Greetings, fellow weaselites.

[Sodapop]

You ARE an expeirenced member, dude.

[Just Plain Rydell]

Dudette!! Well anyway welcome to our bunch!

[Sodapop]

So, uh, Fatal Hilarity, who's your favorite cartoon character of all time (Besides the weasels, duuuuude)?

Mine's Yakko Warner..

[Fatal hilarity]

That's a real toughie. So I'm just going to make a list:

• Nuka from The Lion King 2: Simba's Pride
  
• Mrs. Brisby from The Secret of NIMH
  
• Calvin & Hobbes
  
• Ash Ketchum from Pokémon (season one)
  
• Darkwing Duck from... well, Darkwing Duck
  
• Genie from Aladdin and Aladdin and the King of Thieves
  
• Spongebob Squarepants
  
• Captain Carrot from Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew!
  
• Top Cat from... er, well.
  
• The Thief from The Thief and the Cobbler (Recobbled Cut)
  
• Crazy Claws as part of The Kwicky Koala Show
  
• Lisa Raccoon from The Raccoons
  

I wonder what a psychiatrist would think of this list...

Now, if I were to pick just one, I'd say it was a tie between Nuka and Mrs. Brisby. Their influence on me is staggering...

[Sodapop]

Cool list, man.

[Fatal hilarity]

Thanks. Care to hear my descriptions of ones you may not be familar with? I've always liked showing off.

[Sodapop]

Yeah all of 'em except the Genie, Nuka, SpongeBob and Ash..

[Fatal hilarity]

Okay, The Secret of NIMH is a film by Don Bluth, the same man who brought you the arcade games Dragon's Lair and Space Ace, and the films An American Tail, The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go To Heaven and Anastasia. It's based on a book called Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.
The story is about a mouse named Mrs. Brisby (to avoid confusion with Frisbee), who's a widow of the late Johnathan Brisby- famous for rescuing a group of rats from the labs of the National Institution of Mental Health (NIMH). The rats were experimented on, and it resulted in the ability to read, reason, and build things. And so Mrs. Brisby is out to rescue her sick son Timmy from the destruction of their home, with the help of a magic amulet- meanwhile a political scheme threatens the rats' society.
I watched this when I was a little kid, and it's sheer intensity (for a cartoon) had a strange effect on me. Probably about half of my "serious" art is inspired by it.

And Calvin & Hobbes... wow, you've never heard of it? It's probably one of the few newspaper comic strips that mattered in the 90's. This one's about a six-year-old boy named Calvin and his stuffed tiger doll Hobbes, who he sees as alive and breathing (whether or not he's really alive or not is up to the reader). It's mostly about Calvin's misadventures and day dreams.
This one was an enormous influence on me as well- I was obsessed about it for about five years as a kid. I've always loved the fantasy sequences and still do.

Darkwing Duck is a Disney TV series from the early 90's about a duck named Drake Mallard who has a superhero alter-ego- Darkwing Duck. He doesn't have any superpowers, so he uses gadgets, cunning, and martial arts to beat his enemies, like Batman. His main weakness is his hilariously enormous ego.
I didn't watch this very much when it was in syndication, but I remember liking it. I've only recently rediscovered it, but boy, it's one of the funniest TV cartoons I've ever seen... I swear, the stuff made in the early 90's has been among the best so far.

Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew! is a comic book by DC from the 80's that I came across by chance while at a festival or something. It's about a superhero comic book artist named Roger Rodney Rabbit (yes, Roger) who's as dorky as they come, but gains super strength and super hopping powers when he eats a carrot that's been made radioactive by a meteor chunk. And so he becomes Captain Carrot, and with his Zoo Crew, fights any threat to funny-animal-kind.
I don't usually like superhero comics (often boring and too serious), but when you have the hero be a cartoon rabbit in a world inhabited by cartoon animals only, and have lots of jokes (mostly bad puns), it's so much cooler that way.

Top Cat is a Hanna-Barbera series from the 60's, in a similar vein to The Flintstones and The Jetsons. It's about Top Cat, a fast-talking trickster alley cat who thinks himself to be really cool and hip (by early 60's standards). With his gang of other goofy and swingin' alley cats, they'll often get themselves in and out of trouble with mobsters and aristocrats in the big city.
This one's definitely all about verbal humor and character interaction. Usually all they're doing is standing around and making wisecracks, but that's what's better suited for the limited animation of Hanna-Barbera in the 60's.

The Thief and the Cobbler is made by none other than Richard Williams, the animation director for WFRR- so his animation team is responsible for how the Toon Patrol moves.
Now this one has quite the incredible story. Williams is one of the most respected animators around. In the mid-60's, he began work on what was to be the greatest animated film of all time. He worked on it for about twenty-five years, and WFRR was going to be a means to get the film distributed. But Warner Brothers lost faith because he wasn't getting it finished, and took it away from him.
Subsequently, it was butchered and tampered with to be released in Australia and South Africa as The Princess and the Cobbler, where it failed because of the similarities to Disney's Aladdin. But The Thief and The Cobbler was made before Aladdin- Aladdin actually took a lot of inspiration from it.
Later, it was butchered even further by Miramax (and in a way, by Disney) as Arabian Knight (groan), which also failed. Today, the movie has never been properly finished or released, and you can only get it in it's original form by downloading it online.
As for the movie itself, the story's about a cobbler named Tack and a nameless Thief- both of whom never speak in the original version. The Thief chases after these three Golden Balls that protect the city from harm, but they've been stolen by the evil wizard and royal advisor Zigzag so he can marry the princess and have the city/kingdom conquered. When Tack falls in love with the princess Yum-Yum, he becomes determined to rescue the city from an evil army. And so everyone runs around going after these three Golden Balls.
This movie, which you can get in it's original form as the Recobbled Cut (Mark II) online (don't worry, no one's going arrest you), has got to have the most eye-popping and insanely difficult animation I've ever seen in any cartoon ever. If you think WFRR has really spectacular animation, you haven't seen anything yet. I highly recommend this one- you'll probably never think of animation the same way again.

Crazy Claws is a bobcat who sounds like Groucho Marx, in a segment that's part of the late-80's Hanna-Barbera series The Kwicky Koala Show. Because he acts like Groucho Marx, the jokes are probably the wittiest I've heard in a cartoon that predates The Animaniacs and all those. It's mostly about him outsmarting this hunter and his dog.

The Raccoons is a Canadian TV series from the late-80's and early-90's that I recently discovered. It's all about these raccoons living in a forest that's frequently threatened by the evil and obscenely rich and greedy aardvark business tycoon Cyril Sneer.
I'm really wowed by this series. It's animation is really impressive for a TV series, and all the characters have a great depth to them. It's storytelling is way above average, too. By the third season, it seems, the show had just about everything. Lots of laughs, conflict, heartstring-tugging, spine-tingling music... heck, even pie fights.
Lisa Raccoon in particular is unusually complex character. She's a tall, physically mature teenage daughter, who moved away from the city to live in the forest. She's really homesick at first, and has a hard time adjusting. Not only do I sympathize with her, she's probably the prettiest cartoon character I've ever seen. I can't believe that I had never heard of this show before- I think it's brilliant.

Well, that's all I can really say. By the way, what do you think of Nuka?

[Sodapop]

Uh, I think Nuka is a bit.. scary and retarded. And I don't mean stupid retarded, I mean retarded retarded... And how'd you do the floating ball-type things??? Those black circles?? How'd ya make 'em??? Huh huh huh huh huh huh huh? ()

[Fatal hilarity]

*sigh* I was worried you would say that. Nothing against you personally, but I fail to see any evidence of him being retarded. Just because he looks strange and acts weird does not mean he's retarded. I don't even see any evidence of him being even less than average intelligence.
Forgive me for sounding cranky, but I'm very sympathetic with Nuka. The way I see it, he's been cursed with strange looks and a total lack of social skills, and so nobody respects him. Zira is cruel and neglectful to him, but he only wants to please her. So I think he's a very sad and tragic character. He's extremely stubborn, that's for sure.
You know what really gets me in the ol' heartstrings is the line they cut from his death scene. He says to Zira: "Well... I finally got your attention, didn't I?" This, to me, is the most foolishly deleted scene in any movie I've seen.

I only wish to tell you my view because I was frustrated by people at a Lion King forum I used to go to when they kept calling him retarded just because he's weird, and pretty much hated anything and everything to do with Simba's Pride. I was then bullied off of the forum for suggesting that they were less than real fans, and I've been nursing a grudge against them ever since.
Mind you, this was only a few years ago. When I first saw Simba's Pride after buying the 10th anniversary DVD set of all three movies, I was immediately struck by Nuka's strangeness. Most of all, I was struck by the emotional intensity and impact of the movie, which has influenced my art ever since. I think in some ways Simba's Pride surpasses the original.
I don't care what anyone says- It's one of my favorite movies ever, and people hating it only makes me love it more.

...
...Well, now you can see how strongly I feel about it. I don't really care to mention it again.

****
The little black dots ("bullets") can be achieved by clicking the far right button in the second row, underneath the row with the bold, italic, and underlined buttons. It's directly underneath the button with the big red "A", and it looks like three squares with lines next to them.
A little note: It didn't quite get the effect I wanted, and I had to do some manipulation. I forget what I did now.