Cavalcade of Awesome

Here we are, Day 14 of AWESOME-tober-fest. It’s Hump Day everyone and we came here to talk about werewolves in TV shows. The previous two shows were live action, but our next three entries will be cartoons. Two of these cartoons were absolute favorites of mine growing up in the 80s.  Today’s cartoon, however, I didn’t really get a chance to watch on TV as it was only on for one season.  But it had a great premise that I love, even today, and I would have watched religiously.

Today we will look at Gravedale High.

Gravedale High first aired in 1990.  It was very similar to another of one of my favorite cartoons, Galaxy High. Just swap out aliens for monsters and change the perspective as the main character in Gravedale is a teacher, not a student. However, the “fish out of water in high school” theme is prevalent throughout both cartoons.  Plus, it has Rick Moranis, who I love.

Here’s Gravedale’s intro.

The premise is, Rick Moranis voices Max Schneider, a human teacher who is hired at Gravedale High, a high school for the current generation of monsters.  Among the student population are vampires, werewolves, centaurs, Medusas, mad scientists, Igors, Gillman, etc.  It’s a great concept that I adore to this day.  Imagine Drak Pack, but instead of solving crimes the monster teens are actually going to high school. And obviously there’s a lot of monster/human relationship humor in every episode. Here’s some of the main characters in a great pic from DeviantArt :

The show was voiced by a lot of very famous voice actors.The first student on the left is Reggie Moonshroud, the nerdy werewolf.  He was voiced by Barry Gordon, best known as Donatello from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Nestle Quik rabbit.  Rick Moranis’ Max is second from the left.  Vinnie Stoker is the Fonzi-esque vampire and was voiced by Roger Rose whose been in Knight Rider and voiced characters on The Jetsons and Batman the Animated Series.  To the right of Vinnie is Gill Waterman, the character based on Creature from the Black Lagoon.  He’s voiced by none other than Jackie Earl Haley, he of the new Nightmare on Elm Street and Watchmen movies.  Lastly on the right we have Frankentyke who is voiced by Frank Welker who famously voiced Fred from Scooby Doo as well as Megatron and Soundwave from Transformers.  Other voices included Tim Curry as a mummy history teacher, Rikki Lake as a fat mummy named Cleofatra (subtle), Jonathan Winters as a zombie coach and Eileen Brennan (Mrs Peacock in Clue the Movie) as a teacher that looks like the Bride of Frankenstein.

As you can see, it was a strong cast.  Unfortunately, it only lasted 13 episodes, and it’s unclear whether all of those episodes even aired.  I don’t believe this was ever released on DVD.  I thought it had been released in the UK or Canada, similar to Drak Pack, but I can’t seem to find it on Amazon UK.  You can see a few episodes on YouTube.

So that was Gravedale High.  The next two cartoon entries on Thursday and Friday are two cartoons I LOVED as a kid.  While Gravedale High has a werewolf as part of the ensemble, the next two cartoons both star a werewolf.  And one was based on a movie.  Can you guess?  Well, come back tomorrow and Friday to read about the final two werewolf TV shows for this week.

Aso, check out the blog Countdown to Halloween for more Halloween-y, bloggy AWESOMEness.

This entry was posted on October 20, 2010 at 9:03 am and is filed under cartoons, Halloween, holiday, monsters, TV shows, vampires, werewolf, werewolves with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2010, Halloween, holiday, monsters, pop culture, reviews, TV shows, werewolf, werewolves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.