I’ve long had deep love for cartoons, starting with the classic shorts from Disney, Looney Toons, and Hanna-Barbera, through Saturday morning lineups and bowls of sugary cereal, afterschool syndicated blocks, feature films, music videos, and onward, culminating in primetime fare and late night oddities. I love all of it, from the smart kids’ stuff to the stoner adult stuff, hours and hours of animated bliss parading before my eyeballs. Aside from a few ups and downs, both in quality and politically, the lineup of shows appearing on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim has been pretty consistently great these last three decades, from the early Hanna-Barbera appropriating shows like Harvey Birdman all the way to stuff like Rick and Morty, an amazing program with the most obnoxious and ridiculous fans in the universe, and everything in between.
One of those shows was the darkly comic Metalocalypse, a macabre and violent satire of heavy metal culture that followed the misadventures of fictional death metal band Dethklok in a post-apocalyptic world. While the show was good, it never really grabbed my attention the way its peer programming did, but boy oh boy is the music a lot of fun. The animated headbangers in Dethklok absolutely nail the sound the show’s creators are both honoring and mocking to the umpth degree, and often with riffs and licks to rival any real metal band out there. Just listen to “Dethharmonic,” from 2007’s The Dethalbum, and if you have even a passing affinity for melodic death metal, you’ve got to admit that it’s an utter behemoth of sound, all with satirical lyrical content skewering the wealthy’s aversion to taxes. Credit to writer, comedian, animator, voice actor, and musician Brendon Small, whose work as Dethklok elevates the show to something more than just crude jokes and parody.
“Prepare the laser-beam. I’m gonna use it tonight. Engage the laser-beam. It’s gonna end your life.”
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