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Category Archives: Other Animated Shows
In its Debut, Star Wars: The Bad Batch Decides Whether to Obey or Rebel
From the beginning, Star Wars’ iconography featured the motley, earth tone-draped freedom fighters of the Rebellion against the pristine, black-and-white perfection of the Empire. Before the audience ever knew the details of the conflict at hand, this imagery told us everything. The rigid, overpowering force of the film’s Imperial villains contrasted with the shaggier, freethinking rebels who dared to oppose them.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch follows in those vaunted footsteps. The series — from Star Wars animation impresario Dave Filoni, head writer Jennifer Corbett, and supervising director Brad Rau — frames itself as a contrast between the wilds of personal choice and the strictures of mandated conformity. As the Empire emerges from the ashes of its predecessor, those who fought for the Republic must decide what their place will be in this new galactic order. Will they stay good soldiers or become free but wanted men?
South Park’s Pandemic Special Is Surprisingly Earnest
It’s South Park! And they’re covering current events again! In a year where there’s been more news-per-square-inch than anyone can handle, not even the show’s “Six Days to Air” approach can cover it. So instead, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and their collaborators have birthed a one-hour special to cover (among other topics): COVID-19, police brutality, lockdowns, wildfires, protests, Zoom meetings, mental breakdowns, Donald Trump, the Build-A-Bear Workshop, and an avalanche of the other developments, big and small, that have consumed our lives in 2020.
Posted in Other Animated Shows, Television
Tagged COVID-19, Episode Reviews, Eric Cartman, Randy Marsh, South Park, South Park Season 24, Stan Marsh
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South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut Continues to Give and Point the Finger
Blame TV. Blame your parents. Blame movies. Blame society. Hell, blame Canada. But whatever you do, blame something, and quickly, before someone thinks of blaming you.
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut turns 20 this weekend, and for as much as the movie’s Saddam Hussein-heavy, Celine Dion-referencing take on the world is very much of its time, the film nevertheless captures the ways in which American culture would continue to take deeply entrenched, complex cultural problems, and hunt for convenient scapegoats and easy answers in the years to come. There is no issue too inflammatory, no societal malady too multifaceted, that it cannot be oversimplified and laid at the feet of a readily-available boogeyman.
Posted in Animated Films, Movies, Other Animated Shows
Tagged Film Reviews, Matt Stone, South Park, Trey Parker
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BoJack Horseman and When Life and Death Don’t Fit the Rules of Television
CAUTION: This article contains major spoilers for Season 5 of BoJack Horseman.
There was a random forum post the other day, asking when movies stopped showing characters getting into elevators. Well, it was more complicated than that, but that was the gist. Movies used to show a character leaving a room, walking down the hallway, getting into a car, stopping for gas, arriving at the next location, etc. etc. etc. In the early years of film, that’s how you transitioned from one scene to another.
Then, Jean-Luc Godard happened. And suddenly movies just cut past all that stuff. A character would start in one room and then, boom, be someplace else, with a brief establishing shot or a quick dissolve or little more than a different backdrop to let you know what’s going on. Movies eventually came to trust their audiences to understand that the character on screen did all that boring transition stuff in the meantime, without needing to see it.
Can Matt Groening Strike Gold for a Third Time with Disenchantment?
If all Matt Groening had ever done was create The Simpsons, one of the greatest television shows of all time, it would still have earned him a place in the pantheon of TV’s legendary creators. If all he had ever done was give life to Futurama, the cult classic sci-fi comedy that simply refuses to die, he would still have a claim to fame and have left an indelible mark on the small screen. But now Groening is about to unleash his newest creation, Disenchantment, another adult animated comedy, whose success or failure will determine whether Groening can carve out a place for this new series, distinguish it from its predecessors, and complete the TV show hat trick.
Posted in Other Animated Shows, Television
Tagged Disenchantment, Essays, Futurama, Matt Groening, The Simpsons
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ReBoot: The Guardian Code Earns Its Fan Backlash
I’m old enough to be able to remember when The Simpsons first started using Comic Book Guy — the portly, surly, and above all opinionated proprietor of Springfield’s local comic shop — as a stand-in so the show could poke fun at its die hard fans. The reaction was as swift and negative as you’d expect, with series’s biggest devotees (often its biggest critics) taking great offense, not only at being cast as schlubby lowlifes, but at having their concerns dismissed as pointless, nerdy nitpickery.
So it felt like deja vu when ReBoot: The Guardian Code — the 2018 revival of the groundbreaking 1994 computer-animated television show, ReBoot — depicted the hardcore fans of the original series in nearly the exact same way and received the same sort of response.
Posted in Other Animated Shows, Television
Tagged Computer Animation, Fan Backlash, ReBoot, ReBoot: The Guardian Code, Revivals, Season Reviews
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Archer’s “Danger Island” Proves the Show Can Work Anywhere
Another season. Another reboot. The powers that be behind Archer have figured out that the motley collection of personalities the show’s crafted over the past eight years are now officially commedia dell’arte characters — distinct enough to be recognizable but malleable enough that you can plop them into any variety of new stories and situations and trust that they’ll fit right in.
Enter “Archer: Danger Island”, the show’s latest seasonal refresh. Season 9 offers a new backdrop for our favorite band of former secret agents/private detectives/drug runners/noir gumshoes/astronauts/submariners/alcoholics — a Casablanca-esque, French-occupied island in the South Pacific named Mitimotu. The action takes place in 1939, with references to the looming war and a winking vibe that tracks with the characteristically wide-ranging cultural pastiche of an “American abroad” island adventure.
Posted in Other Animated Shows, Television
Tagged Archer, Archer Season 9, Season Reviews, Sterling Archer
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Star Wars Rebels Chooses Not to Remake the Past in “A World Between Worlds”
I’m always suspicious of time travel stories. Too often, they open up a big can of worms that even great T.V. shows can’t reseal. They tend to either involve paradoxes and bits of convenience that we just have to accept as part of the time-bending shenanigans. But most of all, they create problems for both plot and drama.
If you can just go back and change some explosive event in the past, why not travel back even further to a more boring one that lets you avoid the conflict altogether? And more to the point, why do any of your actions matter if they can simply be undone down the line? Time travel risks breaking your universe and weakening your ability to tell meaningful stories.
So I was worried, naturally, when Star Wars Rebels introduced what amounts to time travel in “A World Between Worlds”, thereby allowing the show to revisit two of its most heightened and dramatic moments. It’s a choice that connects this series with the past, present, and future of the Star Wars franchise, while also creating the opportunity to rewrite these major events in the show’s own history. But fraught though these time-tampering opportunities may be, Rebels approaches them in a way that is not only satisfying in terms of mechanics and continuity, but which exists as an episode-length rejoinder to the idea of “let’s just fix the past” that’s otherwise inextricably a part of the DNA of time travel stories
Bob’s Burgers: Tina Belcher Chooses Girl Power over Stink Bombs in “V for Valentine-detta”
You could be forgiven for getting whiplash from the on-again, off-again romance between Tina Belcher (Dan Mintz), Bob’s Burgers’ resident love-struck tween, and Jimmy Jr. (H. Jon Benjamin), her longstanding crush. The show’s featured each one pursuing the other; it’s had them alternatively dating and feuding, and it’s even shown them pulling off wild stunts to impress the other, without ever really settling on a consistent level of interest, as befits the messy world of middle-school romance.
Posted in Other Animated Shows, Television
Tagged Bob's Burgers, Episode Reviews, Jimmy Pesto Jr., Tina Belcher, Valentine's Day
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Hope in the Shadow of the Empire: Star Wars and the Jewish Identity
Star Wars has always drawn a connection between the Empire and the Nazis. From the very beginning, the franchise presented images of Grand Moff Tarkin and his officers, replete with enforcers dubbed “stormtroopers,” wearing uniforms that likened them to the men who served Hitler. It’s a visual choice that’s meant to tell the audience who the Empire is at a single glance, without needing to unpack the details that the franchise would explore in the ensuing decades.
Posted in Other Animated Shows, Television
Tagged Episode Reviews, Judaism, Star Wars, Star Wars Rebels
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