Nature is treated with a high degree of reverence on kids' TV these days. Not a huge surprise; the environment's in peril, and all that. But there's something a little relentless about the earnestness of it all. Hey kids, love the sloth! Love the trees! Love the earth, where every creature is gentle and good!
Thus, there's something refreshing about seeing the natural world from the perspective of a 14-year-old boy. In "George of the Jungle," the Cartoon Network's new version of the classic show, the animal kingdom isn't externally threatened so much as perennially conflicted, full of predators, prey, hypocrisy, and occasional comic violence. A meerkat gets stalked by a tiger in camouflage: He's wearing an ill-fitting zebra costume. George swoops to the rescue, bonking the tiger into a wall before tying him up in his tail.
That's our hero, a clumsy and well-meaning teenager in the requisite skimpy outfit. (In the original '60s cartoon, he was a 20-something. But his "Watch-out-for-that-tree!" theme song endures, updated a bit for young ears.)
George lives with a paternal ape and hangs out with two teenage-girl friends, one a tomboy and one a Valley Girl type who's the daughter of a jungle witch doctor. Like many modern cartoon characters, they're all drawn with googly eyes and an assemblage of sharp angles. But George is actually a soft-edged sort of guy, sweet and perhaps a wee bit slow. When he has to think hard, he dribbles his lip with his finger.
George acts as a sort of policeman-protector of his jungle home, encouraging various species to find ways to get along. The scenarios are goofy, the scripts filled with enough pop-culture references to appeal to a media-savvy kid or his parents. One upcoming story, about a mythical animal duel, borrows bits and pieces from "Star Wars," "The Karate Kid," "Harry Potter," and "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants."
In another story - funnier and more inspired - George's female friends fear he's doing too much to protect the small animals from tigers and the like. They decide to dole out some self-defense training, instead. "It's time to take back the jungle!" one of them declares.
In the meantime, the predators chafe at George's constant meddling. "Us big guys are tired of getting pounded just for doing our thing," the tiger gripes, before he finds his own solution: Turn the big game animals into New Age vegetarians. Soon, the lions are chasing smaller animals around, trying to feed them yam french fries. As a bunch of crocodiles surround them singing folk music, a group of warthogs looks perennially confused.
"George of the Jungle" does occasionally drop in a real-world reference. When George talks proudly about the vegetarians, his friend Ape scolds him for upsetting the natural order of things. Yep, kids, the truth about nature isn't pretty: Watch an episode of "Nature" or an hour of "Animal Planet" and you'll likely see a fair amount of PG-13-worthy gore, not to mention some disturbingly realistic talk of doom. Far safer for young minds to spend time in a world of cartoon mayhem, where a goofy guardian slams into trees for the sake of animalkind.
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to viewerdiscretion.net.
