I'm a big fan of this sidelined little pantheon of American animation. Both the early stuff, all super-basic "talking heads" animation, sleepy and low-key, with dialogue based mostly on edited/re-recorded improvisation...

pilot episode of Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist, "Pot-Bellied Pigs" (1995):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz7yrnP3KpY

pilot episode of Home Movies, "Get Away From My Mom" (1999):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7IhZ0PahL8


...and also the later, increasingly ambitious stuff with tighter scripting & slicker animation, like Home Movies by the end, and even more so the latest show Bob's Burgers, which I think is due to start a new run of episodes (4th season) in a few months

U.S. Patent #6,252,604: Mr. Thomas F. F. Snyder's Method of Animating an Image by Squiggling the Edges of Image Features



"we have a patent on the crappiest thing in the world..." - h. jon benjamin

late to the game but hey, you know what?  this is really sort of revelatory for me.  i have fond memories of dr katz because i used to watch it in the late 90s and it introduced me to mitch hedberg, and home movies is legitimately one of my favorite shows and i think i probably made a thread expressing this many years ago on pre-sw gw, but the discussion didn't really go anywhere.  but!!  i watched the first episode of bob's burgers a few years ago, generally being a fan of h jon benjamin's stuff and sort of thought it sucked!  later on my girlfriend insisted it didn't because she'd watched a few episodes while getting stoned with our neighbors and i kinda wrote it off as their all being high but i never realized there was a connection between it and the earlier two series.  i feel like this is going to make me give it a legitimate chance.
 
having said that, i think a lot of the humor in dr katz and home movies was derived from conversation-driven scenes set against pretty mundane backdrops (e.g. therapy, soccer game, dinner, etc), and the one episode of bob's burgers i watched, iirc, had a very different narrative structure to it?  but honestly my memory is hazy so i should probably give it another shot.

i don't blame you, a lot of people wrote off Bob's Burgers after the first episode, it's kind of unrepresentative really... but for me it was even earlier than that, I saw a trailer that made it look terrible, and i was worried about the show... but i loved it from very early on, these are episodes from the first season I would recommend:

"Art Crawl"
"Bed & Breakfast"
"Crawl Space"

if you think those suck too, yeah, you might just not like the show... but for me the Dr Katz/Home Movies style of conversation comedy does come through (some episodes more than others though, for sure...)

ooo i only just noticed there are some episodes of the Squigglevision kids' show Science Court up on the 'tube
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxmys7IRgKg
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tNrNJOz2To
 
etc... it was a saturday morning show intended to educate about a different science thing each week

ooo i only just noticed there are some episodes of the Squigglevision kids' show Science Court up on the 'tube
 
etc... it was a saturday morning show intended to educate about a different science thing each week

 
Damn nostalgia bomb just blowing up in my face. Paula Poundstone does some of the best deadpan.

huh I vaguely remember that show. I don't remember if I had any idea what was going on in it though.

early pilot "biography of mr katz" (1992)
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK7BtNdy6KA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK7BtNdy6KA[/url]