#monchhichis

Cullen and Welker: An extensive look at the animated shows and projects beyond #Transformers that the voice icons had characters on screen together.

For children of the ’80s, there are two voices that bring the most nostalgia to our ears. For over three years, Peter Cullen and Frank Welker greeted us every weekday afternoon with a reverberated struggle between good and evil on the animated series known as The Transformers. The battle between heroic Autobot leader Optimus Prime (voiced by Cullen) and the evil Decepticon dictator Megatron…

Me: Oh, look, it's Karl Urban! He was in those new Star Trek movies I told you about.

My mother, after a contemplating pause: He ... Kind of looks like a Monchhichi.

First of all, some cartoons I like aren’t on home video in any official capacity, such as series like Capitol Critters, in which case I have to buy bootlegs or download them online from torrent sites and such. Some of these shows are incredibly obscure and that’s one of the reasons why nobody wants to release them.

But some cartoons are ridiculously famous and everybody wants ‘em. A particularly egregious example is Tex Avery’s cartoons for MGM. While they’re available on DVD in France of all places, they’ve never been on US home video since the VHS era, and the French DVD is out-of-print and usually needs to be imported, making it much more expensive than normal. (EDIT: There have been US Blu-rays since I wrote this, but they don’t include everything.)

Other times there are a few volumes of the series, but for whatever reason it didn’t make the copyright holders a million billion dollars and they suddenly stop putting ‘em out. The worst case is the Looney Tunes DVDs and Blu-rays- there’s still plenty of ‘em not available. There’s also classic Disney shows like DuckTales, Rescue Rangers, and Darkwing Duck that still have whole seasons missing from DVD. At the same time, Warner Archive puts out ridiculous shows like Monchhichis and Shirt Tales, which few people care to see.

I’m aware that Darkwing Duck and the others are available on iTunes, but this poses another problem that people like me have to deal with. When a cartoon series, especially newer ones from the last ten years or so, is released on a purely digital market like iTunes, Amazon Video, or what have you, it just simply isn’t possible for me to get ‘em:

I don’t have the money to buy each episode individually.

I don’t have a mobile device of any kind. I can’t afford one.

I don’t have the disc space to keep ‘em after I’ve downloaded ‘em.

I can’t afford to buy blank Blu-ray discs or blank DVDs all the time.

(EDIT: I’ve gotten a smartphone and Roku streaming device since I wrote this, but there’s still the issue of streaming services removing shows for no reason.)

So if I want to see a series like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic or Harvey Beaks in glorious HD on my television (which is what I prefer because lying down on the couch to watch TV is so much more comfortable than sitting in front of the computer where there’s barely room for two people to sit), I’ll most likely wind up downloading them from a torrent site, and only keeping the downloads around long enough to burn ‘em onto a blank disc.