Camp Lazlo
Camp Lazlo is a mid-2000s Cartoon Network cartoon, about cute li'l forest animals who attend a poorly-managed summer camp. It was created by Joe Murray, previously the creator of Rocko's Modern Life on Nickelodeon, though it unfortunately does not quite live up to his pedigree, being more of an ordinary kids' show than the satirical multi-demographic show that Rocko was.
In the show, Camp Lazlo is, ironically, not a camp. Rather, Camp Kidney is the name of the camp that Lazlo attends, and there is no Camp Lazlo, making the show's title ridiculous indeed. The camp itself is also ridiculously named, seeing as there isn't one kidney in the entire camp (this excludes the kidneys that reside in the bodies of the cartoon animals who attend the camp, of course).
Characters[edit]
- Lazlo (Carlos Alazraqui) – Lazlo is a monkey that has a banana for a mouth. This ironically contradicts his status as a monkey, which seemingly should be dictating him to eat said banana. Alas, he cannot eat his own mouth, and this anguish adds a touch of realism to the show. In the series finale, he visits a favela (PT) in São Paulo, Brazil, his city of birth, thinking that it would be filled with cute forest animals, and therefore as cozy and joyful as the camp he attended. Armed teenagers quickly put an end to this erroneous belief.
- Raj (Suraj Sharma) – An elephant who speaks with a thick Indian accent. Raj moved to the United States because he is a dalit (untouchable) in India and will never hook up with any hot girls over there. He works at the camp's convenience store, a clear example of the writers' originality and racial tolerance.
- Clam (Douglas Osowski) – Half-clam, half-rhinoceros, Clam lacks the brain matter to speak very much. Originally, the creators didn't want him to have any brain matter to speak, so if bees stung him he couldn't tell Nurse Leslie that he needed an Epipen, meaning that he would get anaphylactic shock and die. Cartoon Network forced the creators to give him enough brain matter to speak a little, so he gets few lines, and winds up appearing "reserved".
Production[edit]
In 1972, a young Joe Murray was sent to the wuahckiest!!! camp he'd ever seen. This camp was, apparently, run and attended by forest critters, because when he created a TV show about it three decades later, that was how the camp in the show was.
The show aired on Cartoon Network, at a slump period where their quality control was declining and executives were hoping that maybe if they accepted enough mass-produced mediocre shows, they'd get lucky and one or two might be good. Unfortunately this was not the case, and CN's "target demographic" dropped even further, to include 0–3-year-olds, when they introduced the ill-fated Tickle U block around this time.
Reception[edit]
Being such a mediocre cartoon, Camp Lazlo has received absolutely no reviews, either positive or negative. Perhaps this is for the best.