Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
BioEnchanted
Aug 9, 2011

He plays for the dreamers that forgot how to dream, and the lovers that forgot how to love.
Something that I like about the leadup to the season 1 finale of Dead End: Paranormal Park is Courney's change in behaviour. When in prior episodes she's gleefully stirring poo poo up and being very aggressive about getting what she wants, even when first called out at the end of the Pauline reveal (defending herself with more aggressively petulant statements like "What I was only joking" and lashing back when her behaviour is finally questioned, accusing the humans of feeling superior), but in the penultimate episode when confronted by Barney as she's waiting at the elevator, her body language is very different. Her defenses have started to become weaker and more defensive "You know I don't belong here anyway..." "what did you expect I've known you for like, 5 minutes" etc but she's now shrinking back against the doors of the elevator while holding her suitcase in front of her, and hiding in the chandelier rather than being more open in her stances. She's trying to not make eye contact as she has realised that her hijinks have gone too far, and it's only when she gets to hell/plane 10 that she feels she can relax and forget about what happened... until she sees the invasion on the TV, notices that she still hasn't found her place even on plane 10 and that everything was for naught.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Covok
May 27, 2013

Yet where is that woman now? Tell me, in what heave does she reside? None of them. Because no God bothered to listen or care. If that is what you think it means to be a God, then you and all your teachings are welcome to do as that poor women did. And vanish from these realms forever.

DoctorWhat posted:

None of them. The narrative and tonal baggage is too immense and nostalgia reboots are a plague.

Uhh maybe Teenage Robot but only if they make the subtext text.

I would want them to finish Transformers Animated, at least. That needed one more season.

Mr Interweb
Aug 25, 2004

Covok posted:

What other 00s cartoons do y'all think could use a modern reboot or continuation because their original runs suffered from interference?

off the top of my head, probably something like silverwing, as i feel it deserves another season just for not pulling any punches for a kid's show

mycot
Oct 23, 2014

"It's okay. There are other Terminators! Just give us this one!"
Hell Gem

Covok posted:

I would want them to finish Transformers Animated, at least. That needed one more season.

Derrick Wyatt passed away this year :smith:

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
Wyatt's death was tragic, yeah.

There is a semi-official radio play wrap-up to Animated, called The Trial of Megatron. Most of the original cast returned!

https://youtu.be/sDO_0U7Fwcc

readingatwork
Jan 8, 2009

Hello Fatty!


Fun Shoe
This episode of The Loud House ended up longer than planned.

readingatwork posted:

Season 1, Episode 8B) One Flu over the Loud House:

Season 1, Episode 8A-2 (the 2 is because Paramount + sucks and listed 2 episode 8s): Hand-me-downer
Written by Michael Rubiner
Storyboard by Ed Baker
Directed by Chris Savino

Synopsis: Lincoln gets a girly pink bike handed down from Lori and hates it because it's pink and girly. When some neighborhood kids start making fun of him he lies and steals his sister Lynn's much cooler bike so he can hang out with them as some kind of middle school biker gang. Things go well for a while until Lynn's bike gets stolen, forcing Lincoln to frantically search the neighborhood to find it before Lynn's big competition. He uses his pink bike for the search and gets made fun of again but this time he confesses what's going on causing his new friends to instantly abandon him. He later let's Lynn know what happened and gives her the pink bike to use for her competition. Clyde eventually finds Lynn's old bike but by then Lynn had won the race and she decides she likes the pink bike better and let's Lincoln keep the old one, revealing that it too was a hand me down that she modified into it's current form. Filled with a new appreciation for hand me downs Lincoln takes the bike and gives it to one if his little sisters who instantly destroys it. Good job Lincoln.

Thoughts: Some parts of this episode work. There are some decent jokes, some good visual gags and some decent bits of character acting. However I found these things very hard to appreciate because everyone is their worst self and incredibly unlikeable. Lincoln is a(n incredibly bad) liar and a weaselly little coward obsessed with the approval of his new peewee biker gang. Lincoln's sisters apparently like to give him either things that are wildly gender inappropriate or broken trash they're too lazy to throw away and then have the gall to be mad at him for not liking it. Lincoln's gang are borderline homophobic and their friendship is entirely contingent on what kind of bike you have. And of course Clyde vacillates between either being a creep or a vessel for the worst jokes in the episode. Not good. Do better, show.

Themes and morals: Ok, this one is a bit more complicated than usual because we have the intended moral about hand me downs and then all the weirdness about gender roles that surround it. Let's start with the former.

The intended message of the episode is about how while hand me downs can be old and crappy they can actually be pretty cool if you are willing to put some effort into making them your own. Which is fine I guess, but the show doesn't really make a compelling case for it. Case and point, let's look at the hand me downs that Lincoln got in a flashback early in the episode:

-A tank top clearly intended for a teenage girl
-A guitar that Luna had smashed in half
-A used jock strap
-A rotting ventriloquist dummy that is quite literally haunted

Sorry show but this is all just crap and Lincoln is within his rights to be pissed off and hide these things under his bed for years. You ~can~ make something useful out of these things with enough creativity and effort I suppose, but the same could be said for random stuff taken from the city dump. Maybe if at the end of the episode the sisters came together and actually helped Lincoln make his pink bike into something he could be seen in public riding the message would work but as it stands it really doesn't feels like Lincoln's epiphany is earned.

Then we have the gender stuff and drat if that isn't a whole can of worms. The short version is that the show has a very 90's attitude towards the subject. There is recognition that girls like Lynn can break gender roles and be a bit like the boys but once Lincoln is the focus and is placed in girly situations things start to fall apart a bit. He's hot poo poo with (what appears to be) a boy's dirt bike and is apparently even popular with girls but the nanosecond he so much as touches a pink bike that he didn't even want in the first place it's all dust in the wind. The girls, his friends, his status as the town cool guy, all of it. The problem here isn't that this is inaccurate, this actually rings pretty true in a way. There's a reason that boys in the US are flying off the handle and shooting up their schools over perceived masculine deficiencies. The problem is that this is all just taken for granted and never acknowledged or commented on. It's just sort of the way things are. The show understands on an instinctive level what it means to do girly things as a guy and is willing to mine that for humor, but it's just not smart enough to grapple with what that actually ~means~ in a larger context. It's super frustrating because there's a LOT about our culture to call out here and the entire opportunity is missed.

Final thoughts: Lincoln really needs to get better at lying to his family. There were several parts of this episode where a better lie could have gotten him out of the whole mess scott free. Hell, when the bike got stolen all he had to do what keep his mouth shut and nobody would have realized that he was the one who took it.

Final Rating: Eh.

readingatwork fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Jun 30, 2022

BioEnchanted
Aug 9, 2011

He plays for the dreamers that forgot how to dream, and the lovers that forgot how to love.
THat's really disappointing about that episode as the Loud House was I think around the same time or a bit later than Steven Universe, a show in which the main character (late steven universe spoilers) trades his normal outfit in for literally his late mother's outfit when visiting her home as part of a gambit to use her status to try to talk to her sister. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvCIvDAPzgk Hell his entire colour scheme is basically pink due to being left from his mother's legacy and he doesn't give a poo poo.

BioEnchanted fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Jun 30, 2022

Mr Interweb
Aug 25, 2004

Covok posted:

What other 00s cartoons do y'all think could use a modern reboot or continuation because their original runs suffered from interference?

i know it's a different decade but pirates of dark water absolutely deserves a proper continuation/ending

Larryb
Oct 5, 2010

Mr Interweb posted:

i know it's a different decade but pirates of dark water absolutely deserves a proper continuation/ending

From a story perspective Dark Water was kind of ahead of its time (in fact I think it might have been one of the first serialized western cartoons to my knowledge) and it’d be nice if it were to get a reboot or a continuation one day

FilthyImp
Sep 30, 2002

Anime Deviant
Give Legion of Superheroes a proper ending!

Mr Interweb posted:

i know it's a different decade but pirates of dark water absolutely deserves a proper continuation/ending
That's the one I immediately went to then realized "oh. 00s..."

The cliffhanger ending if the series, where the treasures get harder because they've transmuted, was so enticing to me. "What if one of the treasures becomes an animal but Wren doesnt want to enslave it or kill it!"

BioEnchanted
Aug 9, 2011

He plays for the dreamers that forgot how to dream, and the lovers that forgot how to love.

FilthyImp posted:

Give Legion of Superheroes a proper ending!

That's the one I immediately went to then realized "oh. 00s..."

The cliffhanger ending if the series, where the treasures get harder because they've transmuted, was so enticing to me. "What if one of the treasures becomes an animal but Wren doesnt want to enslave it or kill it!"

That's basically Jackie Chan Adventures where the Talismans get destroyed and the powers flee to random animals of the same type.

readingatwork
Jan 8, 2009

Hello Fatty!


Fun Shoe

BioEnchanted posted:

THat's really disappointing about that episode as the Loud House was I think around the same time or a bit later than Steven Universe, a show in which the main character (late steven universe spoilers) trades his normal outfit in for literally his late mother's outfit when visiting her home as part of a gambit to use her status to try to talk to her sister. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvCIvDAPzgk Hell his entire colour scheme is basically pink due to being left from his mother's legacy and he doesn't give a poo poo.

Even before that you had Dipper vs Manliness where the whole point of the episode is Dipper realizing that his new friends actually suck and standing up to them. I don't think Lincoln ever actually realizes that his biker friends are poo poo. He just kind of feels bad that they are gone and it's framed as a comeuppance for lying or something.

Mister Beeg
Sep 7, 2012

A Certified Jerk

drrockso20 posted:

Found on the Internet Archive a playlist of pretty much every Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies short, so I decided to try and work my way through the whole series, and man even putting aside his somewhat racist origins*, Bosko is definitely an uneven start for the franchise, the animation itself is often charming but there's little in the way of real humor at this point, which at least partially comes from how little in the way of dialogue these shorts have at the moment, aside from Bosko(and occasionally Honey) every other character has been mute animals and even Bosko doesn't actually speak much, things will probably improve soon enough though, also in the short "Hold Anything" there's a bunch of mice that are so blatantly Mickey Mouse derived it's amazing that Harman & Ising didn't get sued over it

*though once they change his voice after his pilot short to something more cutesy it's mostly his(and Honey's) design that carries the racist baggage in the shorts I've seen so far

SlothfulCobra posted:

Bosko's main draw was being the first cartoon to do lip-syncing, which was a technological novelty at the time, but that also left most of his shorts too focused on the syncing to do many jokes. It's also just not very good. There's a reason why not just Bosko, but just about all of the Looney Tunes before Porky got forgotten.

I've heard that a lot of early Looney Tunes also just plain stole bits from Disney.

At least Bosko is the first and last Looney Tune to say gently caress. More than you can say for Beans the cat.

In general, it wasn't until Tex Avery arrived at the studio that Looney Tunes truly became "Looney". So the first few years are a hit or miss, depending on who was making what.

It's amazing that Chuck Jones became as big as he did given his early output. Big difference between his pre-Dover Boys output and his post.

I Am Fowl
Mar 8, 2008

nononononono

Covok posted:

What other 00s cartoons do y'all think could use a modern reboot or continuation because their original runs suffered from interference?

Sheep in the Big City.

Dawgstar
Jul 15, 2017

readingatwork posted:

Final thoughts: Lincoln really needs to get better at lying to his family. There were several parts of this episode where a better lie could have gotten him out of the whole mess scott free. Hell, when the bike got stolen all he had to do what keep his mouth shut and nobody would have realized that he was the one who took it.

I wonder how much of the 'meh' stuff is the result of Savino's influence and if the show got better after he left.

cartoons123
Nov 7, 2013

Dawgstar posted:

I wonder how much of the 'meh' stuff is the result of Savino's influence and if the show got better after he left.

I can’t confirm if the show saw an actual improvement or is still coasting on that line of “fine” (This was mainly my I’ll watch it if it’s on show) but I do feel like there’s been a slight increase on episodes that focus less on Lincoln (the character based somewhat on Savino) and more on the rest of the family.

As for Clyde, I think (Big Keyword THINK again, I’ll watch it if it’s on) MeToo and the aforementioned Savino Oust meant that his 00s style creep tendencies were drastically downplayed if not dropped altogether so look forward to that in however many seasons this show’s been on for

InsensitiveSeaBass
Apr 1, 2008

You're entering a realm which is unusual. Maybe it's magic, or contains some kind of monster... The second one. Prepare to enter The Scary Door.
Nap Ghost
Can't wait to explain to my boy why they changed the logo in 19 days:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90765432/why-the-new-pbs-kids-logo-got-rid-of-the-kid

drrockso20
May 6, 2013

Has Not Actually Done Cocaine
As I'm continuing this Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies project(currently up to "Moonlight for Two" the second of the three Goopy Geer shorts) the most recurring thought besides "man most of these Bosko shorts are dull as dirt" and "each new attempt at a mascot for Merrie Melodies is lamer than the last one" and "man I saw this exact same gag just a couple shorts ago down to the exact same animation" is the quite simple one "man they keep doing mice that are such blatant Mickey Mouse copies that it bewilders me that Disney didn't sue the poo poo out of Harman & Ising for it"

Of the 34 shorts I've gone through so far only a small chunk are worth watching on their own merits rather than for the sake of a project like mine

Pakled
Aug 6, 2011

WE ARE SMART
Considering how expensive animation is/was and how dull most of those early cartoons were, I'm honestly amazed that actual commercial animation ever got off the ground. Maybe since we all grew up with animation we're just too spoiled to appreciate characters jumping towards the screen and the camera going down their mouth, while our great-grandparents recognized that as the height of comedy.

Mr Interweb
Aug 25, 2004

Pakled posted:

Considering how expensive animation is/was and how dull most of those early cartoons were, I'm honestly amazed that actual commercial animation ever got off the ground. Maybe since we all grew up with animation we're just too spoiled to appreciate characters jumping towards the screen and the camera going down their mouth, while our great-grandparents recognized that as the height of comedy.

a lot of the really good animation back then was relegated to shorts and movies so animators could focus their attention on projects one at a time.

i'm actually more impressed in regards to how widespread animation has been post 80s. up until then, animation for kids was either fairly cheap and easy to churn out like pretty much all the hanna barbera stuff, or budgets were so small that you got terrible results like the 80s transformers cartoon. i brought it up a while back in the thread but it was at the start of the 90s that kids animation started getting treated with more respect and given higher budgets than they were used to.

MikeJF
Dec 20, 2003




Wasn't that pretty much all spurred on by Disney taking a punt on doing Ducktales with for the time an order of magnitude higher quality animation for TV than anything else, and how well that paid off?

drrockso20
May 6, 2013

Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Pakled posted:

Considering how expensive animation is/was and how dull most of those early cartoons were, I'm honestly amazed that actual commercial animation ever got off the ground. Maybe since we all grew up with animation we're just too spoiled to appreciate characters jumping towards the screen and the camera going down their mouth, while our great-grandparents recognized that as the height of comedy.

That is probably more than anything Walt Disney's biggest contribution to animation, he was always pushing for the evolution of animation both as an art form and as entertainment

Mr Interweb
Aug 25, 2004

MikeJF posted:

Wasn't that pretty much all spurred on by Disney taking a punt on doing Ducktales with for the time an order of magnitude higher quality animation for TV than anything else, and how well that paid off?

was it? i could believe it, since even as a kid i remember it being way more impressive than many other shows

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

Honestly while I can sort of figure ways that early Looney Tunes had appeal from the novelty of the format, I think really they just weren't very good by even the standards of their own era. The competing companies' shorts from the same years were better.

A while back I watched through a bunch of 30s Popeye shorts that were better than anything Bosko's ever been in, even when Popeye isn't properly lip-synched at all.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Mr Interweb posted:

was it? i could believe it, since even as a kid i remember it being way more impressive than many other shows

DuckTales was massively outsourced to Tokyo Movie Shinjou and other eastern studios, and at a premium too, not on the cheap. Put it years ahead of everything else.

Neeksy
Mar 29, 2007

Hej min vän, hur står det till?
I think it's Shinsha, but yeah, they animated a lot of the stuff that people ended up remembering fondly, like the good episodes of Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, DuckTales, etc. and random stuff like Heathcliff and Inspector Gadget were also TMS.

If you remember the lovely animated Tiny Toons, those were done by the Pup Named Scooby Doo studio, Kennedy I think?

Sockser
Jun 28, 2007

This world only remembers the results!




Neeksy posted:


If you remember the lovely animated Tiny Toons, those were done by the Pup Named Scooby Doo studio, Kennedy I think?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju_HW7ozM9I

Mister Beeg
Sep 7, 2012

A Certified Jerk

drrockso20 posted:

As I'm continuing this Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies project(currently up to "Moonlight for Two" the second of the three Goopy Geer shorts) the most recurring thought besides "man most of these Bosko shorts are dull as dirt" and "each new attempt at a mascot for Merrie Melodies is lamer than the last one" and "man I saw this exact same gag just a couple shorts ago down to the exact same animation" is the quite simple one "man they keep doing mice that are such blatant Mickey Mouse copies that it bewilders me that Disney didn't sue the poo poo out of Harman & Ising for it"

Of the 34 shorts I've gone through so far only a small chunk are worth watching on their own merits rather than for the sake of a project like mine

All I can say is, if you think Bosko is dull, then you're gonna have a miserable time with his eventual replacement, Buddy, created after Harman and Ising left.

A lot of cartoons from the era did seem to feature Mickey Mouse ripoffs, yeah. Van Beuren up in New York did a couple of cartoons with a Mickey Mouse knockoff that was so blatant Disney actually sued. I'm not sure what Disney thought of the Harman and Ising versions, although maybe he went easy with them because both men used to work for Disney all the way back in the Kansas City days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2QNP7cW_3Q

Neeksy posted:

If you remember the lovely animated Tiny Toons, those were done by the Pup Named Scooby Doo studio, Kennedy I think?

Kennedy Cartoons, yeah. I remember there a director on Tiny Toons who actually preferred Kennedy's animation (granted, he came from the John K. school of cartooning, sooo...).

Kennedy wasn't the worst, though. Encore Cartoons did two episodes that was so bad they were dropped after a short time. There was a credits gag "Number of Retakes: Don't Ask"

FilthyImp
Sep 30, 2002

Anime Deviant
Kennedy Cartoons had a weirdly squishy style.

Mister Beeg
Sep 7, 2012

A Certified Jerk

FilthyImp posted:

Kennedy Cartoons had a weirdly squishy style.

Yeah, the director in question had a "animation has to be wacky at all times" attitude, which might be why he was drawn to Kennedy's output when he was working on the show.

Neeksy
Mar 29, 2007

Hej min vän, hur står det till?

Mister Beeg posted:

Yeah, the director in question had a "animation has to be wacky at all times" attitude, which might be why he was drawn to Kennedy's output when he was working on the show.

Ah the same thinking that made Princess and the Frog so difficult to watch.

Mr Interweb
Aug 25, 2004

SlothfulCobra posted:

A while back I watched through a bunch of 30s Popeye shorts that were better than anything Bosko's ever been in, even when Popeye isn't properly lip-synched at all.

popeye was the only show that had that 20s/30s steamboat mickey/betty boop type animation style that i could actually watch. also helps that i liked popeye in general a lot more than any of those other characters.

fun fact: fleschier studios actually beat disney to the punch when i came to 3D animation (well, backgrounds anyway) with their specials on Sinbad and Ali Baba. always thought that was pretty badass

DoctorWhat posted:

DuckTales was massively outsourced to Tokyo Movie Shinjou and other eastern studios, and at a premium too, not on the cheap. Put it years ahead of everything else.

that makes a lot of sense, actually. TMS was always one of the best animation studios

Neeksy posted:

I think it's Shinsha, but yeah, they animated a lot of the stuff that people ended up remembering fondly, like the good episodes of Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, DuckTales, etc. and random stuff like Heathcliff and Inspector Gadget were also TMS.

somebody else that knows this factoid besides me! :hfive:

but yeah i remember i came across some of the earlier episodes a few years ago and was legitimately impressed at how well animated they were (before Dic cut off ties in order to save cash of course). aged INCREDIBLY well for a not particularly popular 80s T.V. show.


Mister Beeg posted:


Kennedy Cartoons, yeah. I remember there a director on Tiny Toons who actually preferred Kennedy's animation (granted, he came from the John K. school of cartooning, sooo...).


https://twitter.com/jwcartoonist/status/1171234961543897088?lang=en
https://twitter.com/JWCartoonist/status/1171234983677177856

:barf:

quote:

Kennedy wasn't the worst, though. Encore Cartoons did two episodes that was so bad they were dropped after a short time. There was a credits gag "Number of Retakes: Don't Ask"

the guys this did this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4pQYO5CgSg

looks like poo poo, i agree, but at least the characters at on model.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
The communication between writers, storyboarders and animators can be fascinating. Reminds me that the Venture Bros guys have had problems where they wanted to put in deliberate animation mistakes in tribute to the janky old shows, but the animators apparently didn't understand what they were going for and just animated it correctly. Also the extensive notes that go into King of the Hill and stuff like telling them not to sex up Peggy.

The_Doctor
Mar 29, 2007

"The entire history of this incarnation is one of temporal orbits, retcons, paradoxes, parallel time lines, reiterations, and divergences. How anyone can make head or tail of all this chaos, I don't know."

Neeksy posted:

I think it's Shinsha, but yeah, they animated a lot of the stuff that people ended up remembering fondly, like the good episodes of Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, DuckTales, etc. and random stuff like Heathcliff and Inspector Gadget were also TMS.

If you remember the lovely animated Tiny Toons, those were done by the Pup Named Scooby Doo studio, Kennedy I think?

Interesting, I always assumed Inspector Gadget was one of those French/Japanese ones for some reason.

Mister Beeg
Sep 7, 2012

A Certified Jerk

Ghost Leviathan posted:

The communication between writers, storyboarders and animators can be fascinating. Reminds me that the Venture Bros guys have had problems where they wanted to put in deliberate animation mistakes in tribute to the janky old shows, but the animators apparently didn't understand what they were going for and just animated it correctly. Also the extensive notes that go into King of the Hill and stuff like telling them not to sex up Peggy.

Especially when the animation is done overseas, yeah, these mistakes happen all the time due to a combination of language and cultural barrier. I've heard stories from people in the industry.

One story I heard is that the studio in Taiwan that animated "Garfield and Friends" misunderstood a note that described Garfield "acting cool". They took "cool" literally and animated him shivering.

Also, that scene in "Dexter's Lab" parodying Chuck E. Cheese, where a group of people started flying for no reason.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

Mr Interweb posted:

popeye was the only show that had that 20s/30s steamboat mickey/betty boop type animation style that i could actually watch. also helps that i liked popeye in general a lot more than any of those other characters.

fun fact: fleschier studios actually beat disney to the punch when i came to 3D animation (well, backgrounds anyway) with their specials on Sinbad and Ali Baba. always thought that was pretty badass

Technically Fleischer was the only one to really do actual 3D. Disney just worked out a way to layer a bunch of cels and move them around separately in front of the camera, so it's just really fancy layering.



Fleischer had a whole system to place an animation cel into a physical sculpted and crafted backdrop.



Fleischer's system looks incredibly cool, but is probably way more expensive and problematic to operate, and I think in their later works they just gave up on it anyways.

Meanwhile, Looney Tunes decided to get simpler and cheaper with its backgrounds.

Nowadays, Adventure Time manages to get an impossible zoom and pan shot in its opening that I'm not really sure the technical details of how they did it, but it definitely helped to be fully digital.

Mr Interweb
Aug 25, 2004

The_Doctor posted:

Interesting, I always assumed Inspector Gadget was one of those French/Japanese ones for some reason.

no you're right, it was i believe. i think Dic came up with the idea but they worked with French/Japanese studios on production.

readingatwork
Jan 8, 2009

Hello Fatty!


Fun Shoe
Are these The Loud House episode reviews getting annoying yet? Too bad I'm going to keep doing them anyways.

readingatwork posted:

Season 1, Episode 8A-2 (the 2 is because Paramount + sucks and listed 2 episode 8s): Hand-me-downer

Season 1, Episode 8B-2 (Again, Paramount+ is dumb and listed 2 episode 8s): Sleuth or consequences
Written by Whitney Wetta and Sammie Crowley
Storyboard by Kyle Marshal
Directed by Chris Savino

Synopsis: Lincoln is all cosplayed up and ready to go to a big superhero convention when his plans are put in jeopardy by a clogged family toilet. With Lincoln being the prime suspect (because he apparently floods the bathroom every other week) the house is on lockdown until the culprit reveals themselves. Lincoln and Lucy (the goth one) team up and start questioning the Loud siblings but get nowhere until it's revealed that the object that clogged the toilet is a cute pony comic making the prime suspect Lola (the one who likes cute stuff). The interrogation goes nowhere until a discovered page from the comic reveals that Lucy had actually said a bit of the comic's dialog earlier in the episode. When confronted she confesses that she hid the comic because she was worried she'd be made fun of for liking it and agrees to tell the rest of the family what happened. At the last moment though Lincoln decides he can take the teasing better than his sister and accepts the blame for the clogged toilet, getting grounded in the process and causing him to miss his convention. He doesn't regret his decision though and Lucy draws a comic for him as thanks for what he did.

Thoughts: Did you notice that the synopsis was twice as long as normal? That's because quite a lot of plot happens in this episode despite it being only 11 minutes long. This is a proper mystery story complete with suspects, clues, red herrings and a twist reveal at the end. There are a lot of moving parts and to my pleasant surprise they all work together (mostly) flawlessly to make the best episode of the series so far.

The reason this episode works is the same reason the other Kyle Marshal episodes have worked so far. The character acting is strong and faces/expressions are consistently on point with lots of little touches that show how much the fun the artists having with the material. Unlike previous episodes though I think the writers also deserve some serious credit here as well. They've crafted a story that's way more cohesive and engaging than I've come to expect from TLH with lots of solid jokes (surprising consider the episode is built around toilet humor), neat character moments, and a twist ending that I'd probably have seen coming in a better show but didn't here because... well, you know. They even bring back Lisa's weird poop experiments and actually manage to make it kind of funny. Then to top it off you get an ending which, while not earth shattering, is legitimately sweet and made me feel for both Lincoln and Lucy in a way that most episodes completely fail at. It's good stuff and I wish most episodes were at this level of quality.

Themes and morals: The central idea the episode wants to discuss is how to react when people give you poo poo for liking things you aren't supposed to. In Lincoln's case this is superhero comics and his reaction is to let his sister's teasing roll right off his back. In Lucy's case it's cute pony comics and her reaction is to desperately hides what she enjoys and even let's Lincoln get grounded to keep her secret safe. The contrast shows that Lucy's actions are largely unnecessary since other people's opinions on these things usually only matters if you let it matter. A good moral and one that's handled well.

In an interesting bit of convention breaking the episode doesn't actually end with Lucy coming out about her interests to her sisters and getting over her fear. Instead we get something a bit more complex where Lincoln takes the fall so that Lucy can deal with her sister's BS on her own terms down the line when she's developed a thicker skin. The show acknowledges that Lucy is being irrational and probably *should* be more open with her hobbies but is ultimately sympathetic to the fact that she's just not there yet. I liked this. It's much more nuanced than what you normally get in this kind of show.

I will say though that the show makes this storyline work at the expense of the sisters, who are made uncharacteristically petty and mean to make Lucy's motivation believable. It works, but drat they do NOT look good in this episode.

Comics and comic culture are very mainstream you assholes! It's not that weird! :argh:

Final thoughts: Look at this gif I made of Lincoln trashing the bathroom. Look at the panic on his face and the little movements of the toilet lid. It's a great little moment and it has so much more personality than the show normally does.



Final Rating: Good. (Best episode so far)

readingatwork fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Jul 2, 2022

drrockso20
May 6, 2013

Has Not Actually Done Cocaine
I think most people who have watched it will agree that they like the concept of The Loud House while being tolerant at best of the actual show itself, which I think is why it has such a large fanart and fanfiction community(even after you ignore all the perverts), it's a concept ripe with potential that is mostly squandered by the official product

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Covok
May 27, 2013

Yet where is that woman now? Tell me, in what heave does she reside? None of them. Because no God bothered to listen or care. If that is what you think it means to be a God, then you and all your teachings are welcome to do as that poor women did. And vanish from these realms forever.

Mister Beeg posted:

Also, that scene in "Dexter's Lab" parodying Chuck E. Cheese, where a group of people started flying for no reason.

Yeah, but that one was an amazing piece of cinema that lives in my head rent free.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply