Stay Tuned #62: Eek! The Cat?

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

E.e.k. The Ticketmaster.

You may be confused by the above banner image if you didn't have the...privilege...of growing up when Eek! The Cat (a.k.a. Eek!-stravaganza and Eek! & The Terrible Thunder-Lizards) was occupying space on Saturday morning children's programming, so let's start with some context for why I'm randomly devoting the last Tuesday in March to talking about a short segment from an episode of a cartoon I knew was trash when I was a kid.

Conner the Waffle recently did a video on pop culture references to Power Rangers in other media, and I was mildly disappointed to see he didn't bring up the "Mighty Boring Shower Strangers" parody from Eek! The Cat (five masked weirdos with magic bath brushes bump into each other in the shower and decide to fight sentient soap scum together), so I looked up the episode online to link it to him for a follow-up video, and was surprised at how wild it got.

For my younger audience, Eek! The Cat was an annoying, short-form slapstick cartoon where the title character is Garfield if he were a purple moron, basically written as a subversion of 80s and 90s "everyone must love and share and help" moralizing character tropes (his catchphrase is the ironic, "it never hurts to help") such that his lack of intelligence and general awareness turn his assistance into a chain reaction of pain and disaster. Supporting characters included Annabelle (Eek's Southern fat joke of a girlfriend), Sharky the Shark-dog (it is what it says on the tin, his one trait is wanting to murder Eek, so he was my favorite character, and he was an Ice Cube/Snoop Dogg pastiche in one episode), an extremely Canadian stereotype moose, and a homeless cat who's a parody of Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now if he did everyone else's cocaine by himself. I watched more when the Terrible Thunder-Lizards joined the cast because 90s kids loved dinosaurs, and the escapades of Caveman Wallace Shawn (voiced by Moonlighting's Curtis Armstrong) inventing modern inconveniences with his short-tempered sidekick (voiced by Homer Simpson himself) felt funnier to my nerd sensibilities at the time even though it's the same, "well-meaning idiot causes pain" joke that Eek! somehow managed to sustain for...

FIVE FUCKING SEASONS‽ of mostly dated references, annoying, flat characters, and predictable "comedy." At least the cast was stacked with voice and cameo talent, and I was today-years-old when I learned that Dee Snider co-wrote the theme song.

As for why I felt compelled to talk about this series and this particular episode in March? It's because of the Martial Law reviews I did last March!

So here, before I get into the details (a word that does a lot of heavy lifting), is the full episode containing the "Fists Of Furry" segment:

Sharky's new favorite show is Mighty Boring Shower Strangers (as described above), and Eek is worried that he's too impressionable and will hurt himself trying to do karate like the show (a rib at conservative child advocacy groups and network censorship of the era with a punchline so darkly timeless and prescient that it got a genuine laugh out of me), so he just calls Cynthia Rothrock! Yeah, Martial Arts Queen Cynthia Rothrock from the (official) Martial Law duology is a character in this episode. She looks only vaguely like the real deal, but is voiced by Cynthia herself (it kinda shows in her stilted delivery that she didn't have much voice acting experience, but this is Eek! The Cat we're talking about, so quality sees quality, even when quality looks like purple cat rectum).

Anyway, the predictable "martial arts actor is an amalgamation of all of their characters and lives their movies every day" and "annoying Type-A character constantly interferes with Type-B finding inner peace" jokes you've seen in everything play out here, resulting in Eek and Sharky Drebin-Magoo-ing their way to the rescue when Cynthia gets kidnapped, only for Fabio (voicing himself) to save everyone last-minute because this episode is dumb and insane and got me to laugh twice.

So now that you know that exists, please stay chill and Stay Tuned by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leaving a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have feelings about, helping out my ad revenue as you read because it never hurts to help, and following me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my feline-good content.

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Eek!-master,

Not The Cat.