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AKA Cult Toons
The 'AKA' evening slot aired between 7 and 9pm on weekday evenings during 1999 on Cartoon Network UK. The slot consisted of repeated shows such as Tom and Jerry, Looney Tunes and Cow and Chicken, in addition to short original stings and idents created for the slot, based upon a DJ theme.
'AKA' Stings and Cult Toons material would consist of Hanna-Barbera owned footage, prominently from the 1960s and 1970s (Such as Wacky Races, The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, The Banana Splits (including Arabian Knights and Danger Island), Hong Kong Phooey, Help!... It's the Hair Bear Bunch!, Harlem Globetrotters). More contemporary material included Cow and Chicken and Dexter's Laboratory.
Cult Toons (Also referred to by the producers, Exceeda, as 'AKA Cult Toons') was a series of 30-minute slot experimental alternate comedy VJ (video jockey) videos almost identical to Youtube Poop, directed by Xavier Perkins and Brett Foraker.
Like Youtube Poop, through the manipulation of videos and the inclusion of seemingly irrelevant and obscure clips from films and cartoons, a new context and sometimes a completely different story is developed. For example, common features of the re-edited cartoons would include repeated footage (when a character would say "You can say that again" the previous line would often be repeated), freezing the footage (usually after a line such as "Hold everything!" or "Stop!"), overdubbing voices (including randomly replacing lines with the theme music to The Godzilla Power Hour), and repeating a line or sound effect and adding drum beats and record scratches over it, turning it into a brief hip-hop song. The start of an episode of The Gary Coleman Show would often feature halfway through the show, edited so that lead character Andy LeBeau would suddenly explode a few seconds in. It would then end abruptly over a 'Technical Difficulties' caption, with a dramatic music sting.
Prominent material however would be live-action films ranging from blaxploitation to Bruce Lee, as well as footage of celebrity interviews and turntable DJs created especially for the show. The unexpected appearance of these clips gave the show a very surreal and non sequitur quality, as they would often be loosely related to the context of the episode. For example, suddenly cutting to a clip of a martial arts film if a character got angry. Another example, In an episode featuring the Super Furry Animals, the opening titles of Help!... It's the Hair Bear Bunch! were edited so that all mentions of "bears" were replaced with themselves saying "furry animals".
The end credits of each episode would reveal the programme's UK origin by sampling a clip of Velma Dinkley from an episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? saying "Made only in England!", interrupted after each word by record scratches and clips.
The Electric Cheese has been obtaining episodes from around the country on VHS and DVD and uploading them to Youtube.
