The year was 1992.
The Renaissance Age of Animation was still relatively young, and despite
Disney making headway into the television market with
The Disney Afternoon and a few
Saturday Morning Cartoons, they still had serious competition from the likes of
Warner Bros., Turner Broadcasting (who had just launched a scrappy little cable channel called
Cartoon Network), and
Nickelodeon.
Enter
Raw Toonage.
Born from Disney's aquisition of the rights to the Belgian comic
Marsupilami, as well as the
Development Hell that
Bonkers was going through at the time,
Raw Toonage was an
Animated Anthology experiment that ran during the CBS Saturday Morning block in the fall of 1992. The show's format essentially predated
Animaniacs by one year (in fact, future
Pinky and the Brain writer Tom Minton worked on the "Totally Tasteless Videos" segments), though
Raw Toonage usually added a different
Framing Device to the mix each week.
However,
the show only lasted twelve episodes on CBS before being cancelled. It ultimately spawned two spinoffs, though: Disney's
Marsupilami, and
Bonkers.
Segments included:
- The host segment: The aforementioned framing device, appearing in most (but not all) episodes. Each time it would feature a different Disney character.
- He's Bonkers: Basically, these are the cartoons that Bonkers D. Bobcat starred in before joining the police force. (Most of these shorts would later be repackaged as compilation episodes of Bonkers.)
- Marsupilami: Disney's laid-back version of the titular creature, who hung out with a gorilla sidekick named Maurice.
- Totally Tasteless Videos: This segment was kind of a toss-up. One week, it could be about a caveman who is also a Private Detective; the next week, it could be about haunted poultry.
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