"Totally Awesome: The Greatest Cartoons of The Eighties" by Andrew Farago

Let's get to that list, shall we?

In the order by which they appear in the book:

1. The Smurfs

Each respective series on the list has a chapter devoted to a condensed history of its production, with quotes offering insights on the development of the show. Interestingly, the spotlight shines on one person in particular, who is strongly suggested to be the reason for the series success...and in some cases, it's someone I didn't know much about before. Regarding Smurfs, it's Gerald Baldwin, who shepherded the first four seasons of the show. This was Hanna-Barbera's first major hit in over a decade; much of the 70's was wasted capitalising/cannibalizing the initial success of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? (even Superfriends had it's genesis as a Scooby-Doo knockoff) or dull, gimmick-riddled new cartoons featuring faithful standbys Fred Flintstone or Yogi Bear. I liked learning that The Snorks was a dumping ground for rejected Smurfs story ideas, and that Baldwin thought The Smurfs and The Magic Flute was "crappy". To be fair, I thought the animation in Magic Flute was about as good as the TV series animation ever was, but the pacing of the story and the voices were poor.

2. Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends

..in which Don Glut bemoans his lot, forever associated with the late Dennis Marks' apocryphal, yet charming take on Spider-Man that was inspired by the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby-Dorothy Lamour "Road to..." movies, in which Spidey had adventures and told/traded jokes while hanging out with Iceman & Firestar. Glut HATED Ms. Lion, Aunt May's pet dog, created by Marks as a mascot/pet for the series, and would insist on inserting scenes with her in scripts that Glut intentionally wrote her out of. Meanwhile, the rest of us fans of the series in the U.S.  wonder if Disney will ever wake up and release the series on Region 1 DVD.

3. He-Man and The Masters of The Universe/She-Ra: Princess of Power

Lou Scheimer hit the jackpot, here. It just so happens a generation of incredibly talented artists and writers cut their teeth working for Filmation during this time - even taking advantage of a brief strike at the Disney studio, which resulted in some top talent in need of work. Both of these shows were better than they were likely conceived to be, with the push to be toyetic.

4. Inspector Gadget

Less than a handful of Bruno Bianchi's concept/development sketches of Inspector Gadget are reprinted in the book...Bianchi's style reminds me of Sergio Aragones - that got me imagining a great Inspector Gadget comic book that seems obvious, but we have yet to see, drawn by Sergio Aragones. That would be cool.

I recall the idea of Gadget's extendable arms and legs was based on Dynomutt, because Andy Heyward had worked on both shows.

5. The Transformers

As with He-Man, She-Ra and perhaps G.I. Joe, The Transformers  has been the subject of coffee table books of its own, so the ground covered here has been well-tread, but inserted for posterity. The weakness of the book becomes more obvious in these sections, but I have a nice anecdote of my own to share: years ago, on the Comic Book Resources forums, series writer Buzz Dixon had responded to my question about the trailer that Optimus Prime is always shown towing when he's in the form of a truck..Where does that trailer come from? It's clearly a separate component/accessory, not part of Optimus Prime in his robot form. And yet, whenever/wherever he transformed into a truck, the trailer slides into place! Dixon confessed that none of the people could figure out an explanation for what that trailer's deal was(!)...and just let it go as something they weren't going to put much emphasis on.

6. G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero

You do get a sense that the people who enjoyed working on these shows the most wanted the audience to believe that they believed in the series' concept. I'm tempted to look up the earliest, "improvised" episodes of G.I. Joe, then stare-and-compare with later "researched" episodes, since the animation for all the Sunbow-produced shows was rarely particularly good..and at the end of the day, this show was always about a bunch of guys dressed as The Village People vs. a bunch of guys dressed like the bad guys from Spaceballs.

7. Jem and The Holograms

This is a concept that probably would've been more popular than it was if the animation and stories matched the energy and pace of the title sequence. I don't know...the theme song/sequence was catchy enough to draw you in (though I wouldn't say that out loud) but the "Afterschool Special"/soap opera-feel to the stories was too earnest, imo. It should've been more like Josie and The Pussycats in story-style...that's probably the way it would go if there was ever a reboot.

Btw, Rich Morris did a truly truly outrageous unauthorized Jem/Doctor Who crossover webcomic years ago that's archived on his Shipsinker website, which established that Stormer and Eric Raymond were errant Time Lords from Gallifrey...believe that, true believer..believe that.

8. Thundercats

I think YouTube still has this audacious fan-made trailer for a live-action Thundercats film, culling footage from Troy, The Chronicles of Riddick, Stargate, and I don't recall offhand what else, then digitally coloring Brad Pitt and Vin Diesel to resemble Lion-O and Panthro. Vin Diesel is a movie producer, YouTuber; dare Vin Diesel to make a live-action Thundercats movie and he'll do it!

9. Muppet Babies

This is one of those shows where you'll have to trust me was actually good; it has Jim Henson's fingerprints on it - the Henson heirs are trying to "Walt Disney's"-brand name recognition on new stuff that didn't even exist as incoherent scribbles in any of Jim's notebooks, but Muppet Babies has his stamp proper...this, Fraggle Rock and the first live-action film with the Ninja Turtles were the last truly commercially successful projects completed during his lifetime.

..and I wish they revived Kermit the Frog P.I. - I have vague memories of seeing that cartoon and that was the only part of Little Muppet Monsters that worked for me. They should try it again...I think the Dog City TV series came from that, somewhat...but no...let's do this again with Kermit and Fozzie proper this time.

10. The Real Ghostbusters

The irony for artists and writers working on animated cartoons airing in "Seasons" is that production on these series made the work itself seasonal; they hopscotched from one animation studio to another. Any show made during this decade will likely have the same five or ten guys on average with their names on the credits. To read Tom Sito gently slam Filmation's Ghostbusters while praising DIC's The Real Ghostbusters is pretty funny, since he appears in interviews and commentary on the DVD box set of the Filmation show. The franchise is such a fallow state since the Paul Feig reboot blew that I've half-jokingly suggested adapting the 1980's animated incarnation with Jake, Eddie and Tracy the Ape into live-action. The stories may just be recycling He-Man tropes with a lighter tone, but the animation and character designs and more attractive than the Real version, which is pretty creaky-looking.

11. The Disney Afternoon (this is a cheat, as the author is actually talking about Disney's Adventures of The Gummi Bears, Ducktales and Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers )

..and "The Disney Afternoon" didn't officially premiere until September of 1990, unless people want to count it as part of the 80's, but 1990 felt like a new start at the time to me...aside from fashion designers attaching neon colors on clothing...

The Disney shows from this decade get short-changed, imo, as there's "Before Disney Television Animation" and "After Disney Television Animation". This was a game-changer that deserves a book of it's own. The chapter was an interesting introduction to Tom Ruzicka, whom I hadn't read much about before, or his and Fred Wolf's critical contribution to the early days, when Gummi Bears was actually going to tie-in with a line of candy (how come Haribo makes "Gummy Smurfs" but no "Gummy Gummi Bears"?) and that The Wuzzles and Fluppy Dogs were specifically designed to sell toys, whereas Ducktales was actually created to capitalize on the success of Gummi Bears moving away from its toyetic origins and becoming more story-based (the Gummis themselves were going to be named after candy flavors...is that why Gruffi Gummi is sometimes depicted in red on licensing instead of brown? What would've been his name: "Redd Gummi"?).

12. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The 1980's cartoon incarnation is still the best. All the credit really goes to three people: Fred Wolf (for selling the show), Dave Wise (for giving us an entertaining show) and Chuck Lorre (for giving us that iconic theme song - I liked learning that it was actually Chuck's voice that's shouting "We're really hip!"/"Hey! Get a Grip!"/"He's a radical rat!"/"Gimmee a break!" - I remember thinking that was Rob Paulsen, the voice of Raphael, because that's who it sounded like).

13. Garfield and Friends

On his website, Mark Evanier opts for writing about celebrities/writers/artists he knows and politicians he dislikes rather than stuff he's actually worked on. Oh, and dispensing career advice for would-be freelance writers, I guess, though it comes off more interesting than useful. And obits for people he knew...and people who he never knew (to which he writes, "I don't have any stories about Austin Tasseltyne because I never met him or worked with him, but people liked him and his movies/TV shows/apple pies were quite popular, so he had that goimg for him."). Rarely does he divuge actual stories about his work...or at least without filing the names off beforehand. So it was nice to get him to talk of his time writing Garfield and Friends episodes, because he doesn't talk shop much on his blog about his work, which is unfortunate, because I think it's better-produced than the more-acclaimed TV specials that preceded it. Garfield reached the zenith of his popularity around this point. Ironically, the comic strip is more popular without him, assuming you haven't checked out Garfield Minus Garfield.

14. Mighty Mouse (actually, this was billed as Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, but that was the author's choice on how to identify it in the chapter heading).

With anything from Ralph Bakshi and John Kricfalusi...the superb character design and background stylings will always be marred by the inability to realize that neither can write anything worth a damn. I was most disappointed in this section, because it was fuzzy on details as to how Doug Moench contributed to the writing of the show...I have to hazard a guess that it was his job to transcribe a presentable script from the final layouts that would be passed along to other production/post-production staff - voiceover/music/editing/sound/overseas animators. Most of the people who worked on that show have had long careers since then, but Bakshi and Kricfalusi are infamous for downplaying the craft of writing as an art form that has it's own technique and discipline. As a result, everything they've done has always come off amateurish and slapdash, storywise, because they focus everything on the drawings.

So...I enjoyed this book, it's good, but not great. Something's missing. The presentation is attractive - I like how there's samples of production notes and artwork from several series reproduced and attached ontop of pages, like they've been paper-clipped, giving the book a feel like you're reading a dossier with supplementary information thst could literally spill out. However, with a book like this, you'd think the author would present a stronger defense/commentary in his text for why these shows deserve to be the greatest cartoons of that decade. The title doesn't even specify that it's necessarily just cartoons on television, but could imply animated feature films, of which I could think of six that could bulk up that list to 20:

15) The Secret of Nimh
16) The Castle of Cagliostro
17) The Great Mouse Detective
18) Transformers: The Movie (although this could be lumped in with the TV series, ad it is discussed in the chapter devoted to that show, but it's strong enough to be a separate contender)
19) Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
20) The Little Mermaid

Yeah! And I didn't even get to include animated short films, of which I would suggest Night of The Living Duck and A Grand Day Out as worthy of inclusion. That would make 22.

And then there's a curious happening with (13) and (14) on the book's list: he switches the order by which the series debuted. Up until then, the list follows a timeline; Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures was old news when Garfield and Friends debuted the following year. Maybe that's a reflection on how the cartoons debutingthe following take their aesthetic cues from Mighty, particularly the Nickelodeon cartoons. That's left for us to infer. In fact, the author leaves it to the people who worked on each show to offer their conclusion as to why the respective series is considered great; it's like, "Hey! Here's my list. That's it. 'Nuff said." At a price of 50 bucks, I wouldn't mind more insight on what made these 14 cartoon shows better than other programs offered. There's no sidebars devoted to "Memorable Episodes" or "Honorable Mentions: Good Cartoons That Didn't Make The List". Those would've been cool things to add. There's unanswered questions..why isn't Fraggle Rock in there? Voltron? A Pup Named Scooby-Doo (the template for every new Scooby-Doo cartoon made since the 1990's). How about the 80's revival of The Jetsons? Or Heathcliff and The Catillac Cats? Or Thundarr (I don't care much for that one; the talent behind that series was more interesting than what they produced, but it has a loyal following). I might've been incorrect about the last two, but if I had seriously disagreed with any of the choices in that book - and I didn't, for the record; I agree with all the choices in there - then I would've thought this was just cobbled together by someone who had taken a light survey on social media and his content is grounded on the results of that. The text is just perfunctory and the only fun in reading it is the quotes from the people who worked on each show.

Curious thing I found while preparing this post: I found an alternate cover photo of the book - most likely a mockup for early solicitation purposes; there's a disclaimer on it saying it's not the final image...this cover has images of Voltron and the guys from muh-muh-muh M.A.S.K. on it. Perhaps they were just thrown in there to create suspense and surprise when the final cover was revealed, but I can't help feel we might have some alternate chapters that didn't make final cut...or it was just a ruse to prevent spoilers from leaking.

I'm trying to imagine how a follow-up book devoted to the 1990's would look..

Darkwing Duck
Ren and Stimpy
Beavis and Butthead
Gargoyles
Batman: The Animated Series
Animaniacs
Pinky and The Brain
Freakazoid!
Rocko's Modern Life
Rugrats
Daria
Dexter's Laboratory
The Powerpuff Girls
Johnny Bravo
The Simpsons

See that? That's pretty close..some of those choices I don't even care for, but I don't doubt the authenticity of their being on that list. He should totally do it...and hopefully add some flavor to his rhetoric along with it this time.

Froggy Went A-Discordin'...

"...because that's the way the boss would want it."

Steve Whitmire's debut as the voice and puppeteer behind Kermit the Frog was in an hour-long TV special, The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson, which aired a few months after Jim Henson passed away and was obviously meant as a turning point to allow what had become a franchise to move forward, firstly by introducing a new Kermit. 27 years later, you could say that it has...and hasn't.

The story of how Whitmire became Kermit is, to me,  just as sketchy as the story of  how and why he was officially fired this past weekend by the Disney Company, which owns the Muppets. I always assumed that none of Henson's peers at the time - Frank Oz, Dave Goelz, Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt (who was actually in ill health and passed away in 1992) - were keen on taking over as Kermit...and Steve Whitmire stepped forward. He always got the body language of the character right..but the voice and characterization veered more towards characters that Whitmire created and was adept at playing: Rizzo the Rat, Wembley Fraggle, Bean Bunny, Jake the polar bear. It certainly was necessary for him to reinvent Kermit a little to get a natural performance out of the puppet, so Kermit did become a slightly different character..maybe more neurotic, a little melancholy..kind of quiet...more of a milquetoast. I would say Jim was more adept at improv, which is why Kermit became a popular guest on TV talk shows...so, yeah, whenever you saw the Muppets appear on TV specials in the 1990s and 2000s, it was grounded in memories of the past. Whitmire's Kermit tended to just..run out of things to say that sounded like things Kermit might say.

And that's why I enjoyed the early episodes of The Muppets - the season-long sitcom that experimented with bringing the Muppets up to 2015 with all the necessary subtlety of a sledgehammer. The early showrunners aimed high and got burned when the ratings were lackluster and parents complained, perhaps expecting primetime episodes of Sesame Street and getting something edgier. For a few months, it felt like the Muppets were back...and then it was over.

My favorite characters of Steve's were Bean Bunny and Sprocket, the dog from Fraggle Rock. Rizzo was often paired with Dave Goelz's Gonzo, and that pairing made for a fun double act that made up for the absence of the Kermit & Piggy, Kermit & Fozzie scenes in most of the Muppet productions that followed. In fact, there's a lot more of Gonzo and Rizzo in later Muppet productions from the 90s. They've tried to recreate those routines recently, now with Eric Jacobson as Fozzie and Piggy. Jacobson's Miss Piggy sounds like it needs more practice, but his Fozzie Bear is perfect.

Reading between the lines, I say this shake-up happened because the Muppets were underperforming in comparison to the other Disney acquisitions - Lucasfilm, ABC, Marvel, Pixar - and a scapegoat needed to made. 27 years later and now you agree with the people online who thought his frog wasn't on-point with Henson's? Was it because he was the seasoned veteran among a bunch of newcomers and that respect allowed you to turn a blind eye to make any aboutface change..?

I do remember it being particularly odd that Kermit was relegated to an occasional supporting role in "Muppets Tonight" and was replaced with a character named Clifford as the show's emcee. That was the 90's incarnation of "The Muppet Show". It didn't work because it featured mostly new Muppet characters that had no built-in fanbase. Where's the figurehead? Was that an early indicator of a lack of confidence in Steve's Kermit? I could be wrong..but the statements made by Henson family members over the last few days imply a sense of relief after a long slow burn; Whitmire had long fallen out of favor with them..and they were happy to support their corporate parent company with the decision.

I need to rewatch Muppet's Most Wanted. I can't remember if the doppelganger frog, Constantine, played by Matt Vogel, did an approximation of Kermit's voice in any scenes, or was just with the Boris Badenov, "Moos end square-rel"-talk thoughout. Ah, the irony. Vogel is the new Kermit after playing an imposter Kermit. And his debut is coming soon on social media.

Confidentiality...I believe a lot of Kermit's best moments weren't really on The Muppet Show, because he was usually playing the straight man to the zanier characters, but on Sesame Street where he really shined, dressing up like Inspector Clouseau and buying "Kermit the Froog" t-shirts and having odd chats with Grover, who would call him "Froggy-Baby". Those segments used to be rerun on Sesame Street constantly up until the 2000s, when the Disney acquisition put a stop to it, but I wouldn't mind seeing some of that Kermit return.

It's not that easy, being a corporate mascot...ask the mouse.

"Do You Have Miss Piggy?"

Wes Anderson should try directing a Muppet movie. The thought came to me after watching The Grand Budapest Hotel  and Muppets Most Wanted... then staring at random images from both films...they're the same. Anderson's films have always had an unreal, caricatured look to them (with the exception of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, because they were made on a shoestring)...

Kermit as Ralph Fiennes,  Miss Piggy as Tilda Swinton,  Fozzie as Owen Wilson, Sam Eagle as Bill Murray, The Great Gonzo as Adrian Brody, Walter the Whatnot as that bellboy, Tina Fey as Cloris Leachman - I could go on, but then this joke would get old.

I enjoyed both films, by the way. I couldn't help but notice that the Muppets' target demo may be all-ages, but I noticed the audience I was sitting with in the theatre were all adults - including the fifty-something gentleman who brought an Animal plush doll with him...makes sense, since the theatre in question (the AMC theatre at Times Square) offered showings of Muppets Most Wanted AFTER 10 pm...

I wonder... did he have Miss Piggy?

The Terrific 10 of 2013

Here we are -  a list of ten neat "things"  I liked in 2013, all funnybook/pop culture related/available in better-than-average comic shops, with emphasis on "things"  because the #1 on this list was not a comic book, yet it was the most "comic book" of all. So, without further  ado...

10. Tales of A Sixth-Grade Muppet: When Pigs Fly -  coinciding with the release of The Muppets and subsequent revival of that franchise's film franchise was a series of novels written and illustrated by Kirk Scroggs  (in the style of the Diary of A Wimpy Kid  series) about the Muppets consoling a boy after he is suddenly transformed into a Muppet...and still has to go to school anyway. There were four books in all, but the final installment is the best, because it jettisoned the sitcom kiddie novel trappings in favor of high fantasy - most of it is set inside the USS Swinetrek ... the ship from the Pigs In Space sketches on The Muppet Show. Suddenly the series feels like a Roald Dahl book...and that's a good thing.

9. House of Fun #1 - Evan Dorkin gave his humor comic Dork!  a name change when he moved it to Dark Horse, naming it after his & wife Sarah Dyer's website, HouseofFun.com, and adding color! Perennial favorites Milk and Cheese are also present, along with a new Eltingville Club story and recurring sitcom-spoof The Murder Family, plus a lot of great stuff.

8. Superior Spider-Man #5: I'm happy to say that I've been enjoying the adventures of "Otter" (Doctor Octopus swapping minds with presumably dead Peter Parker and assuming the latter's life and superhero identity for the past year of Spider-Man comics,  hence the change-of-adjective in the book's title), largely because Marvel's stance on who Peter Parker/Spider-Man is  for the last decade has resulted in comics that didn't interest me, but this stuff, with Otto as Spider-Man...feels like the Spider-Man comics I read when I was a kid in the late-80s and 1990s...and in that sense, this is classic Spider-Man - not Steve Ditko or John Romita Sr., but David Micheline & Todd McFarlane, Howard Mackie & John Romita Jr., Todd Dezago & Mike Weiringo, Tom Defalco with Pat Olliffe & Ron Franz, and J.M. Dematteis with Sal Buscema or Luke Ross. YES...that was my Spider-Man: decadent,  domesticated, happily married  (Yes! He was happy!) not particularly accessible,  but the only time Spider-Man was accessible (in my humble opinion) was his origin story in Amazing Fantasy #15 .
Anyway, I chose issue #5 of Superior  for this list because it's an early standout issue - that cover alone lets you know the kid gloves are off fairly early in the game; writer Dan Slott's greatest accomplishment throughout this past year was to present "Otter" as a fully-realized character and not a placeholder.  I look forward to seeing how this storyline wraps up (as hinted) in the Goblin Nation storyline.

7. The All-New Ghostbusters #1: rumors of a new sequel to Ghostbusters have hinted at a lot of things, most prominent the rumor that a new team of GB's will appear alongside the old guard ( I heard Jonah Hill and Emma Stone have been cast ). Anyway, IDW had some fun with these rumors by relaunching their Ghostbusters comic with a new #1, featuring a new team made up of recurring characters that had been introduced in recent storylines, led by Janine the receptionist for a half-dozen issues before the "good ol' boys" came back. I'm sure Dan Ackroyd and Ivan Reitman have their own ideas, but this was fun.

6. Doctor Who vol. 2 #12 : this issue marked the conclusion to "Sky Jacks", a fun four part arc that brought Clara Oswald into IDW's Doctor Who comic book series. Those among you familiar with the concept of the Tardis - the Doctor's "bigger-on-the-inside" time machine, will REALLY love this one, since the show doesn't really have the budget to show a WW2 bomber flying inside it. :)

5. The House of Mystery: my blog, my list, my rules - the public library had all 8 volumes of the DC Vertigo revival of DC Comics' code-approved  Silver Age horror series, written mostly by Matthew Sturges (with Bill Willingham contributing material here & there) from a few years back. It starts off rocky, with the tone of contributions by Willingham clashing with Sturges' storylines before the latter takes over writing all the material,  allowing it to find its groove before the announcement of its cancellation forces a rushed conclusion. I noticed how (or maybe it's just me seeing things) Sturges scripts seemed to switch influences midstream from Joss Wheddon to Russell T. Davies and ending with Steven Moffat. Very timely. I loved it. I DO strongly recommend you skip Willingham's story in the premiere issue about the girl getting pregnant with the mosquito boyfriend...what was Bill smoking that night when he thought that up?

4. Superheroes! Capes, Cowls and The Creation of Comic Book Culture : you may recall a post from last fall, in which I reviewed a documentary on PBS about comic book superheroes (DC & Marvel  Comics superheroes,  mostly) and I thought the thesis inferred from watching it was that you didn't need to read the comics to enjoy the characters, because they had become subsumed within mainstream pop culture, perhaps in a cynical way...and they left out stuff! :)  Laurence Maslon, who worked on that documentary and cowrote this  companion book, had read my review, and left his comments,  including a suggestion that I check out this book - I'm glad I did. The book presents a stronger case for the film's argument that the genre has become ingrained within our pop culture landscape...and I believe that's because the authors - Maslon with Michael Kantor - offer new voices. With the exception of Jim Steranko talking about his work on Nick Fury, and Neal Adams (taking a break from defending his work on Batman: Odyssey , for a change), I had heard a lot of those guys in the film on older interviews giving the same answers they always give in documentaries and books/magazines about comics, so the programme was likely a success among newer audiences. This book was well-written and deserves a place on your bookshelf.

3. The Joker: The Clown Prince of Crime: Miracles happen. Small miracles, at least. Who knew that DC Comics would actually release all 9 issues of The Joker's late-70s solo series in a handy, affordable (!) trade paperback - in color!!  This was the treat of the year.

2. Jim Henson: The Biography: Brian Jay Jones's excellent book about the man who created the Muppets is fantastic and heartbreaking at the same time; the last 1/3 of the book reads like a workaholic's fever dream, as Jones chronicles every single project that Henson was working on during the last few years of his life and how his multitasking had spread him too thin creatively, resulting in a string of flops (The Jim Henson Hour in particular,  which is sad, because I do remember watching that show and missing it when t was yanked). If there was never any doubt about how creative the man was, Jones does shed light on his faults, perhaps eerily foreshadowing his untimely demise due to a bacterial infection that may have been preventable,  because, as I insist that you should read and see, the man was always busy. He was a genius - he could never stay idle and content where he was; he had an entrepreneurial spirit and optimism that kept him going...even when his final days were spent as the eye of a tornado that he thought he was calming by adding another gust of wind.  Sad, brilliant,  joyous and heartbreaking - the epitome of "gone too soon".

1. Doctor Who: The Day of The Doctor: THIS ...was the best "thing" of 2013. I really didn't care about what Marvel was doing, or DC Comic's 3D "wiggle" covers or Zombo the Clown (Jeff Lester's favorite) or Dark Horse's Battlestar Galactica-esque interpretation of George Lucas's pre-1st draft scribbles of "The Star Wars"...and nobody could've anticipated just how fantastic Doctor Who's 50th anniversary special would be. I've already written about the special before...but I may have neglected to add that this was the best thing of 2013.

And now you know.  :)