Before The Venture Brothers and Freakazoid, there was The Tick. Based upon the comic books of Ben Edlund, the Tick is an invulnerable being with superhuman strength and no clue. Thankfully his invulnerability keeps him from being killed by his foolish actions because he’s a living cartoon trapped in a “realistic” world that has fringes of craziness.
It was really odd for Fox to show a cartoon of this sort when children usually watched. Most of the show’s jokes were about superhero names: the cowarldy knock-off of Batman called Die Fledermaus, the obscure joke about a plant villain named El Seed or the play-on-words with heroine American Maid. The Tick was more appealing to fanboys than children. On the other hand, it aired when Fox still took chances on its programming to get out from under the moniker of being “the fourth network.” After three seasons, it was suddenly cancelled. My friend José was (and still is) working at a Fox affiliate at the time. He told me there was a fourth season planned but then the network announced its cancellation. I don’t recall any explanation. Years later, The Tick reappeared on Comedy Central briefly and I stumbled upon it on Toon Disney. Now the first season has appeared on DVD.
As a DVD, this two-disc set is rather weak. After wading through all the Disney plugs before the main menu, there really aren’t any additional features to compel anyone to buy it. No sketches, no animatics, no deleted scenes, so on. Not even the super-easy and cheap-to-do audio commentaries. To add insult to injury, the 11th episode is missing due to “creative differences,” whatever that means. If it weren’t for my aversion of most things associated with Disney and its air time competing with Adult Swim, I could’ve saved the money on this and just recorded it on my DVR from Toon Disney. The ending credits are frustrating too; all the actors for the season are listed at once even though Roddy McDowell was only in one episode as the Breadmaster. Other than easily recognizable voices from Rob Paulsen, Tony Jay, Mickey Dolenz, Jim Cummings and Roddy McDowell, it would still be nice to see who was the voice of which character?
As a cartoon, I had forgotten how poor the animation was for a hand-drawn show but the jokes, dialog, plots, voice acting and other elements are what attracted me to it. This is the same strategy used by Adult Swim’s more original programming too. Which now dove tails into The Tick’s relevance to Adult Swim and The Venture Brothers. Chris McCullough wrote three episodes of The Tick cartoon and one of the short-lived, terrible live-action version starring Patrick Warburton. Then he went on to create and develop The Venture Brothers with Doc Hammer. His involvement with both versions of The Tick probably explains why Ben Edlund has written several episodes and why Patrick Warburton provides the voice of Brock Samson. More importantly, I think McCullough’s cartoon displays its lineage of humor from The Tick through the Phantom Limb or White Noise (there’s that play on words again) and parodies of well-known superheroes (everyone loves Stephen Colbert’s version of Professor Impossible, the cold, self-absorbed version of Mr. Fantastic). I only hope a better job is done on the season two set.