lentr

The Timon and Pumbaa television series is generally ragged on as another way to make a quick buck for Disney.

Well, it is. Every TV show is designed to make money and become famous or use the fame of others.

However, Timon and Pumbaa are nonetheless charming in their hyperbolated character flaws, such as Timon's chronic greed and selfishness, and Pumbaa's idiot savant genius hidden behind his naiveté and ignorance.

Some of the episodes are lacking in animation, cleverness, and satisfying resolutions. But most are great fun to watch, and have some very humorous (some made me laugh out loud) gags in them, from simple physical comedy to plays on words through Timon and Pumbaa's bantering and the episode titles, and sometimes it is just the sheer silliness of their predicaments and dialog (just check out some of the quotes). Their adventures take them all over the place (and that's meant literally and figuratively).

Other minor characters like Zazu, Rafiki, and the hyenas feature in their own episodes, but generally these aren't as good, except for perhaps the Zazu episode where he loses his job for being off by one animal in a survey. Like this and others, some of the episodes have some sort of moral lesson at the end, but in general the show is at its best when Timon and Pumbaa are being themselves with good writers at the helm.

The ambidextrous and many aliased Criminal Quint is funnier than some give him credit to be, and what show is it without a recurring villain? All shows have such.

In all, I'd rate this cartoon as "decent." Nothing to get worked up about, but definitely worth watching when you catch it. If you're lucky you'll get one of the good ones.

In my opinion, this movie was actually pretty darned violent. Not in the sense of intense, scary scenes (LOTS of Disney movies can be pretty scary in their own ways), but in terms of sheer death and non-family friendly ideas. At the beginning we can assume several thousand people are wiped out by an arrogant king's use of a weapon of WAR. Who ever heard of war being a staple idea of how a conflict was caused in a Disney movie? And the Leviathan scene, where a giant swimming robot attacks the sub,while hardly scary at all,immediately destroys about four hundred people (we see several of them trapped to die by drowning as a flood control door is shut in front of them). And then you see the escape ships wiped out one by one by the creature's "laser" beams("We're getting murdered out here!"), and a funeral scene for the dead. Then there's the part at the end where there's that big firefight between the evil humans and the normally noble-and-benevolent-but-pressed-into-violent-conflict-anyway Atlanteans. You see people enveloped by explosions and whatnot.

Come on! How is this Disney, family friendly fare? Mass death and destruction wielded with almost scary casualness is not what I expect from a Disney movie. In the old days, most of the death was either shown to be tragic or unnecessary, or justified in the case of the villains. Now, we get this whole thing about "Hey look kids. That guy just died. Ho hum. On to more special effects! W00t!" Even I as a young adult am disturbed (just because I'm grown up doesn't mean I'll enjoy "adult" feature films) by this flagrant disregard for what Disney used to be. As well as this movie being just kinda bad to me overall makes my vote what it is. Along with the "violence goes along with fun like best friends" thing, there's an almost too-typical romance, overused special effects (the new computer smoothed models, while impressive, are just not as charming as the "classic" Disney characters), an odd, somewhat PC story (notice how they have to have every race imaginable displayed, giving several superfluous characters that don't seem to impact the story at all) that makes former comrades into faceless monsters, and I'm talking about the guys from the sub that didn't die, who suddenly aren't important and have sterile masks instead of faces that makes it okay to kill them all at the end, as well as the now over-used message that old, alien societies that are "in touch with the world around them" are always better and less ignorant than modern, European "invaders." We got enough of that in "Pocahontas." Ugh. Whatever happened to simple stories of friendship like in "The Fox and the Hound?"