Cartoon Night in Canada

Not to repeat ourselves, but Chris and Sylvie are covering old favourite Jacob Two-Two for our first ever return episode this week on the podcast. This time, we tackle another scathing indictment on a Canadian institution with Jacob Two-Two taking down the gamification of education in this country and the predatory youth gameshow circuit. This episode is basically the Jacob Two-Two version of Paul...

For our "Cartoon Night in Canada After Dark" episode this month, Chris and Sylvie take a gander at a rightfully forgotten British-Canadian offensive comedy that should have been left back in 2005. We slag off, hav a laugh, and take the piss out of Bromwell High, a satirical look at the United Kingdom school systems which has aged VERY poorly.  From the whitewashed voice cast to the stereotype...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie find themselves in Ireland with a globe-trotting insurance fraud investigator to foil the plot of the IRA in our fourth episode of our anime side series CanaDub. Once again, we find ourselves talking the legacy of Pioneer/Geneon Entertainment with one of their less remembered dubbing efforts with a Madhouse adaptation of a Naoki Urasawa classic, Master Keat...

In our official one-week extension to Spooktober, Chris and Sylvie take a look at a mostly forgotten star vehicle for a child actor which made sarcastically investigating the paranormal it's whole deal. It's Moville Mysteries, a visually odd monster-of-the-week horror show clearly schooled in comedy at the Joss Whedon Writing Academy. We dig into the show's look, the career of Frankie Muniz, someh...

On this week's creepy Halloween special, Chris and Sylvie find something more spooky than any ghouls, witches, or vampires: the prominent influence on anime in western animation. We are returning to our friends at Marathon Media for (possibly) the best of their four flagship series, the paranormal-busting teen horror-comedy Martin Mystery! While digging through the tangled web of its production hi...

On this week's sinister slice of Spooktober, Chris and Sylvie let their scare down and revisit the delightful Halloween special where the only eerie thing about it is the early CGI animation. It's Scary Godmother: Halloween Spooktacular - the surprisingly uplifting tale of a queer friend group of over-the-top movie monsters partying and vibing together on the scariest night of the year. We break d...

Greetings Boils and Ghouls, it's officially Spooktober month here on the podcast and we are celebrating with a whole month of creepy Canadian animation. For this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie ponder what would happen if you took a campy, gory, salacious HBO show and....just kind of take all that good stuff out and marketed it to Canadian kids. You get the ill-fated kiddified version of Tales fr...

As we are officially entering spooky season, Sylvie and Chris have programmed an entire month of spooktacular Canadian cartoons and episodes to entertain themselves all through October. And we may have accidentally selected the most terrifying for the first week with the forgotten Harry Potter rip-off the Ultimate Book of Spells. While getting our rants off over a certain terfy British author, we...

On this week's episode, Cartoon Night in Canada goes "After Dark" once again so Sylvie and Chris can chat about a show which distilled the cultural obsession with celebrity and cheap, obvious parody in the mid-2000s into a perfectly serviceable stop-motion show. While every riff on Hollywood isn't perfect in The Wrong Coast, Sylvie and Chris found enough interesting commentary and revealing satire...

On this week's episode, Sylvie and Chris finally step into the Treehouse and cover a show intended for preschoolers with the imaginative pastoral storybook series Little Bear. While Chris nurses a TIFF-induced hangover, your hosts work diligently to analyze the visuals and themes of this show about a grizzly bear intended for babies. This was not easy, but hey, apparently Sylvie found the soft col...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie continue exploring the vast archives of animation that is the National Film Board of Canada with another pairing of short films which couldn't be more different in terms of tone and mood. An endless and visceral cycle of birth, labor, and death set to a classic Russian piano suite paired with a childhood memory of hockey fandom and team tribalism in middle...

On this week's episode, Sylvie and Chris save the world today (the Egyptian way) with a vestige of two dominant '90s trends colliding in Mummies Alive! Hot off the heels of a resurgence in Egyptomania in the West and when the hottest trend in animation was shamelessly ripping off the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, this Canadian co-production from the desk of Ivan Reitman debuted to the world as a f...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie take flight with some uwu anime bats in the miniseries adaptation of a beloved children's book series, Silverwing. While first getting a little rant off about the state of animation in the streaming era (shame on you, HBOMax) we talk a bit about the show's "unique" design, its stellar voice cast, its noble efforts of adapting Kenneth Oppel's novel series, a...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie get real and talk about their problems against a backdrop of vaguely connected media clips with Teletoon's late appeal to the MTV generation, Station X. An odd cartoon that has grown in infamy as a media rights issue nightmare, our chat somehow encompasses this show, obscure French-Canadian coming of age films from the 90s, ineffective prison reform techniq...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie look back at a time when the Gothic subculture invaded the mainstream through cutesy marketability with the delightful Ruby Gloom, a macabre little show born from a stationary line. Episode covered is Season 1 Episode 10 "Skull Boys Don't Cry." If you liked what you heard please consider giving us a like, share, follow, and rating to help us reach a wider a...

On this week's episode, Sylvie and Chris send their clones to record an episode, because they couldn't be asked to do their jobs, and talk about the famed Canadian produced series about teenagers and cloning. No, not the one you are thinking of. We are chatting about Carl², the trials and tribulations of a slacking blogger and his clone who he keeps in his closet. A spirited conversation where we...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie go plundering with some nihilistic pirates to battle some neo-nazis in the third official episode in our anime side series CanaDub. We chat about the legacy of Geneon entertainment and G4 Tech TV and the cast behind the Ocean Group's dub of Studio Madhouses Black Lagoon. How many CG Barbie movies have they been in? Where have you heard those voices before?...

On this week's episode, Sylvie and Chris begrudgingly have a gander at the longest running animated show in Canadian history, Kevin Spencer . Once again, we come to the conclusion creating animation for adults is a difficult prospect, especially when appealing to a post-South Park try-hard edginess style of humour is just so easy.  Episode covered is Season 2 Episode 24 "The Potted Goose." If...

On this week's episode, we maximize and roll out to take a look at another pioneering CGI series from Mainframe Entertainment with the anthropomorphized Transformers show Beast Wars: Transformers. While neither Chris or Sylvie knows a thing about Transformers lore, we nevertheless find ways appreciate the early aesthetic growing pains that was 90s CGI animation and the incredible effort by Mainfra...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie repeat themselves to emphasize their shared love for the lovely series based on Mordecai Richler's children's book series, Jacob Two-Two. Somehow attempting to articulate why the show's unique visual style holds up tremendously today, the conversation somehow shifts to Canada's dismal media landscape, the distinctive charms of Montreal to tourists, Tegan an...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie continue exploring the vast archives of animation that is the National Film Board of Canada with another pairing of short films which oddly seem to express the same ideas (in radically different tones and moods). Finding meaning in a chaotic world where nuclear annihilation is a constant threat and we are at the mercy to fate's many digressions and weird tu...

On this week's episode, Sylvie and Chris jump on the Paddington hype train to discuss the only adaptation of the marmalade loving bear to be produced by the Great White North with The Adventures of Paddington Bear (1997). Mostly we chat about Michael Bond's storybook character, his enduring appeal and legacy, and our personal histories with Paddington while sifting through the utterly comforting v...

On this week's episode, Sylvie and Chris get back into poorly conceived and try-hard offensive adult animation with the unexpected adaptation of a controversial cartoonists' therapeutic newspaper cartoons. While chatting about John Callahan's fascinating career, work, and enduring legacy, we dive into the=is strange attempt to turn him into a household name through the medium of adult cartoons wit...

On this week's episode, Sylvie and Chris go back to school with a maniacal phantom creeper in the basement with Flying Rhino Junior High. While once again bemoaning how hard it is to find any research on the shows we cover, we discuss show creator Ray Nelson Jr.'s unique approach to character design and the spurious merits of edutainment in a post-Magic School Bus world. Plus, we dissect the unmis...

On this week's episode, Chris and Sylvie mock God's design with animalistic abominations and unbridled gross-out humour with Nelvana's Spliced. While speculating on what the evil doctor's plan was for all his animal hybrids on his abandoned island, we chat about the show's animation style and classic inspirations and the long lost comedic art of "RAAAAANNNNNDOOOOOM" style jokes. Plus, Sylvie has s...