Liberty's Kids on Netflix

If I haven't mentioned this before, Liberty's Kids is now streaming on Netflix.  DJ is going through the oeuvre as we speak, it's Sunday morning, and bacon and eggs are on the way.  Life is good.

Kuragehime (Jellyfish Princess) and Belated Update

So, let's see...the last time I posted to SMC I was remarking on the death of Walter Cronkite, the voice of Benjamin Franklin on DIC's "Liberty's Kids" - I have actually been talking about this show in one of my graduate seminars this semester.  Yes, my professor thinks I'm a complete doof, now, because so far I've expressed my love of "1776, the Musical," my preference for Hall of Presidents at Disney World over real presidential history, and now my comment that one of the themes of Liberty's Kids is about the obstacles of slaves and freed black people (my seminar with this professor is looking at Antebellum slave narratives).  I think if he knew about this blog he would be rather dismayed that he had provided me with a letter of recommendation for graduate school.

Anyway, so I'm finishing my second year of grad school and then...?  The economy is so bad I'm not really sure what my next move is; I just know that I'm not continuing in the PhD program because I cannot continue teaching freshman English for $7.80 an hour.  Well, actually, I could keep doing that, but not teaching AND writing a dissertation for eleventy years. 

My son is still watching Scooby-Doo; he doesn't like the newest addition to the canon, however; It's something that Cartoon Network came out with recently (he watches cable at the G-rents').   Not having seen it, his resistance to it tells me that it either has too much real supernatural stuff going on, or it's somehow grittier than the other incarnations.  Wait, let me look for it...It's called Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated (this link will take you to the CN page for the show) - it looks pretty standard issue, so I'll have to watch an ep and see if I can figure out this SD anomaly with my boy.  He's watching a lot of CN's other offerings for kids (and the Total Drama series, even though it's for a somewhat older crowd); Scooby-Doo has become a sort of mental comfort food for him, like the old Popeye and Looney Tunes cartoons were for me. 

I started this blog when my son was still little, as a way to write about my experience with reacquainting myself with the old cartoons I watched as a child, especially now that I was introducing these works to my son.  Now he's moved on to the stuff he likes but he still has an appreciation for the old Fleischer stuff and that makes me happy. 

So, I'll sit with him and watch the stuff he likes, and for the most part it's stuff I can reasonably tolerate, like Johnny Test; while it's not stuff I would go out of my way to watch on my own, I'm still appreciative that I get a chance to sample what the hip youngs are watching these days.

Anyway, so that's as much of an update I can reasonably give without getting completely boring, so I'll just move onto the next subject, which is also somewhat of an update. While my son has been blazing his own path of cartoon experience, I'm continuing down this rabbit hole of anime (and now manga) that I started up when introducing my son to some of the old anime that I watched (when it was still called Japanimation).  After I went through all of the old stuff I watched, I started looking at stuff I had never really watched but was from the same time period (and had not entered the U.S. market in any translatable way), then I moved onto new stuff.  I think the first recent anime I started watching was Bleach, and it's been all downhill from there. 

Does my obsession with Japanese animation make me otaku?  Haha, no - I've actually tried to engage otaku in online forums and was immediately tossed out, so either my online social skills are really, really bad or I just haven't gotten "it" (whatever "it" is).  I realized recently, however, that I've watched so much anime in the past couple of years that I'm getting a little jaded and can now start looking at the different offerings with a more critical eye.  So, I won't automatically obsessively watch a series if I don't like it or find it too ecchi or fan-servicey.  I guess that's a good thing?

One show I've started watching that deserves some mention is Kuragehime, and I'll continue with those thoughts in another post - I've already eaten through way too much time on this one meandering post.

Swiped the picture from Star Crossed Anime Blog

Walter Cronkite, the voice of Benjamin Franklin, has died

This is old news, now -- the media just got through its grieving process with days and days of retrospectives on Mr. Cronkite. Sure, we all know him as the voice of reason during the cold war, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and JFK, and the Vietnam War, to name just a few of his many achievements. But no one, anywhere, honored him for one of his most recent achievements, as the voice of Ben Franklin on Liberty's Kids. Wait, I'm wrong, there was a NYT blog post about Mr. Cronkite's passing, and a commenter mentions this fact. No where else, though, says boo about it. We have lost a great voice of the cartoon world, folks, and no other cartoon blogs made mention of this fact! So, I guess it comes down to this lazy blogger of an oft-neglected cartoon blog to honor the man and the voice, of Benjamin Franklin.

Goodbye Mr. Cronkite, you brought this great sage from our earliest times as a nation to the forefront of what, inarguably, has to be one of the best shows about the American Revolution.

Got the image from DIC's Liberty's Kids archive

Liberty's Kids on DVD

I've ranted on and off since starting this blog about all the good things about Liberty's Kids (it provides an entertaining and somewhat accurate story of the events and personalities surrounding the Revolutionary War) and all the bad things (its distribution has been miserly and dysfunctional at best). Awhile back on a post I did ("And Another Thing About Liberty's Kids"), some kind commenter said that Liberty's Kids would be coming out on DVD last October and the set would sell for around 60-dollars. This, after I ranted about it selling for $500.00 through some educational distribution site.

Anyhow, it's all good -- the fam just finished watching disc 1 of the Liberty's Kids 6-disc set, which is distributed by Shout! Factory. We're getting them from Netflix, just to see if it'll be worth buying the set. So far, so good -- there were 7 episodes on the first disc and they were all in order, a far cry from the doofy collections that came out in 2005, with only 3 random episodes on each ("The Boston Tea Party: The Movie," "Give Me Liberty," and "The First Fourth of July"). DJ is loving watching them all in order, and it seems like we might be getting the set, after all.

Okay, my only complaint, and it is a teeny-tiny complaint -- because, don't get me wrong, I am soooo, so happy that Liberty's Kids is finally in a boxed set put together by people who actually know what they're doing -- my only complaint, even after the joy and rapture of this event, is that I thought that maybe the episodes should have been kept intact, as they were shown on TV. Meaning, that the original fillers between the stories ("Continental Cartoons," "Ben Franklin's Newsbytes") should have been left as they were. As it stands now, they are lumped in their categories on the special features menu, and it is rather boring to watch them all at once because they fly by so quickly and have the same format. It was probably a decision that was made on whether or not to keep the story flow or the TV format, which had more of a variety-type appeal.

Anyway, that is a small, small complaint next to the major positive that is this collection, so...YAY!

Swiped the cover art pic for the new collection from Shout! Factory's site

In Which I Take a DIC Entertainment PR Person to Task For Doing His Job

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the letter letting me know about "Liberty's Kids" being aired on the History Channel. We don't have cable in our house and I don't know if the History Channel is an appropriate venue for "Liberty's Kids." For instance, here's the lineup for March 4th (tomorrow):

07:00 AM		Liberty's Kids: Across the Delaware James knows a secret about a captured spy named John Honeyman, but he can't tell anyone--not even Sarah. Using the element of surprise, General Washington gets two much-needed victories at Trenton and Princeton.
TVG
07:30 AM		History's Lost & Found: The Lost Squadron/Uncle Tom's Cabin Manuscript/Ty Cobb's Dentures. In this half-hour version of our historical scavenger hunt we locate: the P-38 fighter planes and B-52 bombers that crash-landed on a glacier in Greenland in 1942; the 14 remaining pages from the original manuscript for Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe's explosive book about slavery; and baseball great Ty Cobb's dentures, which sold for $7,475 at auction in 1999.
TVPG
08:00 AM		Hillbilly: The Real Story: The two-hour special, hosted by celebrity Billy Ray Cyrus, brings these mythic people to life through stories that span 300 years. Outcast immigrants, war heroes, isolated backwoodsmen, hard working miners, fast moving moon shiners, religious warriors, musicians and statesmen make up the rugged cast of characters.

"Across the Delaware" is a great episode, but followed up by a show featuring how much Ty Cobb's dentures fetched at auction somehow seems not a good fit for children or the history buffs who watch the History Channel at 7 am.

DIC Entertainment has had some good shows, but a lot of your stuff leaves a lot to be desired, like "Dino Squad" as part of CBS' Kewlopolis. Why not do more educational shows like "Liberty's Kids" and less stuff like "Dino Squad" and "Archie's Weird Mysteries" --- Good God, what's "Sushi Pack?" Oh, wait, here's the synopsis:

The Sushi Pack are tougher than tough, mighty munchies of goodness! Four pieces of sushi and a wad of wasabi jolted to life – out on the streets fighting for what is right! In a world where dark forces will always pursue their wicked goals, the crusading, crime-fighting Sushi Pack is here to fight back on our behalf. These bite-sized morsels of might are ready to serve!

But you already probably know that about "Sushi Pack."

Look, I realize you're doing your job, but c'mon, you obviously haven't read the blog enough to know that I'm mad at DIC Entertainment for charging 400 dollars for the complete canon of "Liberty's Kids," making it next to impossible for mom and dad consumer to purchase the collection for their children; or, alternatively, DIC has only made a few episodes available (12, I think) on DVD where you have to buy a DVD with only 3 episodes on it, and the episodes do not fall into any particular order, either.

Thanks, anyway, and keep reading the blog!

Sincerely,
Michele of Saturday Morning Cartoons Blog

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 6:46 PM, Bennett, Mark wrote:

Dear Michele,

I was glad to come across your blog that mentioned “Liberty’s Kids,” which is being tested right now on The History Channel at 7:00 in the morning.

For the next ten days we need to get the word out to people like you who may favor putting an award winning animated series about the America’s Revolution on the air. This series was done with PBS and has received Emmy nominations (2 for Walter Cronkite’s rendition of Benjamin Franklin) and features an all star cast. This is a great show but it is hard to get shows like this on TV when so many toy and game supported shows fill up the network time. This is an important opportunity for us to let The History Channel know that they will be rewarded by bringing this type of programming to kids.

Thank you for your time and please let others know that we are on the air for the next ten days at 7 in the morning (except for Sunday).

Sincerely,

Mark Bennett

<>

http://www.dicentertainment.com

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And another thing about Liberty's Kids

DJ and I were watching an episode from the DVD of Liberty's Kids that we have at home, "Give me Liberty." It has only three eps on the thing which is a criminally small number to put out on a DVD. The other thing that is irksome is that they only have, like, three or four sets of these things and they are by no means anywhere close to being in order or to being complete. I saw a complete 6 DVD set of Liberty's Kids at an educational media website, for $500.00! That's insane! The Producer of this cartoon, DIC, is probably making money hand over fist because a lot of stations (like the pass-through digital station we suddenly get on our analog set) play Liberty's Kids to satisfy their federally-mandated educational content quota for the kiddies. And what about the adults? Don't we get a federally-mandated educational content quota? Or maybe that's what American Idol and Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? are for.

The other thing I wanted to mention was that there were a buttload of movie stars who did voices on Liberty's Kids. For instance, Liam Neeson did the voice of John Paul Jones on the episode we watched the other night. But there are a ton of big names on this show (including the velour fog, Mr. Cronkite) like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dustin Hoffman, Annette Benning -- Ben Stiller??? Huh? And I could go on and on. The only other show that could match that Hollywood body count is The Simpsons, and their DVDs cost less and have more eps per!

Here's a good article at Common-place about commercial fare that caters to teaching children about American History, like History Rock, a part of Schoolhouse Rock that taught a bunch of us the Preamble to the Constitution with a catchy tune. You have to scroll down a bit to read the Liberty's Kids part but the whole thing was very balanced and pleasurable to read.

Here's a so far great (I haven't read too far into it yet) online encyclopedia on cartoons that seems pretty darn complete, called Toonarific. Go there and poke around -- it is totally worth it!

Liberty's Kids

I've been wanting to post about Liberty's Kids for awhile. When DJ was a baby, it was on the local PBS station as part of its morning lineup on the weekdays. I didn't pay much attention to it other than as background noise while I changed diapers and did transcription work, but as DJ got older it became apparent that he was keenly interested in American history, specifically the Civil War. There are few videos or cartoons that discuss this part of our history in a fundamental way for children so I decided instead to purchase a DVD with 3 of the Liberty's Kids episodes. DJ watched them over and over which is a good sign that he found it interesting. We don't watch the DVD too much these days, being supplanted with A Pup Named Scooby Doo and episodes of Scooby Doo/Dynomutt Hour, but DJ likes to watch Liberty's Kids on the pass-through digital station when it comes on Thursday and Friday mornings.

I like Liberty's Kids because they gives ME a fundamental look at American History -- I feel like a dumbass sometimes trying to answer DJ's questions about our nation's history, so Liberty's Kids helps me at the same time. And who can resist the smooth, silky voice of Walter Cronkite breathing life into one of America's greatest patriots, Benjamin Franklin. The "kids" of Liberty's Kids, well, I could definitely leave them but they do provide a bridge to explain the events in a relate-able way to children, so if watching an ep has DJ running around the house screaming "give me liberty or give me death!" it's had some positive effect, right? Um, right?

Here's a link to the lyrics from Liberty's Kids from Blackcatter's World of TV Theme Song Lyrics. Not really sure why I'm posting that except because I swiped the pic from them and to point out that they neglected to point out that the song, "Through My Own Eyes," was performed by Aaron Carter (who?) AND Kayla Hinkle as referenced in the Wikipedia entry about Liberty's Kids.