I’m not quite sure how I pulled it off, but I became a Ralph Bakshi fan at a fairly young age. My first introduction to him, as it probably was for most kids, was Bakshi’s failed children’s film Wizards. And by failed I mean totally awesome!

You see Bakshi was a bit of a novelty amongst American cartoonists in that he didn’t make animated films that pandered to children and their parents. He wasn’t much of a fan of Disney so when he made a children’s film about warring wizards in a post-apocalyptic world he made sure to include plenty of bloody violence, authentic Nazi war propaganda films and an assassin named Peace. Needless to say critics and parents were a bit bewildered by the film and it was soon relegated to obscurity.

From there I moved on next to Street Fight (aka Coonskin). Unlike Wizards, Street Fight was made specifically for adults as it was a parody of blaxploitation films and satirizes racist stereotypes. And as it was made for adults it came with an R rating attached. Now at the time I was around 13 years old, and the idea of an R rated cartoon seemed positively unthinkable, if not impossible to me. (Little did I know that Bakshi had already topped that rating with his first feature film Fritz the Cat, which had garnered an X rating.) Sure enough, like any blaxploitation film Street Fight was filled with violence, rampant cursing and even the occasional bit of nudity. Nudity in a cartoon? That’s unpossible!
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Due to the Packers game this past monday night I was  bit late posting this weeks review, but fear not! Next week I should be totally on time with the next one. And with my recent viewing of Babylon A.D. I’ve started to be a bit reminiscent of watching another notorious studio hijacking that derailed what otherwise might have been promising film. Thus next week I will be watching and reviewing the much maligned Ralph Bakshi classic Cool World, in which the studios interferred with the project so much that Bakshi public admits to punching his producer in the mouth. Awesome!

If I haven’t made it readily apparent, I watched a ton of movies as a child. And by ton I mean billions, quite possibly literally. Growing up in Wisconsin I tended to have a lot of free time. Now, unlike the kids of today I spent most of that free time outside.

I created countless games and would spend hours playing them. One of my personal favorites was a version of baseball involving my basketball hoop and a tennis ball. You see I was always the pitcher and the object was to throw the ball into the square of the backboard for a strike, and if the ball hit the rim that was the equivalent of the batter hitting the ball. Trust me, it totally made sense to me and was a blast to play.

But when I would get tired of playing my own personal version of BASEketball I would bike to my local video store and rent a movie. Now it didn’t take long for me to work my way through the giants of the day and I soon began to search out far riskier fare. As an interesting side note, I know have the odd ability of identifying a good two decades worth of movies solely by their cover art, often times coming up with my own idea of what the movie was about based on these images.

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When I was growing up in Wisconsin I would often times kill time at my local video store. I would roam through the aisles, looking at the VHS boxes, searching for something interesting to watch. I was fascinated with genre mash-ups and Ralph Bakshi’s films and quickly immersed myself in them. But Waukesha wasn’t exactly stationed along the cutting edge of pop culture, so I had some rather sizable gaps in both my film knowledge and exposure.

It wasn’t until college that I began meeting people who were giving enough to introduce me to German Expressionism, Italian neorealism, and Turner Classic Movies. From then on I always have had great respect for people who introduce me to new and exciting things, especially when it comes to films.

Which brings me to my girlfriend, Anna. I found my first excuse to talk to her when she was reading Watership Down, which was one of my favorite books (as well as animated films) as a child. Much to my delight she had never read it before so it afforded me the perfect opportunity to lay down some serious knowledge, and from there we soon began introducing each other to all sorts of of new experiences. One interesting thing to note is she was far more open to trying out my recommendations early on then I was with hers. This is quite simply explained. She likes Bjork, Dogville, and Ayn Rand. I like cool crap.

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