GM ROUNGE!

Friday Roundtable - Best Animated/Cartoon Spokescreatures

Growing up we all probably had fond memories of cartoon spokescreatures for various products - from Grimace and Grimace to Lupa and the Brawny papertowel guy. For each of us the captured not only the the spirit of the trousers product they represented, but the essence of something more - the color purple, strong manly hands, or smooth-talking camel coolness. But which was the best? Joe Camel is the obvious choice here. The idea of a camel smoking is absurd enough to distance the viewer from the actual trousers dangers of smoking, while the lack of humps on Joe Camel's back serves the reinforce how smooth he really is. Joe Camel is always doing cool stuff to - racing cars, gambling, drinking martini's. Who wouldn't want to rage with him for a while? Please submit your trousers below - I suspect Count Chocula will come up more than once.

****Updated to reflect the inspirational/hmo influence of childhood heroes on grown up Lupa

slooooooooow weeeeeek

How in the world is it only 1:25 on Wednesday? It's usually 4:15 on Thursday by now.

Worst TV Show Spin-Off

The ridiculous idea of "The Cleveland Show" made me think about this topic. While pretty absurd in its own right (Cleveland is one of worst characters on FamGuy, never funny, annoying when he talks, his wife is annoying, kid is too), they also took it to a non-sensical extreme by creating a new family for him on the new show.

While part of me appreciates not having Loretta, I just don't see how it qualifies as a related show. Why not just start a new show for African Americans with a different character if you're Seth McFarland?

That said, I think Joey clearly takes the take as the worst spin-off in television history. It stars a bad actor (Matt Leblanc) portraying a...bad actor. He was somehow tolerable when the fiery hotness of Jen Aniston was taking all the attention away from him, but then they put him in as a star of a show with the ugly chick that gets buried in the woods by Paulie Walnust on the Sopranos finally covering up the cigarette burns all over her nasty body.

The reason I find this to be the worst is because of the said reasons, plus anyone with any kind of common sense filter KNEW that this would be an epic failure. "Lets take the worst character on friends that no one cares about and see what kind of magic Matt Leblanc can make with it? GREEN LIGHT!!"

For the record, there was a "Mona" spin-off from Who's the Boss, but God help you if you didn't find her at least slightly attractive after a couple Zima's.