Best of Little Lulu:Green Girl

Rating:
Summary: Lulupalooza
Review: Marge's Little Lulu made her impressive debut in the Saturday Evening Post in 1935. Wildly popular, she hit the big screen in 1944 in a series of cartoons for Famous and Paramount studios, and was everywhere in ads for Kleenex tissues. John Stanley expanded the roster to include Tubby, her best friend, Annie, and the rest of the well-known gang. But her best venue by far came in 1995 in this labor of love from CINAR animation studios in Canada, which ran on HBO Family.

CINAR went back to the John Stanley comics and used many of his inspired stories, as well as the whole Stanley gang. Lulu is voiced by Tracey Ullman (on whose show The Simpsons made their debut). Each show consists of three cartoons, with brief Lulubites (reminiscent of Marge's single panel comic) and a short stand-up routine by Lulu/Ullman. Ullman's routines seem too strident for Lulu, and the barbed, adversarial humor (kids vs adults, girls vs boys) seems incredibly dated, the only discordant note in this wonderful series. (See also the companion volume, The Best of Little Lulu Featuring Friends and Enemies).

You get a whopping fifteen cartoons (five shows). Episodes: The Green Girl, with Rainy Day and Beautiful Lulu; Alvin's Record Player, with Lulu's Television Debut and Cry Baby; Snowball War, with Jr. Detective Tubby and Picnic Pirates; Gilbert the Gorilla, with Snow Business and The Case of the Egg in the Shoe; Business Girl, with The Pet Duck and Lulu's Umbrella Service.