Adult Swim is Making a Comeback

For many years now television has been lacking in the cartoon department. Since the 80's and early 90's the number of good cartoons have greatly decreased. Finally in 2001 Cartoon Network gave us cartoon fans something to watch with the creation of Adult Swim.

Adult Swim is a block of programming with adult oriented cartoons for the older crowd that are up late at night. When the Adult Swim block started it had a great lineup of non-stop fun. The block started off with re-runs of the cancelled Fox shows Futurama and the Family Guy. Following those shows were other great shows like Home Movies, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Sealab 2021, the Brak Show, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Harvey Birdman and Cowboy Bebop.

Unfortunately somewhere along the way Adult Swim lost its way. These great programs were slowly replaced by newer shows that weren't anywhere close to the quality of the original shows. First Adult Swim started loading up the block with animes, none of which were very good and all of which were basically the same thing over and over again.

Then Adult Swim turned to more original programming, bad original programming. Moral Orel, Oblongs, and Squidbillies are just a few of the bad programs. It boggles my mind how bad some of this garbage is. How does Assy McGhee, a show about a detective that is an actual ass, (the kind found on a person's backside, not the donkey kind) even get past the first stages? It's just crazy someone thought that was a good idea.

Fortunately while Adult Swim is destroying their lineup, the great original shows are being presented in some other form. All of the great Adult Swim shows can be found on DVD, I own Home Movies myself.

Family Guy became such a hit on Adult Swim that Fox brought it back to their channel and has added new seasons to the program. Fox even put the show in their Sunday night block with The Simpsons and King of the Hill. Family Guy even had its own movie and video game as well.

Now it is Aqua Teen Hunger Force's turn. This past weekend Aqua Teen Hunger Force's new movie, called Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, was released at theaters. I'm not a big fan of the cartoon to big screen movie concept but anything that gets Aqua Teen Hunger Force more attention is a good thing.

Now it's also been announced that Capcom is bringing Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law to the Playstation 2 and PSP in the fall. Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law is a cartoon about a superhero named Harvey Birdman who has now given up fighting crime and instead is now a lawyer. In the cartoon he represents many iconic cartoon characters when they get in trouble like Scooby Doo and Fred Flinstone. The cartoon could make for a very entertaining game.

Who knows what else the future could hold for some of the other Adult Swim shows, they obviously have a very diehard following and those fans will eat up anything to do with these shows. It's good to see that while Adult Swim is wasting airtime on their awful new shows that somebody is actually doing something with the great shows they once had.