Sealab 2021
Season 3
2 DVDs 15 episodes
Warner Home Video

Remember those cartoons you watched Saturday mornings while gobbling down Cocoa Puffs (never understood people who ate Cap’n Crunch)? Well, Adam Reed and Matt Thompson took one of Hanna-Barbera’s lesser offerings, Alex Toth’s thirteen episode ecologically conscious Sealab 2020, renamed it 2021, recut, or is it shredded?, it time and again, added some extra footage, done other animated magic with it and made it into an adult oriented, profane, crass, crude, and very funny cartoon with some nudity and something to offend everybody. It aired as part of the Adult Swim line-up on the Cartoon Network.

Season Three of Sealab 2021 features thirteen fifteen-minute episodes where continuity is not a concern and various new characters are just the original characters slightly touched up. The packaging for this set, reminiscent of communist Russia propaganda material and cheap books, is questionable but the content is not. This is one bizarre but funny cartoon for adults. The creators have even pushed the joke as far as having some of the audio commentary tracks be gibberish about the communists taking over the world,

No topic is sacred to the rewriters and reanimators of this cartoon, from The Matrix to menstruation. The retooled American anime works because not a single episode relates to the previous one and the funny situations are totally different from show to show so you never know exactly what you are going to see aside from recurring characters.

Extra features in the season three box set feature The Gert Pilot, the retooled episode the recreators pitched to the Cartoon Network five years before the series was picked up based on a second pilot, the partially completed Quinmas (another retelling of the A Christmas Carol), a failed episode called Dearly Beloved, a series of unaired promos featuring Kitty Fun-Fun, and an Andy Rooney like moment featuring character Stormy Waters with his take on the political situation in the US.

Sealab is an interesting concept with episodes that will be hits and misses according to individual taste. Overall, this is one weird but fun to watch cartoon

 

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