Author: Merritt K

The entertainment industry seems totally unwilling to take chances on new ideas these days, content instead to crank out legacy sequels to the properties that the men in charge recognize and have come to associate with the purchase of mansions, yachts, and sex trafficking islands. But this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, huge swathes of children’s properties were based on existing films.

Plenty of these adaptations seemed like sure things. Consider the Hot Dog Matrix of Cartoon Cash-Ins:

Anything in the top-right quadrant is firmly in the Safe Zone. While these cartoons varied wildly in quality, they were at least drawing on subject matter that made sense to air at 9 AM on a Saturday morning. Sure, you can’t have a Ghostbuster getting a spectral blowjob or Beetlejuice making sex jokes — huh, I’m just now realizing that the ’80s were really fixated on ghost fuckin’ — but sand off the edges and you’ve got decent fodder to run in between toy commercials.

Then there were the dicier propositions. I’m still not entirely clear on how Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, originally a ’70s parody horror movie, became a cartoon and a Nintendo game. It was either a cheap get or a wild gamble that somehow paid off.

The opposite of this are those R-rated films that were simply so successful that executives couldn’t not render them into unrecognizable, bowdlerized forms. The Aliens cartoon that never saw the light of day would have been in this category, but I guess monstrous, eusocial space rapists were a step too far even for the kinds of people who greenlit a show about a penis-exploding police cyborg.

That brings us to the last quadrant, a realm of madness. Here we find an attempt to adapt a no-budget film that opens with a bunch of lunatic teens crushing a child’s skull like an overripe pumpkin. That The Toxic Avenger got a cute little cartoon, action figures, and multiple video games — not to mention a modern nostalgia-bait retro beat-em-up — remains an anomaly of late 20th century licensing deals.

Whenever I think I’ve run out of these kinds of cartoons, Haim Saban and/or Jean Chalopin go back in time to 1990 and create a new one. This week, I discovered that the timeline had once again been altered — there was, in fact, a 13-episode run of a Little Shop of Horrors show.

Now, Little Shop of Horrors is one of my favorite films. It combines all of my loves: lavish sets, the puppetry of Frank Oz, Rick Moranis, sexually menacing dentists, songs about killing for personal gain, and Danny John-Jules.

If you haven’t seen it, the film is basically a Faust story except the devil is a giant, man-eating plant from space who tempts Seymour, a lowly flower shop clerk, into feeding it people by promising to help him win over his beloved Audrey. On its face, it isn’t a completely terrible idea for a cartoon. It’s already a musical, it has a fairly goofy tone, and talking plants were a mainstay of Saturday morning cartoons. Just ixnay the dismemberment and dental sadomasochism, and it’s solidly in the kid-friendly and well-known quadrant — as long as we’re talking theatrical ending, not the original.

Let me explain: Little Shop of Horrors originally ended on kind of a down note. Audrey II mauls its namesake to death and Seymour reluctantly feeds his love to the plant at her request. Desolate, he’s about to kill himself when he discovers that some executive wants to propagate Audrey II and sell it in stores around the country. Seymour tries to prevent that from happening by committing herbicide, but Audrey II eats him alive and a few months later, giant plants destroy New York City. It fucking rules, and it’s how the stage musical ended, but audiences at the time hated it.

So, yeah — cut out the violence, make the characters into kids, and boom, you’ve got yourself a cartoon.

Little Shop has a really strange visual style. Seymour is a hideous looking frog boy, and the backgrounds are all these vague suggestions of places, as if god just kind of sketched in reality, threw some flat colors on it, and fucked off to go back to furiously masturbating over the dimension where everyone is Danny John-Jules.

Presumably, the producers took the money they saved on making things look like things and put it into developing multiple musical numbers for each episode. This was 1991, so they were legally required to have at least one rapping character. Audrey II was voiced by the baritone Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops in the movie, so it made sense to have the man-eating plant — here renamed Junior — perform hip hop numbers.

Here’s the really weird part: the raps are actually not bad. I mean, they’re extremely of their time, but the guy voicing Junior is doing kind of a Public Enemy thing, punctuating his lines with Flavor Flav-esque “yeah boiiii”‘s. Say what you will about Haim Saban: he may be a barely-literate, warmongering maniac, but the man could write a song.

There’s a running bit where Junior is aghast at the way humanity treats plants. He doesn’t really eat people in this version, but he’s constantly trying to talk to vegetables and encourage them to rise up against the human race. In the first episode, he performs a song called “Wake Up” in which he urges his “brothers and sisters” not to take it anymore. It includes lines like “power to the pollinators” and “green is groovy.”

Seymour walks in on his black-coded prehistoric sentient plant monster attempting to incite his brethren to throw off their shackles. Fearing that a botanical revolution will cost him his job working in the flower store, he nonetheless listens to Junior’s concerns and comes to realize that his liberation is tied up in that of all oppresse— I’m just kidding, he immediately threatens to turn a firehose on him like a klansman at his day job.

Somehow, the two move on from this and go on to have a series of adventures that revolve around Seymour’s quest to win the love of the career-focused Audrey, while avoiding the bully Paine Driller. Paine is notable as the rare representation of a bully with headgear, which he often deploys to launch Seymour into trash cans or the waiting mouth of his vicious dog using dental elastics.

Jack Nicholson also shows up frequently? I mean, not the actor himself, but a guy that’s obviously supposed to be him. I guess this is a riff on the fact that he played a small role in the original Corman picture, but who is this for?

’90s cartoons were notorious for packing in references to golden age Hollywood and midcentury movies, but that only really worked when it was, say, someone doing a Peter Lorre voice, which was kind of funny even without context. Just putting a guy in dark sunglasses in your 1991 Saturday morning cartoon is an easter egg for no one except IMDB trivia page curators thirty years in the future.

Speaking of, Orson Welles shows up in episode six as a parade commentator. I don’t mean a character like The Brain from Animaniacs, whose schtick is obviously Wellesian. I mean they drew a character named Orson Welles and had someone do a bad impression of him. Honestly, I kind of respect how self-indulgent it is and I bitterly regret that I was too young to get into entertainment in the era where you could kind of just fuck around and nobody could do shit about it.

But hold on. Let’s step back for a moment and consider how absurd the existence of this cartoon is. Little Shop of Horrors was itself an adaptation of the 1982 stage musical, which was, in turn, based on the 1960 Roger Corman film. That means by the time we get to the cartoon Little Shop, we’re talking about an adaptation of an adaptation of an adaptation. And if you want to go even further, it’s been argued that Little Shop of Horrors was inspired by an Arthur C. Clarke story titled “The Reluctant Orchid.”

Surely that’s it, right? Ha. Clark’s story draws on the H.G. Wells piece, “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid.” I used to think the existence of a video game called Street Fighter: the Movie, which was a Mortal Kombat-style title with digitized actors from the movie Street Fighter that was a loose interpretation of the video game Street Fighter II, was bizarre. But here comes a new challenger.

So yeah, we’ve been doing the remake thing for a long fucking time. The ’80s and ’90s weren’t this magical period of pre-internet joy, unless you were a child, in which case you probably just miss not having to pay bills or be aware of your own mortality.

But there was one way in which that period was better for a very select group of people. If you made it into the children’s TV biz, you could literally just do whatever the fuck you wanted. Sure, make a cartoon about a rapping plant where Jack Nicholson shows up sometimes. Who cares? Before the time of brutal efficiency, KPIs, and ever-escalating shareholder demands, more or less anything went. Everyone was just killing time until they invented Power Rangers and became richer than god, who long ago abandoned this earth for a better world, a more perfect world, a world of Dannies John-Jules as far as the eye can see.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Dean Costello, who has more than enough blood to launch a hundred animated little shop reboots.