What A Cartoon! - Smiling Friends "The Enchanted Forest"

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.

Dylan (batmanboy11) Freitag

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

Adam Elmahdi

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.

Stephen C. Nedell

Yeah, the ring doesn't make the wearer invisible by itself, it multiplies the abilities of the wearer (and other powers like being able to understand the language of the orcs and the spiders) Hobbits are said to be excellent at sneaking and hiding (that's why we don't see them anymore) and so invisibility is an extension of that. Other entities, like Gandalf, would not be invisible but he would have the power to dominate (or 'advise') people to do his will.

John Harrison

"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

nalem

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!

Ben

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.

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

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.

Joe Hodgson

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!

Speaking of Aussie ahows, weird as it may sound, would love either of the crew to watch a bit of Bluey. Honestly one of the best shows on TV. All of Australia loves it, even if it’s mDe for 6 year olds.

Ryan Langley

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.

Alex Irish

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.

Professor Gascan