Three is a Magic Number

Well, only seven months after its foretold resurrection, J. Cart. Overanal. just hit a milestone. As you may have noticed, the counter down there just passed 99984 hits. This is amazing. Though, we personally prefer to use the ternary system because it sounds a lot more impressive to say that we just passed 12002011010 hits. The reason for the insecurity and radix inflation becomes apparent once we examine the statistical breakdown:

• 46% of the hits were from people accidentally stumbling across the site after doing a search using some permutation of the terms “bestial,” “sex,” “Lilo and Stitch,” and “porn.” (O, how we wish this were not true.) We are not sorry to disappoint these people.
• 22% of the hits were from tubegliders, which, as you know, are semi-aware lines of Perl code which traverse the Internet hyperlink by hyperlink and node by node, gathering data and observing binary patterns at the bidding of The Master.
• 14% of the hits were due to people searching specifically for “President Truman eating an excessive purple sandwich,” which brought them directly to this post.
• 12% of the hits were from ghosts.
• 6% of the hits were due to actually interested readers.

Of that meager 6 meaningful %, only approximately 0.02% contributed to the site by sending in articles or links. That’s right: this statistical exercise has turned into a finger-wagging exercise in projected, collective guilt. Fortunately, this site obeys a homeopathic principle, so those very few submissions we received made the entire site super awesome.*

But we will not dwell on the past. “Go West, young man!” said John Soule in 1851. A more apropos quote would have been “Go and start publishing video game over-analyzations, young man!” And so, following Mr. Soule’s sage advice, this is what we shall do.

Furthermore, as you may have noticed, we have been trying to include more editorial commentary, whether in the body of the article or in the comments themselves. We hope this will help spark discussion. Perhaps with reasoned discourse we can finally settle the question of whether Ookla the Mok was from Kashyyyk or Butte, Montana.

Finally, thank you! to all of the readers out there both loyal and treacherous. We are thrilled that a simple college hobby has ballooned into a simple post-graduate hobby, and those of you who have shown support have made the entire endeavor worthwhile.

*This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

It is fun to have fun, but you have to know how.

No one can accuse the editors of The Journal of Cartoon Over-analyzations of not thinking outside the box ex arcae: so, facing a dwindling supply of fresh animation over-analyzations (and unwilling to use the ones we found in De Vermis Mysteriis) we have decided to open the playing field a bit, as it were. While our raison d’être is animation, we are going to start publishing occasional interesting and relevant articles pertaining to appropriate literature (a nice specimen will be forthcoming). We believe we will be the first publication in history to ever present even a single instance of literary over-analyzation.

We may also consider expanding our realm to include the potentially fertile ground of videogames (we’re looking in your direction, Final Fantasy, and we know what you’ve been up to behind the wood shed with Valve and Tim Schafer). But have no fears- J. Cart. Overanal. will always be your reliable distributor of fine, hand-crafted cartoon over-analyzations.

Knowing is half the battle.

The editors here at J. Cart. Overanal. can’t help but notice the influx of new readers recently. To you, we say Hello! and Welcome, enjoy your stay!

This site thrives on reader submissions. The editors are well-respected in the over-analyzation community, but are notoriously lax in publishing their own work. And there is only a finite number of archived articles. So, we’re beseeching you, the student who put off writing their 10-page paper entitled Fight Club vs. The Turn of the Screw: An Oral History by watching episodes of Ben 10. And we’re beseeching you, the engineer who sneaks away to watch TiVo’ed episodes of Spongebob Squarepants while the wife puts the baby to bed. And we’re beseeching you, the audience: send us your half-baked theories and misguided essays! (They don’t even have to be long, that’s what Mini-Analyzations are for.)

overanalyzation AT gmail DOT com

Hello, all you culture-lovers out there!

On the approximately 10th anniversary, Cartoon Over-Analyzations has risen from the grave in the form of a blog. Here’s how it will work: starting out, I’ll begin posting “classic” over-analyzations from the old site every so often. Hopefully, before I run out of those, all of you out there will have started submitting new ones to overanalyzation AT gmail DOT com.

Now, it’s been about six years since we were last on the grid, so there should be plenty of fodder for new over-analyzations. Are there existential dilemmas in Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends? Does Brad Bird’s oeuvre contain creepy Objectivist subtext? Is there a Lorenzo Music/Bill Murray Ghostbusters–Garfield conspiracy? Were Paw Paw Bears simply evolved Snorks with a totemic religion? Or maybe Scooby and Shaggy, like, totally smoked weed, man. These and other questions require more than careful analysis. They demand over-analyzation.