Good news for people who like to read bad comic strips that have been running for decades but wish those bad comic strips would move around: King Features and The Jim Henson Company are developing an animated Hägar The Horrible TV series with Fresh Off The Boat, American Dad, and Don’t Trust The B— In Apartment 23 writer Eric Ziobrowski. For those who aren’t familiar with Hägar The Horrible, the comic is about a viking who… is easily baffled by everyday occurrences? Sometimes makes snide comments? Shrugs his shoulders while comical misunderstandings befall his friends and family? It’s honestly unclear. Take yesterday’s strip as an example. In it, Hägar is brought before an English king and asked to surrender, to which Hägar responds, “What?!” The king asks if he needs a translator, and Hägar responds, “No, I understand crazy talk!” Hilarious. Maybe?
Anyway, comedy(?) aside, one of the big hooks for the series is that it will be made with the Henson Digital Puppetry Studio, which allows the Henson Company’s puppeteers to control digital characters in real time (you know, like puppets). This news comes from Deadline, which says that the Digital Puppetry tech makes for an “organic, spontaneous performance.” As for King Features, it’s the studio behind Netflix’s upcoming Cuphead adaptation, which happens to be a cartoon that looks really nice and—like Hägar—is based on something of dubious quality. (Cuphead the game is fine, some people like it, and its extreme difficult is at least more appealing than the average Hägar comic strip.)
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I’m not even cautiously optimistic about this but I will at least check it out because of Snert.
Why exactly are you dogging on Cuphead (the game)? Nothing dubious about it.
This is ä horrible idea.
Aww, I was hoping for an adaptation of Browne’s other strip, “Hi and Lois”!
Aww, I was hoping for an adaptation of Browne’s other strip, “Hi and Lois”!
Fun Fact: Lois is Beetle Bailey’s sister! Really!
It’s like a Tommy Westphall universe for bad newspaper comics!
Major points for that one, especially on the desperate-to-be-in-the-moment A.V. Club. Other fun fact: Beetle Bailey originated as a college based comic. Beetle enlisted when the war started and, curiously, the strip never reverted back after VJ Day (minor comics strip nerd here.)
I will say this for this: a Hagar series would be mildly less problematic than a Beetle Bailey series
when I went to Mizzou they were building the new student center with a restaurant dedicated to the dude, and the old tavern he used to hang out at. There’s a statue of Beetle Bailey outside and everything
I thought Beetle enlisted during the Korean War, not WWII?
I will wait for the gritty reboot, where Chip drops out of high school to tour with his band and winds up in jail, the twins are running a test taking scam, Thirsty is basically Frank Gallagher, and Lois is cheating on Hi and eventually leaves him, taking Trixie and the dog with, which causes severe depression and the only solace Hi takes is daydreaming away in his office at Foofram Industries where he’d really like to tell off his boss and shag the secretary, and why do I know so much about Hi and Lois?
And if it is on one of those cable channels you could even imply that twins Dot and Ditto are a bit too fond of each other ala House of Yes. And if only I knew what the town it was set in it could be named that like what they did with the dark and gritty version of Archie Comics.
A taste of things to come?(If the video does not embed it is Jim Henson’s test for another newspaper strip, “The Wizard of Id”.)
They barely got four minutes out of the set up-punch style of joke telling. I can’t imagine a half-hour of it.
It is very Henson, though. The pacing is just too slow.
I think they recycled the wizard’s nose and eyes for the nightmare fuel of a jester at the end of this segment
Ya know, I wanna say this is an awful idea. To say they’re taking an unfunny comic and making it an unfunny movie, but eff it.They took the awful premise of Deadpool, made it a movie, and people then pretended it was good and went to see it. So fuck it, they’ll see anything.Now! Imagine! Imagine and picture that there’s someone out there right now that is ready to defend Deadpool. They’ll say, “it’s not that bad”, they’ll say, “it’s a good movie.”Just “mmm hmm” them. It’ll pass.
We get this but no “Cathy” or “Family Circus?”
I’d be all for a “Family Circus” if only for the finale to include captions laid over stills that said what happened to everyone. “Little Billy’s wandering dotted line eventually led to animating Ariel, Aladdin and the Beast, and winning an Oscar with Kobe Bryant.”
Cannot stand Cathy or Brian Henson’s grossout humour, but I would hatewatch the hell out of a series that combined the two.
There was a Cathy animated special on one of the networks way back in the 80s.
I remember that special! That’s where I learned the term “chit-chat”.
They’d better not, or my pitch for a gritty reboot of Cathy will seem like trend chasing! “Cathy: Ack In Black” plays second fiddle to nobody!
The gritty reboot of Cathy was “Caroline in the City”.
Not to go all Alan Moore here, but comedy newspaper strips may be the worst possible thing to adapt to film. Characters only have time to deliver a set-up and land a joke (or a “joke” as is often the case).
There’s enough established, simple character there that people will know if you violate it, but not so much that it’s not going to feel really forced when you have to introduce actual conflict resolution and story arcs. It’s arguably better to just make a movie out of Battleship or emojis because at least then you can do whatever you want without messing with the core of the speedboot or shit icon.
I remember at least one animated special of Family Circus back in the early 80s. There seemed to be an era for about 20 years where animation studios adapted one comic strip after another into a holiday special in the hope it would become the next Charlie Brown Christmas. I think only Garfield really had any success.
And the Garfield animated specials probably only succeeded because of Lorenzo Music and Lou Rawls. Jesus Christ, didn’t UPN try to do a “Dilbert” series?
For two seasons, yea. They used to show reruns on Comedy Central for the longest time. It also had a decent voice cast with Daniel Stern, Chris Elliott and Larry Miller.It followed Shasta McNasty in its final season and got the axe not long after.
You could argue that Vince Garaldi did the same for Peanuts.Yup, I remember the Dilbert adaptation. The episode I saw was OK, but it didn’t entice me to tune in for more.
Agreed about Gauraldi.
The Dilbert series was absurdly underrated, which in 2020 makes me extremely icky to say.
The new Cathy strips are way better than Hagar the Horrible.
There’s a new Cathy?
Yeah someone else took it over a while back and it’s not the same strip it used to be.
Are you making the same mistake I make all the time and confusing Nancy with Cathy?
The “Cathy” sitcom aired for several years back in the 90s, when it was called “Caroline in the City”.
Ack.
I’d have guessed “B.C.” (pre-crazy Christian Johnny Hart) would have been more their speed. Personally, I would have gone with “The Lockhorns” or a 70s period setting of “Funky Winkerbean.”
“Clams got legs!” lol….that BC always delivered
They go from the incredible world-building of THE DARK CRYSTAL . . . to this fucking shit?!?!?
Hopefully they don’t pick up where they left off.
Y’all are haters, Hägar is one of the most reliable (and, occasionally, surprisingly progressive) gag-a-day strips currently running.
Honestly, it’s the presence of the Henson Company that gives me pause. I have a soft spot for bad puns and groaner punchlines, but something about the way they approach that material just completely whiffs for me. Plus, these people made The Happytime Murders.
I’ve had an unreasonable hatred for Hagar ever since I saw a strip where one of the vikings says, “What do you call a knight who takes odd jobs? A freelance!” as if he’s telling a joke. Except that’s exactly what the word means; freelances were knights that didn’t have permanent masters and hired themselves out, and the word eventually came to mean anyone who did that. A fact is not a punchline, Hagar!
You have put more thought into Hagar the Horrible in this post than its creators have in the entire 50 years it’s been around.
“Ok, so you know how the whole Vikings thing is so hot right now???”
No need for a Hagar the Horrible movie or series. Norsemen already exists.
In the early 60s Jim Henson produced a pilot for a Wizard of Id series. It’s worth seeking out for the puppetry and quick-fire gags, and it’s only about 10 minutes long, which may be as long as any comic strip show needs to be.
Hagar? booo. You know what would be good? Groo the Wanderer.
Around 1990 a Groo the Wanderer movie was planned at (I think) Paramount with Sam Kinison in the lead. What actually happened isn’t entirely clear, but there were certainly test shootings, and apparently shots of Kinison in the costume were circulating although I’ve never seen any, but the project got dropped, apparently through the producers becoming worried about his immense drug intake.
The only thing I have to say about this is that Snert is a great name for a dog.
Just wondering if I’m the only person who can’t hear “Hagar the Horrible” without thinking of Wizard People, Dear Reader these days.
OK, I’ll pay that one.
I’m pretty sure Bill Watterson achieved the peak form of the newspaper comic strip many years ago and everything put down since doesn’t matter at all.
You have a strange way of spelling “Berke Breathed”, but I’ll agree with the basic premise.
Neither of you are necessarily wrong, but as a cartoonist who came of age during and drew HUGE influence from the late-stage newspaper strip era (Breathed, Watterson, Larson, et al), I’ve gone from “there’s never been and never will be anything better” to “we’ve been looking in the wrong places, and newspaper strips have been making themselves irrelevant since the 1980’s”. Not even 4 years after Watterson retired, Scott McCloud published “Reinventing Comics” and predicted the internet would change everything. It did.
Why Hagar when Groo the Wanderer is right there?
Edit: oops, I see this was already brought up. Test marketing complete; start working on it, folks.
Lütefisk and grøg for everyone!
But what does the Winchester brother’s think about their dear old friend switching career?
Why though?