More Toot

Well, last night's Drawn Together has its inevitable weight gain story: as half of the cartoon cast residing in the show's faux Real World house were given an unlimited amount of food – and zaftig Betty Boop stand-in Toot Braunstein went on a nonstop binge to "fill the void" in her life. At her hugest, Toot is drawn as a female Jabba the Hut: a joke once used by the South Park boys on Sally Struthers. (And also by moi in an unrealized movie script – but let's not go there. . .) The show's writers toss in just about every mega-fat joke they can remember (one of the other animated characters, for instance, gets stuck in one of Toot’s folds) and also include some calculatedly yucky moments (lots of vomit in the episode’s second half). But I'm betting that screen caps of Jabba Toot show up in one of the Yahoo groups before the week is out. . .

My own take: the mega-sized Toot is not as cute as I'd personally like to see her (but, then, my starting model would be the "laugh 'til you are fat" BBW Betty Boop from the Fleischer "Betty Boop and Little Jimmy" cartoon), primarily because the folks at Drawn Together are more interested in subverting cuteness than anything. At times, her body doesn't look as believable as it does in other scenes (they especially seem to have difficulty making her arms gesture convincingly), though her multiply chinned face is rather nice. If I were a cartoon guest in the DT house, I'd definitely wanna do her. . .

UPDATE: Comedy Central has been posting stills from each episode on its DT page, though at this writing, they haven’t put up any from this week’s ep yet.