The animated show is NOT you!
?A? for trying something new, now cut your losses and move on.
Try simulcasting your existing radio show on TV. (PBS, SPEED, ESPN or SYNICATION.)
Many GREAT radio successes have bombed with other ventures, Rush Limbaugh, Paul Harvey, etc.
First, an apology: I’ve only read the first four pages of this thread, so some of this may already have been said.
When I first heard of this show, I thought it was probably going to be a bad one. Seeing the characters on the website and finding out the show’s name, I thought it would be worse… but I watched anyway. At first I thought it was truly awful, and admittedly the ten minutes it took to get used to the show is nine and a half longer than most people would give it, but once I got that far it was great. It’s not Car Talk. (In fact, they don’t even mention the name “Car Talk”. Other words that don’t appear are “Tom”, “Ray”, and “NPR”. Even the theme is faked.) A TV show based around the actual production of episodes of Car Talk would be horrifically boring anyway. So they didn’t try that. “As the Wrench Turns” is the same kind of attitudes and humor heard on the radio and read on cartalk.com applied in a way that could only have been done as a cartoon, and for me it really works. Don’t like the Campaign episode? Mostly the same idea as on the radio show and this very web site in 1996 (and of course it had to be 0 votes. It wouldn’t have worked any other way.) The timing was off? Listen to the scripted parts of Car Talk, for example anything starting with “So do you remember last week’s puzzler?” It wouldn’t be as funny if it were “better” done. I won’t hold my breath for more episodes, nice as that would be, but I’m flat-out shocked that, apparently, the same people who love “Car Talk” hate “As The Wrench Turns”.
I’d been waiting for weeks to watch Tom & Ray’s NOVA episode, Car of the Future. When I saw ATWT on my local PBS station’s schedule, I mistakenly thought it was your NOVA episode. I grabbed the remote control that night and informed my wife “We’re watching this show… it’ll be great!” When air time came I was taken aback. “Okay,” I sputtered, “this isn’t what I expected, but it might be good.” Fifteen minutes later I was trying to blend into the couch without notice before the wife could say "You made me watch THAT?!"
Love your radio show. Loved your bit in Cars. Never watched ATWT again after the first two episodes. Oh yeah, saw the NOVA episode a few weeks later and loved it.
While I thought that As The Wrench Turns showed a lot of room for improvement, I also think that some of the critics need to lighten up! SOME of the gags work! And as for the animation quality: anyone who calls it “crude” has been spoiled by modern cyber-graphics. I think the style is a throwback to “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids”, for which there must be a warm spot in someone’s three-sizes-too-small-heart.
David Jameson
Tallmadge, Ohio