Genre

Paul McCartney once implored John Lennon’s son Julian to “take a sad song and make it better”. The same basic concept is at work here, but the words “sad song” should be replaced with “bad cartoon”. Sealab 2021 is a clever show from Cartoon Network that takes a bad old show, Sealab 2020, and replaces the dialog track with something much more enjoyable. Think of it as the Mystery Science Theater 3000 approach to creating a cartoon.

Admittedly, the results are sometimes mixed. When a gag ...oesn’t quite work, it’s amusing in that “I’m having fun, but not quite smiling” sort-of way. When it works, though, the show is laugh-out-loud funny; a concept that seems to be lost on most cartoons after we reach the age of 12. The characters are the same for each episode, including the hapless captain, the token Latino (voiced by Erik Estrada), and my favorite, the occasionally-appearing random Frenchman.