Joe Cartoon

Joe Cartoon is the name of a series of Flash-based online cartoons that was launched in 1997 by creator Joe Shields. Starting as an independent website, Joe Cartoon was later affiliated with Atom Films, before becoming independent again in 2006.

Noted for their crude humor and tongue-in-cheek violence, Joe Cartoons were among the first widely distributed web-based productions of their kind.Fact|date=February 2007 Produced in Macromedia's (Adobe's) Flash format, a number of the cartoons are interactive, such as "Gerbil in a Microwave" and "Frog in a Blender". Most of the cartoons often have extreme violence towards gerbils.

In April 2006, a collection of 40 Joe Cartoon creations was released on DVD in North America. The cartoons have been recoded to be playable on set-top DVD players. Some DVD-specific content was also created for this release.

Available cartoons

The cartoons available from the website are broken into several categories, structured to highlight and provide easy access to the most popular series or collections.

;"Thuh Greenfields"This is a sixteen part serial cartoon focusing on Jebidiah and Gertrude Greenfield. The Greenfields are two enterprising pot farmers/performance artists who have a truly bizarre sequence of events, involving a legless dog Lump and a giant Gummo.

;"Superfly"This collection of six cartoons focuses on the ubiquitous character Superfly (aka Supahfly), arguably the most well known character from any of the Joe Cartoons. Each of these places Superfly in a different situation, most involving drinking or drug use. Superfly's catch phrase of "Oh, my freakin' head, I'm so wasted!" often comes into play.

;"Interactive Toons"The header of this category on the website is actually "Press & 'Splode" as most of these seventeen cartoons involve one or more characters exploding at some point. Each of these cartoons require varying degrees of interaction from the user. Some as simple as clicking a button to move on to the next section, with others having various branching paths depending on the users selections. This is where to find two of Joe's most famous works, Gerbil in a Microwave and Frog in a Blender.

;"Holiday toons"A selection of toons about various holidays, mainly Christmas. This section features many classic toons such as Santa Fly, Santa Hoe, Greenfields 11 and St. Patrick's Bar.

;"Everything Else"This final category groups together twenty-three other Joe Cartoon offerings, illustrating a wide range of topics and art styles that have been explored since the website was first created.

At the end of some cartoons, Joe would sign off by showing a message which says,"Joe Cartoon, brutally pointless since March 20th, 1961 11.30am."

Controversy

At least one cartoon, "Donkey Bong (Long)", has been self-censored by the creator after its initial publication. The conclusion of the original version featured the Gerbil performing Simon and Garfunkel's hit song "Sound of Silence", with the lyrics completely altered to describe instead the woes of being stuck inside of a donkey's rectum, which is the Gerbil's ultimate predicament in the cartoon. As the website stepped up its marketing and exposure, the song parody was removed from the cartoon to avoid potential music copyright litigation. However, the Newgrounds submitted version of the cartoon has the deleted scene uncensored.

Trivia

A promo for the DVD set (info above) submitted to Newgrounds included three clips of cartoons not found on the site. The clips feature a man with weights getting his arms exploded, a frog with a bomb in his mouth causing his eyes to explode, and a giant cow dropping a smaller cow on top of a person. It is not known why they were in the video; using Internet Archive provides no results (The site was made with Flash since it opened in 1998. Some of those Flash files have been deleted, thus making early Joe Cartoon unviewable).

External links

* [http://www.joecartoon.com Official website]
* [http://www.joecartoon.com/community MyJoeTube - Joe's Social Network]
* [http://www.myspace.com/therealjoecartoon Joe's MySpace]
* [http://blog.joecartoon.com Joe's Blog]
* [http://forum.joecartoon.com Joe's Forum]