What A Cartoon! - The Weekenders "Cry/The Perfect Son"

I was also one of those kids other parents seemed to like and tell my friends "why can't you be more like Joey?" I didn't realize how much I liked that positive attention (for me, anyway, it was pretty rough for my friends) until I hit high school and started growing out my hair and wearing heavy metal shirts. Then suddenly moms didn't like me, and I wasn't really ready for that. It made dating way more frustrating than it already was.

Joe Hodgson

Ultimately though, I'm extremely grateful that I had teachers and friends' parents who loved me and said nice things about me, because the twist is I wasn't getting any of that at home.

nina matsumoto

That's the What A Cartoon difference!

Bob Mackey

I was always a favourite visitor of friends' parents growing up because I was such a goody two-shoes (well, I guess I still am...). My friend told me about a dream she had once -- apparently her parents spoke highly of me so often that within a dream, after she got into a tiff with her parents, she went to her room and was met with a "Glinda the Good Witch" version of me who went "you've been bad. You need a time out" and trapped her in a cage with a wave of my wand. So, yeah, sometimes dreams can be incredibly literal, and hearing about this episode reminded me of that and made me feel bad all over again.

nina matsumoto

I remember in my English class we definitely did watch the old Romeo and Juliet as Bob and Henry were discussing. I had heard about the nudity from my fellow classmates and, being a super repressed christian teenager in the midwest, I was very excited. However, I was a bit of a smart aleck and was known to cut up in class. So my class was the only class that the teacher skipped over the sex scene because my teacher was that afraid of my comments. A few years ago I watched it again for non perverse reasons and there was no nudity in it. Maybe they edited it out because of the gross stuff about it you mentioned. Also, I loved this show, it felt smarter and funnier to me than most of the other Disney One Saturday Morning Shows. Dave the Barbarian was also extremely funny.

Joey Joe Joe Shabadoo

I work at a children's school. At least here in Norway it seems like the children don't use as much homophobic slurs as they did in the past. There has been a concerted effort to be more inclusive and mindful in the Norwegian school system towards minorities, people with disabilities and the LGBTQ+ community. There will always be those who use horrible slurs towards other kids or adults, but that is the kids that try to provoke a reaction. They know how horrible it is to use such slurs and they use them when they want a reaction from the adults. So these days maybe it is more the shock of them saying a slur itself rather than them actually putting meaning behind the words. That doesn't make it okay of course, but there has been a change in my view.

Jon Peder Grønsveen Opsahl

https://archive.org/details/3x2122ClownsTestingDixon PSA for anyone looking: The internet archive has every episode of this and a handful other "lost" Disney shows.

Also learning that Doug TenNapel is a homophobic dick who polices others cause of his religion was one of the first times in my life where you have the uncomfortable feeling of "Wait this thing that I like was made by a bad person!?" a feeling which keeps happening for SOME reason.

Devin Hoffarth

Dave the Barbarian fyi is pretty good also. It's a bit cheaper of a show than this one (if you can believe it) but I always sorta imagined it as a 2000's era interpretation of Rocky and Bullwinkle or Tennessee Tuxedo or George of the Jungle. One of those "so writer focused we literally have a narrator describe our characters doing anything that would cost money" type shows.

Devin Hoffarth

I was the perfect age for The Weekenders, but I missed it on network TV because I was a Fox Kids/Kids WB kid. I instead caught it in reruns when Disney Channel had it for a brief stint in the summer of 2003 where they aired it in order at least three times all through the summer. I remember this vividly because it was what I would watch before Toonami came on. That and Lloyd In Space (which is a cartoon I have less kind feelings towards in retrospect compared to The Weekenders)

KaiserBeamz

If I was a billionaire or won the lottery I'm buying WAC and making you guys do episodes on my whims. No matter how unpopular. So if you guys see Muzzy Month every August you know what happened

Chris Tar

I'm slightly younger than the hosts so I would've been... 16 when this episode aired. I still watched Recess on occasion even though I knew I was too old for it, and would occasionally watch this show with my younger sisters. I definitely would've expected an episode on Recess (or Pepper Ann, which I really liked), before this. Weekenders (and most of the One Saturday Morning shows) definitely had the sense that they were writing something parents wouldn't be embarrassed to watch (unlike, say, Digimon), as there were a bunch of jokes in Buzz Lightyear or Recess that a child would absolutely not get, even as Kids WB was moving away from its "smart" shows to do more anime and anime-adjacent stuff.

Chris Dobson

I watched this show when I was about 13, and it's funny how nostalgia works for me now. The big stuff like Star Wars, Pokemon, Aladdin are all still around and easy to see, so I don't feel nostalgia from those any more. This unknown, half-good show actually does feel like a time-warp though, because it's in the very, very back of my mind. I only feel nostalgia from the stuff that nobody talks about any more.

Tom Brien

I was just outside the demo of this one - but boy can I relate as the boy who cried in class. Yes it followed me, yes it probably had a huge impact. That repression of my more emotional state led to becoming anger for a good 5 years (like 16-21) that even now in my 30s I look back at and wonder how it got that bad. My connections to art, and how easily I can openly weep from being moved by something is probably one of the traits about myself I care about most - it’s the sorta thing that takes me to the Tate in London and leaves me breathless. Tbh, at this point I can’t even see life through any other lens now. Where this left me in terms of my gender identity? Still unpacking - probably only related in the sense that the enforced ideas of masculinity are so fuckin toxic, yo. Anyway, great podcast for a toon I never watched, always love when you give things you guys missed its due.

Cody C.