Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Peter Potamus Sends The Best Stuff

2025-Apr-26

After a little bit of retrospection, certain themes about this blog appear in the muck. From my current estimate, these published ramblings of mine are an oral biography of my brushes with the media. Media, as in the aggregate term for creative volumes of media. Anything that travels before a medium before it gets to my senses. It could be several volumes like a TV series. One single volume like a novel or a 90-180 minute cinematic feature. The media is not just TV news, as most MAGA voters would have you believe. I mean every single piece of information given to me that was mediated by the means it was delivered. AM radio, podcasts, paintings, opera. It’s all media.

I suppose I had written a few posts about some live music concerts I attended. Even though the ‘media’ of music I had mostly heard from recorded work is what brought me there, the actual experience of the concert is the closest thing to something I reviewed on here that is not a response to media. Boy, I bet Baudrillard would be proud to see that last sentence.

Sure, I refer to the blog posts as reviews or critiques, but that is a bit of a misnomer. What I get the most kick from when I write these blog posts is from talking about how I, the namesake of this web domain’s blog, learned to like whatever the blog post is about. The first half of any of my reviews are just talking about why I would bother to review it. The origin story for my likes and dislikes. I have not done a blog post yet about something I passionately dislike. Could be a good idea.

Today’s blog post is about a media… um… institution? At the moment I suppose it’s a media publishing platform? I have not really kept track of it or any steady production of cartoons. That was the reason I first heard of Adult Swim. I have always liked cartoons. Cartoons have mostly been produced for children. Despite that, I kept watching them into my adult years. Watching Cartoon Network in the early 2000’s (the dawn of my adulthood, or the twilight end of my childhood) during the late night hours is how I came upon Adult Swim. Back then, it was a block of programming on one channel that switched on around 10 or 11 PM. Like Nick at Nite was to Nickelodeon. I assumed they had the same owner, but with very different management once the shift changed.

In the early 2000s I was locked up at a military school for wayward teens, far from steady access to cable television or the internet. Space Ghost was a distant memory by the time I had heard about Adult Swim, and its bizarre offerings. When I was cloistered there, at best I could get brief glimpses of late night TV. This separation from mass media at the time was something that did not bother me much. Already at the time I could tell there was not a lot of interesting stuff to find on TV or the radio. I suppose there were a few cool things I was missing out on. There was just so much boring stuff about doctors, cops, lawyers, or handsome singles to wade through to find a new series worth watching.

That military school did have a wonderful library, rife with printed material that indulged my ribald tastes. For a brief era of my life, my sole source of mediated information was from borrowed high brow library books and purchased comic collections. My arrival to college in the fall of 2003 was a first for me among many things. One of those things was my first unfettered access to cable TV and broadband internet. I grabbed everything I could find once I got my PC plugged into my university’s local area network!

Before jumping into the easy acquiring and consumption of Adult Swim material online, it started with mere glimpses of late night TV while I was at that military school. Back in those proto-internet days for society, magazines were still a viable channel for distributing information. Not only as a means to spread new, but as something you could consume recreationally. Men’s magazines to be exact. Maxim, FHM, or Stuff. Those three were like currency at an all-boys boarding school. Because of the articles, mind you. Among those three magazines I found a blurb talking about Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law, a new TV series about the classic Hanna-Barberra cartoon hero, being repurposed for a late night ‘adult’ animation.

Hearing of this, I started posting up late in the staff TV lounge of my barracks on Sundays nights. There I found my first looks into the very low budget animated perversions that transpire on Cartoon Network after dark. Although Space Ghost’s show itself wasn’t there, the traces of that humor were indelibly marked on the animation and writing popped back into frame. Also, Birdman and Space Ghost are two birds of the same flock in my head. Stentorian voiced, stiffly animated, lame superheroes cheaply made by Hanna–Barberra. I thought Adult Swim was going to be the launchpoint of every old cartoon property Cartoon Network owned, but with nasty adult humor.

Sometime around 2002, the Adult Swim programming block acquired the rights to broadcast Family Guy and Futurama. Maybe earlier. I dunno exactly when. Either way, I do remember that it was those two shows that were the milkshake that brought the boys to the yard, not the original Adult Swim shorts. In that staff TV lounge in my barracks everybody who had TV watching privileges would stay for Family Guy, some for Futurama, very few would stick around for The Brak Show or Sealab. By the time Home Movies rolled around and even I would not stick around.

Not yet. I did not acquire the taste for Home Movies yet. Eventually I would. Too much.

The crown jewel to me in the Adult Swim lineup of the mid-2000s was Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Perhaps that only happened because of the time and place of its inception. The show was weird, and on TV. So weird it felt like it should not be on TV. As if it broke through the bonds of ‘Standards & Practices’ and appeared nakedly out of its creators minds, with as little mediation between creators and the audience. What some might call an ‘art film’.

The internet at the time was something you logged into from a desktop PC. Online research about what these shows were, or finding other people who have also seen them, was a challenge. Turner Media might have had some infotainment stuff published in TV Guide or Entertainment Weekly at the time. The mass media landscape was built in silos for each medium, rather than the big soup of ‘content’ that has become the norm for media now. All of it generated by media generating professionals, not with user sharing.

The success of a poorly advertised adult animation block on cable TV in the early 2000s was something that relied purely on word of mouth, or the work of online nerds proselytizing through discussion boards. The internet at that time provided no ‘share’ button. There was no ‘like’ feature. It was hard to navigate comment sections on crudely user made sites. Polished corporate web apps were basically just static billboards for their products.

In other words, it was the last time you could learn of something ‘cool’ but have nothing to show anybody except the stories of what you saw. Right now if you saw a new interesting series on live TV- that itself would be something I have not done in about twenty years. Watched live TV in my home.- Anyway, say I did. I could find a way for the owners of that show to have me spread the news to one or many friends about how awesome this show is. I could show clips, GIFs, and emojis to my friends. It could be done online or I could pull out my phone and show somebody a video clip.

Back in 2004 when I saw everything but the name of the first episode of The Venture Brothers I had absolutely nothing to show my friends what this show was named or how to find it. Well, except to watch TV late into the night and hope it pops up. Until the show appeared in official promo material that I could point to, The Venture Brothers show was a phantom that my friends thought I made up because I was likely intoxicated at the time.

I had similar problems when I saw a great music video on MTV late at night but did not catch the name. Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and some other Adult Swim offerings, eventually built itself some cache among my kind of people. Enough that their shapes became ubiquitous among the stoner, hippie, delinquent, street-freak, runaway, junkie, hipster, crowd I found myself in during my early adulthood. Maybe there is something like Adult Swim going on among the over-educated pot smoking twentysomethings right now and I just don't know about it.

Although it’s hard to imagine I wouldn’t know of ‘it’. Not because I’m ‘hip’ but because I have this magical media receiver in my pocket most of my waking hours. There is no need for me to know a cool college kid to tell me what the internet is saying. The internet is easily searched, indexed, and I bet every corporation is much better at leveraging it to make sure you watch their show. Except I guess they all are, and that’s why there is no one ‘it’ that can be universal to all the cool kids.

Maybe Adult Swim is still that thing. I hope not. That would like me saying Rolling Stone magazine was super relevant in my youth. It was not totally absent in my youth. It was not some cornerstone of my media consumption or a focal point in any way.

Arguably I think Rolling Stone magazine is a good example of a ‘media institution’ that I threw Adult Swim into, near the start of the blog post. A narrow medium that itself is a wellspring for a much larger idea of other mediated products. Both Rolling Stone and Adult Swim are still around. They’re both ‘media’ companies now, not a magazine and late night TV programming block. However, I think Rolling Stone might have had more of an impact. From what I can gather, Adult Swim is a word that even in its heyday suffered from a lack of awareness. The name would only get as far as say… the name of whatever band the hipsters LOVE(d) at the moment. A cult audience but not a sweeping one. The effect would lessen its effect if everybody knew about them.

The next blog post will keep up the Adult Swim themes going. A multi-part blog arc, talking about me being lazy, watching cartoons throughout my twenties, and quite a bit of my thirties. My best work yet could be my remarks about a cup, a box of fries, and a wad of meat living next to a man just trying to mind his own damn business.