I was a wee little lad parked in front of the TV every Saturday morning during the “crappy” age of cheap TV animation, where hardly anything was really animated: if a character moved an arm, only the arm moved, nothing else. Backgrounds were static and the people merely superimposed on top. That was the age that I remember watching a 70’s environmental-themed cartoon called Sealab 2020.
Flash forward a few years. I’m channel surfing late one night and I stop on a Sealab tableau. It’s Cartoon Network and I’m laughing, “Oh my god, I can’t believe they’re showing this old piece of crap!” But as I watch, I realize that it’s not quite the show I remember. The dialog wasn’t the same and the jokes were adult-themed… also, I was laughing so loud my next door neighbor was pounding on my apartment wall.
The producers of Sealab 2021 had purchased all the stock footage and re-recorded new bits of dialog, just like they’d done with Space Ghost. Those crazy kids at Adult Swim!
The series only ran for 3 years, but if the humor reminds you of another brilliant animated show Archer, there’s a reason for that – Adam Reed, the man responsible for Archer (Hey, what a cool name!) also came up with the idea for Sealab 2021.
Check out a full episode of Sealab 2021, “Lost in Time.”
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