Transcription
What you're about to see was so wild for animated TV at the time, many countries refused to air this portion of the episode years later. Courage is going to walk up to the store and now he's going to open it. But this is what happens if you watch this episode on Cartoon Network Asia for instance years after its release. You're not imagining things. He just stands there. The door is never opened.
All these years later after going back and watching the series again recently, I came to a realization. This moment wasn't just scary and Courage the Cowardly Dog wasn't either. It was doing something far more interesting. Brainwashing it. Preparing you for something you had no idea at the time even existed and it was brilliant.
In 1996 stuffed into a block of animated shorts on Cartoon Network, this would air. John R. Dilworth's short film The Chicken from Outer Space and it was incredible. So good that it would be nominated for an Oscar. Yes, the first appearance of Courage the Cowardly Dog [music] was nominated for an Academy Award and 3 years later in 1999, it would become the highest rated premiere in Cartoon Network history. The network was so confident [music] that they were running previews for the show in movie theaters before Pokémon the First Movie. They knew this dog was going to mess people up and they loved it.
I'm Benton Tarantella, the famous independent movie director. Courage was an experiment episode to episode in ways so few shows are. It subconsciously exposed its audience to things they rarely recognized they were seeing and that started with genre. Courage was a lot of kids first exposure to horror and comedy and somehow even drama. The core horror rule is that your protagonist isn't fearless. They're just the one that survives the fear. Courage was a perfect surrogate for how its audience viewed the world [music] as an unknown and so it made it known.
Your first intro to psychological horror for instance might have been this guy, Freaky Fred. He showed you that horror can be behavioral or social. That what's inside regular people can be scary. This was a parody of Sweeney Todd, Demon Barber of Fleet Street with a hint of Silence of the Lambs mixed in there for good measure. Your first intro to the body horror genre might have been [music] this. Now, big heart, say. Okay, let's stop. Here's the plan, say. The clutching foot, a parody of Cronenberg films like The Fly showing you that the body can be a source of fear. [music] Paranormal horror like here, this direct parody of The Exorcist. Yeah, that was probably your first exposure to that. And then it would suddenly out of nowhere be pure comedy. Sometimes this fast. It would use genre, comedy, drama to lower your defenses and then hit you with the horror hard. This is kind of advanced filmmaking language and genre use masquerading as a Looney Tune. It was slowly exposing you to all genres of media, all kinds of horror, comedy without you realizing it [music] outright.
But it took this subliminal exposure a real big step further. Courage was like many of the shows on Cartoon Network at the time, 2D animation and it also just flat out wasn't at the same time. It was one of the first shows to do what you now see so many animated shows doing. Mixing media. But it wasn't just slowly exposing you to different animation styles, it was exposing you to art sometimes for the first time as well. Your first exposure to surrealism, to the work of Salvador Dali or René Magritte was probably The Sandman Sleeps. You knew what surrealism was before you had ever heard that word thanks to Courage. >> Why? Why? Why?
Then there was the German expressionism, an art form that wasn't about realism. It was meant to externalize emotion by showing fear as the world itself feeling slightly wrong. It can be seen in things like Nosferatu. It did this through exaggerated shadows, extreme lighting contrast, harsh architecture, but you already knew all of this without hearing any of it before cuz you had already seen the shadow of Courage. An episode of animation about anxiety, vulnerability, and isolation straight from the pages of what German expressionism was. And you were even being exposed to classic works [music] of art because Courage was literally built foundationally directly on top of them. This is Andrew Wyeth's 1948 painting Christina's World currently displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. You probably already recognize it. Or American Gothic by Grant Wood. This was not only clearly an inspiration for Eustace and Muriel, but is also featured in an episode with Courage's house behind them instead.
And the same goes for animation. Courage used claymation techniques, 3D animation, paper animation. It used animation to lull you into a sense of visual security and then exposed you to animation styles you'd never experienced before to induce its horror. And again, a lot of these techniques you were seeing for the first time and the show used that knowledge against you. It broke its visual consistency constantly. But it's not just what you see, you can hear it. Classical music was used many times throughout Courage's run like Richard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries and much of its audience just hadn't heard classical music used in this context or sometimes any. Better yet, that care was paid to all of its sound design. Dilworth made it a point not to use stock sounds and try to create new sounds whenever they could using the philosophy of only using sounds that made him laugh. This made a lot of the horror even more uncomfortable because the tone was so unfamiliar. It didn't tell you how to feel. It let you decide whether something was scary or funny on your own. That's incredibly rare and something very few shows exposed their audience to at that time. And honestly, I think a lot of today's animation, whether it's TV or movies, struggles with trusting its audience as much as Courage did all those years ago.
But it was also teaching you the structural language of the world around you. Courage's magic to me is really in the way it presented fear. And it did so in the same way I think it wanted its audience to see it as something [screaming] that deserves empathy. We have no place for the likes of you. Hunchback of Nowhere is one of my favorite episodes of television, period. In it, a hunchback looking for shelter is turned away out of fear by everyone he seeks out until [music] Courage who finds that this monster is actually afraid of Eustace and his cruelty to an extent [music] just like Courage. And he teaches Eustace what it's like to feel like him as Eustace becomes the villain, the monster. [music] Empathy wins the day. In fact, a lot of the monsters in Courage are simply misunderstood, judged too quickly, and are problems that are solved through empathy, an emotion that completely subverts the horror of the show and even sometimes the comedy. It is what stops Courage from feeling dark in all of its darkness all while playing on things like famous [music] Gothic stories. And that was important.
Courage was genius because most of it was parody without context. We can do a tracking shot over here and then rack focus. Which was weird. Most of its audience had at the time never seen most of the things being parodied or referenced like Benton Tarantella here, an obvious play on Tarantino who had only made three movies before Courage released and at that time, there's a good chance you hadn't seen any three of them yet. So Courage became a vehicle for foundational exposure to so much for its audience. To genre, to horror, to animation styles, to art, even music. That's the brilliance of Courage the Cowardly Dog. It was brainwashing you so that you would be more receptive to these genres, ideas, and IPs later in life. You'd have learned more about them already than you ever even realized. You'd recognize surrealism or body horror because a single show opened your eyes to how much cool, [music] weird art and animation was actually out there and really challenged you to be open to and ready for anything.
It is ironic then that some missed this moment when they finally got around to watching it. That a show that opened the door to genre, horror, and art for so many people instead saw a moment where the handle to the door was just never turned. And that theme would carry on in more unfortunate ways. What you're looking at right now is something that should have probably been finished. For a while, it seemed like this was never going to see the light of day at all and for an even longer time, it seemed more like a rumor than something that actually existed. [music] That is until it was acknowledged to be real right from the source. Courage was almost revived in 2018. It was stated that a prequel before Courage [music] was in development. But a few years later, we learned that Cartoon Network's executives had shifted [music] focus and moved on. That they weren't going to open the door to whatever Dilworth could imagine for Courage next >> [music] >> and this animatic pilot titled Goblins of Litter would be all the world would ever [music] see of it. A show that took every risk it could to show its audience something new around every corner of the house in the middle of nowhere would ironically not have a risk [music] taken on it.
So if you take one thing from Courage, I'd say take this. Be like Courage. No matter what it is you're doing, open the door. It might be scary, >> [music] >> but whatever is on the other side has a chance to be well worth the risk. Or it could be this. That is a wrap on today's episode. I'd love to know what show you still come back to from this era. Courage holds up incredibly well. I was very surprised. If you enjoyed this one, press the like button down below. If you haven't yet, hit subscribe. That way you don't miss anything that comes to the channel. Also, that little notification bell helps a lot. It just makes sure you're actually notified when an episode comes out. Anyway, I appreciate you giving the channel a chance and this has been >> [music] [music] >> Hey.