So what exactly brings college students back to Cartoon Network night after night to receive their daily dose of Captain Murphy, Master Shake and Peter Griffin? Nick Wiedenseld, manager of program development at Adult Swim, says he thinks it might have some connection to those damn Modest Mouse rockers.
Similar to the increased popularity of college radio, Adult Swim offers a medium experimental enough to bring in college students. Just as fans of music can turn to college radio for an alternative to Clear Channel programming, Adult Swim offers something that normally isn’t found in the mainstream.
“Even if it's anti-intellectual, it is intellectual because of that”
“There’s a reason why college kids and people in that environment are more giving and more understanding and can deal with things that aren’t easily palatable,” Wiedenseld says. “They don’t have to listen to just the hits. You can, but college radio is experimental. This is almost like experimental television. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but it is always sort of exciting.”
Adult Swim and college radio can thrive on the basis of a homegrown audience. Wiendseld says just as college radio invites listeners to discover new music on their own, Adult Swim lets viewers find the station themselves.
Stewie, from Family Guy, uses his killer ray stun gun to zap
Space Ghost, from Space Ghost Coast to Coast. The zap bounces
onto Space Ghost’s sidekick Brak. Master shake (right) and
Meatwood (bottom), both from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, smile
because they survived.
“We’re not in-your-face. We are not saturating the market with Adult Swim,” he says. “You can find it on your own. As long as we can keep that sort of very homegrown idea, the response will be as good as it’s been.”
Surprising as it may seem, viewers and behind-the-scenes folk agree: Part of the appeal to college students is that cartoons have a higher intellectual value than average television does.
On Adult Swim, jokes dart out from the most unexpected places. Innuendo is the language of choice, and having your mind in the gutter will only help decipher some of the double entendres.
“I think it’s the style of humor used. A lot of writing and jokes are just quicker,” Moore says. “It’s hard to describe, but the pacing and the complete absurdity of it is why college students watch it. Having it not make any sense is part of the appeal.”
College, for better or worse, is all about the pursuit of higher knowledge. Wiedenseld would argue that the environment offers the perfect breeding ground for Adult Swim’s intellectual humor.
“You are in an institution and an environment that is a cerebral environment by definition,” Wiedenseld says. “Even if it’s anti-intellectual, it is intellectual because of that. College is the kind of place where you are supposed to sit down and read and study and watch TV. You are in an environment where this kind of thing can thrive. You have to spend a little bit of time thinking about it to get a lot of the jokes because they don’t make any sense on the surface.”
Wiedenseld also attributes the success of the programming block to timing. Even at 11 p.m. college students’ minds are still buzzing.
“Maybe it is the end of the day. You want to come home and turn off, but I remember my college experience, and I’m much more tired now when I go home,” Wiedenseld says. “Now I just want to watch something sort of mind-numbing. I just turn on BET and watch rap videos.
“In college by the time I got home at 11 o’clock I was just gearing up to go. Now 11 o’clock, I’m f------ retarded. I can’t even watch Adult Swim because it requires too much. My synapses are going crazy, and I just want to go to bed. College kids are just not doing that at 11 o’clock.”
The shows have garnered enough interest that adjunct instructor Ron Russo started an Adult Swim workshop at Kent State. Russo says the class is the first of its kind in the nation. Fridays from 9:45 a.m. to 1:45 p.m., the upper-division, two-credit hour workshop meets in the Hirsch Lab in the Music and Speech Building to watch cartoons.
The class was offered this semester in two six-week sessions. Russo, who is currently working on an Adult Swim book, says the class is possibly one of the best media classes in the country. Students break down the cartoons, looking at everything from 1960s versions of the remakes like Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law to dissecting shot angles of the cartoons.
“I just want to watch something sort of mind-numbing”
“It is the first chance I’ve gotten to have to look at cartoons seriously as a connoisseur,” says Karl Hopkins-Lutz, an Adult Swim student and senior pre-journalism and mass communication major. “The class is so interesting itself to watch and learn about the writers and the directors and the talent that goes into the animation.”
Kyle Rinehart, a senior hospitality management major, says the class has allowed him to take a more analytical look at the shows.
“The class is pretty fun. I mean, you get to talk about cartoons, which I love,” he says. “Aside from getting to watch cartoons all day in a group setting, there’s some stuff I hadn’t made connections to. A lot of the stuff I didn’t know was how a lot of the shots had a different effect on you, as well as the technical terms.”
As innocently as the habit begins, so it continues. Moore and Walsh have all but given up trying to kick the habit. And as long as the FDA hasn’t made a ruling on the toxicity, who’s to say they’re wrong? Perhaps cartoons can be for more than just kids.
Matt Peters is a senior newspaper journalism major. This is his first time writing for The Burr.