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A Hanna-Barbera Neo-Noir Comedy
6 years ago
General
THE RUFF AND REDDY SHOW by Howard Chaykin and Mac Rey (DC Comics, 2018)
https://www.amazon.com/Ruff-Reddy-S....._at_pdctrvw_dp
reviewed by Roochak
If you've never seen the old RUFF AND REDDY TV show, don't sweat it; hardly anyone else has, either. It's just the raw material that writer Howard Chaykin and artist Mac Rey needed to craft a bleak, bitter satire of a television industry that's sold us our own neuroses and obsessions for seventy years, here packaged as the story of two minor Hollywood talents who can't live with or without each other.
Chaykin drew a fine, eight page "origin story" of how Ruff (the foulmouthed cat) and Reddy (the recovering addict dog) became partners, but it's Mac Rey's widescreen, sunset-and-shdadows art show from then on, and it's gorgeous to look at. Chaykin's reinvention of the duo from kidvid adventurers to a pair of aging Jewish comics who experience failure, success, and a state of betrayal so total that success and failure are indistinguishable is what puts this series over the top, though.
Ruff and Reddy are a footnote in animation history, but they're stars in this cynical, cartoon history of television devoid of heroes, nostalgia, kindness, beauty, or hope. They live long enough to appear on (and lampoon) every TV show from Jack Paar and Steve Allen to TRANSPARENT and GAME OF THRONES, but the neo-noir LA of this story is populated entirely by vipers and fools; it's where nobody's luck lasts forever, and the duo's comeuppance, when they finally walk into the trap they've set for themselves, is so painfully funny you'll almost wish they could've dodged it. Almost.
https://www.amazon.com/Ruff-Reddy-S....._at_pdctrvw_dp
reviewed by Roochak
If you've never seen the old RUFF AND REDDY TV show, don't sweat it; hardly anyone else has, either. It's just the raw material that writer Howard Chaykin and artist Mac Rey needed to craft a bleak, bitter satire of a television industry that's sold us our own neuroses and obsessions for seventy years, here packaged as the story of two minor Hollywood talents who can't live with or without each other.
Chaykin drew a fine, eight page "origin story" of how Ruff (the foulmouthed cat) and Reddy (the recovering addict dog) became partners, but it's Mac Rey's widescreen, sunset-and-shdadows art show from then on, and it's gorgeous to look at. Chaykin's reinvention of the duo from kidvid adventurers to a pair of aging Jewish comics who experience failure, success, and a state of betrayal so total that success and failure are indistinguishable is what puts this series over the top, though.
Ruff and Reddy are a footnote in animation history, but they're stars in this cynical, cartoon history of television devoid of heroes, nostalgia, kindness, beauty, or hope. They live long enough to appear on (and lampoon) every TV show from Jack Paar and Steve Allen to TRANSPARENT and GAME OF THRONES, but the neo-noir LA of this story is populated entirely by vipers and fools; it's where nobody's luck lasts forever, and the duo's comeuppance, when they finally walk into the trap they've set for themselves, is so painfully funny you'll almost wish they could've dodged it. Almost.
me of the old song "On Broadway" in that it seems
to speak to the same theme of this whole glittering
wonderland, that's forever out of reach to the
character giving us their pov, and all they ever
see is the underside of things.