problem Solverz is oversaturated in color and pugly fugly to watch. It was also the creation of an indie artist, Ben Jones of Paper Rad, who pitched it originally to Adult Swim funny enough. The pitch got rejected for being too "cute" to the AS executives, picked up by Cartoon Network, and dumped from the network to Netflix after a lowly rated first season. Now the show can't be found anywhere and is borderline lost media.

Bradley Winton

Gonna be that Aussie but it's pronounced "Mel-Burn" not "Mel-Borne", and if you really want to be aussie about it "Mel-Bun". Also, the first time i heard of Michael Cusak was for his animation "Daymo and Darren" which i thoroughly recommend if you enjoyed Bushworld, it's probably the most accurate representation of Bogans in Australia. And yes, Melbourne is pretty open to giving lots of money to the arts, it's why Marvel uses a lot of VFX studios from there. ANyway, i absolutely agree with you on how this show really is a show for my generation, who grew up on Newgrounds flash animations, but now with a lot less Racism!

Joe Hodgson

I'm a dinosaur who still watches cable and the many animated sitcom shows on Adult Swim usually end up being my wind down programming if I'm not feeling up to watching something "new." When this show was being promoted, Adult Swim literally would play a promo every commercial break that featured James Taylor's "Your Smiling Face" and it nearly drove me to madness. It just wasn't the appropriate time for Taylor's unique brand of bittersweet folk rock. As a result, I had a negative impression of this show because the commercials were so damn annoying that I didn't watch it. I tried to watch the Christmas episode, because I tend to watch any and all Christmas specials, but fell asleep during it. I finally watched the show proper for this podcast and I did enjoy it. The memory of Taylor is fading, and I will hopefully make time to watch the rest of the series in due time.

Devin Hoffarth

The way I think most Tolkien nerds interpret LotR and the Hobbit by association is that The Hobbit is just a transliteration of Bilbo Baggins journey from his own perspective. It's a book that he wrote about this one quirky little adventure he went on meant to entertain other guests at his house. Lord of the Rings meanwhile is literally meant to be a transliteration of one of the more central events in all of Middle Earth. Remember: Tolkien was such a huge linguistics dweeb that the story of Lord of the Rings is literally meant to be interpreted as an English professor 'finding' some ancient story like Beowulf and translating it for us the reading audience. Up to even localizing the names of the Characters! Bilbo Baggins's real name is Bilba Labingi and Frodo's real name is Maura. That is the context with which the text of Lord of the Rings is meant to be read. So Bilbo finding the Macguffin that spells doom for all of Middle Earth is two things: it's a nice way to connect Tolkien's most famous work with his next work. And it's also a joke at Bilbo's expense. Bilbo, this silly little hobbit, accidentally found the most evil object while on his journey and to him it was just some trinket that made him invisible. There's also some bit in there I think about how the ring doesn't ACTUALLY make you invisible just like a spirit or something but actual Tolkien nerds can explain it more than I can. Great podcast BTW and it's sad to hear Gascan go...

Devin Hoffarth

Also on the note of Scifi Fantasy: As a D&D player lemme tell you the stories of Grognards (people who can't let go of the past) who would always bitch and moan about how new D&D sucked because it had 'Magitech' or whatever and they proffered it when magic was 'special' and 'unique' never mind how Wizards and Clerics were ALWAYS starting classes. But I'm going off on a tangent here. What I wanna say is that science fiction and fantasy really are just aesthetics 90% of the time. Even 'hard' scifi usually has some kind of unobtanium or weird pseudo-science thing that exists to justify a slightly absurd premise. Because hard scifi stories are often more about how people treat each other with technology than the technology itself.

Ben

Bob: The Lord of the Rings is too long! Also Bob: The Count of Monte Cristo is my favorite book! Monte Cristo is so long that I am currently 74% through the audiobook and there are 15 hours remaining! Now I did look up the word counts and Dumas is still shorter than the three books combined, but given how much of Tolkien’s songs/appendixes/etc we skip or skim, that that 100k words is going to probably go by quickly. But all kidding aside, thanks for the pods guys!

nalem

"This guy is incredibly annoying and I hate all of his bits, but it's a way to learn about direct-to-video crap you would never watch" HOLY SHIT that's SO spot on I needed to know about the Disney sequels

Stephen C. Nedell

I haven't seen this show but I've been a huge Tolkien fan since fourth grade. Our teacher read The Hobbit and shortly after I got a copy of Bakshi's Lord of the Rings on video disc (not Laser Disc, RCA CED *video disc* as in video on vinyl--yeah I'm old). While I liked Rankin and Bass's Hobbit it wasn't until relatively recently that I began to truly appreciate the film and its heavy anime influenced design. As much as I loved Jackson's LOTR, his version of the Hobbit actually disappointed me more than the Star Wars prequels. It's funny you mention the Greatest Adventure as the only good song from RnB's version since it was the only one that was not originally written by Tolkien. Incidentally I used to sing that to The Boy when he was little before bed. By the way, for all the Thundercats fans out there, look at Slithe and tell me his design wasn't based on a mash-up of RnB's Gollum and the Goblins. Any chance you'd even at least consider Bakshi's Lord of the Rings for a What a Cartoon movie? It would interesting to hear your analysis like other ambitious failures like Cool World and The Black Caldroun.

CitizenMeh

For UK listeners- Smiling Friends is streaming for free on the All4 app.

Dylan (batmanboy11) Freitag

Being a fan of RLM, I first heard about this show when the pilot aired because of Mike Stoklasa's involvement & use of the Plinkett voice, so I'd been meaning to check it out since then. I was a little bit hesitant because I was once a fan of OneyPlays, but long story short, Oney has been fairly transphobic and that really turned me off of his stuff a few years ago, and knowing Zach was the co-creator and co-lead of this made me nervous (+ the fact that Oney himself works on it too). But after watching a few episodes, including this one, I'm really glad I checked it out because none of that BS carried over into it, and this is just genuinely a really fresh and weirdly almost hopeful show (despite all the darkness) that I'm glad it exists. It's way more adult and bizarre than, say, Steven Universe, but I still actually SMILE watching the damn thing without it just ignoring the shitty realities of the world, like how the Bilbo stand-in here is essentially an incel.