This is really funny. Don’t read my notes until you’ve watched and had a good laugh.

The first episode of Puffincat got featured on the front page YouTube a couple days ago, and I became instantly obsessed with it, and everything else originating from Diet of Worms, an Irish improvisation group I’d never heard of previously, and would never have if they hadn’t made a cartoon and gained astounding visibility.

I’m a strong believer in the achievement of a desired aesthetic, and I don’t care what that aesthetic is — I always judge the success art by whether or not it has achieved its own evident goal. If the goal is not evident, or the goal is evident but not achieved, I judge art to be less successful.

The goal of Puffincat is evident and achieved. If Puffincat were any “better” it’d be worse. In fact, as the series progresses to the fourth episode, and the handling of the production becomes more honed, the product declines. It hits it’s stride at episode two, where the cheesy post-production image degradation effects are ditched, but the remaining elements are still as crude as before.

File this with Sifle & Olly, Bevis and Butthead, and other more well-known shows that succeeded by setting their sights low and running further than anyone anticipated.

I love a good cartoon, but I adore a good bad cartoon.

Knowing that the brilliant Eric Shcwartz is still alive and kicking, and making cartoons with his Amiga, actually made me cry today. I remember being about nine years old, and wiping the sweat off my palms as I waited for friends to come over with new floppy discs containing his animations.

I’ve written Eric a couple times, and never heard back from him, but that figures. I’m sure he gets nostalgic mail all the time from former little brats like me, saying basically the same thing, which is: “ERIC, YOU INSPIRE US!” He probably has an email filter set up just to deal with that.

Anyway, Eric, you inspire me, and I wouldn’t ever have decided to make cartoons without that inspiration, so from the bottom of my heart, thank you for ruining my life.