Like all great children’s cartoons, the Problem Solvers series by the artist collective Paper Rad is the equivalent of taking a great acid trip. Well, not that I would personally know what an acid trip is like, but the episode “Give Pizza a Chance,” embedded above, sure feels like one regardless.

It’s a heady mix reminiscent of cruddy ’80s video game cartoons, like the Q-Bert and Pac Man shows, thrown into a high-speed underground film blender. There are two things that stand out to me particularly. One: The chapter dividers — a set of circles set up like planets against a starry sky that spin out at the viewer — looks very similar to the 13 chapter dividers in Craig Baldwin‘s Mock Up on Mu. Two: The troll sitting on a grassy hill transmitting his peace/pizza signals out to his minions made me think of the ending to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, although there’s no breaking of the fourth wall here.

Paper Rad is a group made up primarily of artists Jacob Ciocci,  Jessica Ciocci and Ben Jones working in a variety of media dedicated to a lo-fi trippy nostalgia made up of wholly original work and remixes of found footage. To get the entire Paper Rad experience, you can cruise through their highly colorful website. Or if you just want to experience their video goodness, visit their YouTube page. And for a little bit more background, here’s a great interview from last year with Jacob Ciocci at the Pixel Vision blog.

Jacob’s actually going to be in Los Angeles tomorrow, Sunday, Feb. 15 at 8:00 p.m. with the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax. He’ll be performing his live piece I Let My Nightmares Go and showing a collection of Paper Rad videos.

The group also has a DVD out called Trash Talking that’s available on the Load Records website and other places around the web.