
I was recently reminded of a comment someone made at one of the video game forums I posted at as a teenager. It’s stuck in my mind because it’s one of the few comments I saw posted at a video game forum when I was a teenager that had any sort of intellectual merit. The poster said that one reason he was fond of Japanese games and cartoons was that they were able to be weird without being gross, in contrast to the English-speaking world where weirdness went hand-in-hand with gross-out humour.
He was talking specifically about Conker’s Bad Fur Day (for those unaware, that’s a British video game that started out as a sugar-sweet title about a cutesy squirrel, but was retooled during development to be filled with South Park-esque swearing, violence and bodily function humour) but I think it checks out as a general observation. For some time, the quirkiest and most offbeat American cartoons that received any sort of mainstream acceptance typically embraced gross-out humour: South Park, Ren & Stimpy, and going back a bit, the works of Robert Crumb, Ralph Bakshi and Basil Wolverton.
There are some notable exceptions from the psychedelic era — see Yellow Submarine — but for the most part, you’d have to go back to the splendidly strange Betty Boop cartoons of the thirties to find strangeness without grossness. Meanwhile, growing up, I noticed that many of the games I played had a certain oddball aesthetic that seemed the sole preserve of Japan (Warioware, Parodius and Goemon all spring to mind) and after that poster pointed it out, I realised that yes, the general lack of gross-out was a defining trait.
Continue reading “The Sweetweird Swingback”