TVSquad

I was excited to get the screener for the Animation pilots for the New York Television Festival, because if you can't go to the festival, you might as well get to watch stuff in advance right? Of course, now you can watch them, too, but that's beside the point. I requested the Animation pilot because A) I have kids, B) I also write for our sister blog, Blogging Baby, C) my husband loves Adult Swim on Cartoon Network, and that is kind of what these shows are like. Which renders A and B on my list completely irrelevant.

Reviewed here: End of the Line, Squid Dragon Legend and Strange Transmissions.

I suspected that I was the wrong audience for these screeners when I started watching the first pilot: End of the Line. So, I asked my husband to watch it with me, because he watches Adult Swim religiously, and at the end he said, "No, you're not the wrong audience. It's just not funny." But I will make a caveat right now: I am not hip or cool. I live in Missouri. When I used to teach English at the university, I told my students, "I don't want to hear that you don't like T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land-- you're nineteen years old. You have no idea what he is referencing. Of course you don't like it. But that doesn't mean that the poem is not worth your time. It just means you don't deserve it."

The reason I bring that up is that I am completely willing to believe that perhaps I just don't deserve these pilots. There are probably references that I don't understand. So, who I am as an audience member is important. But I want to point out that I love Indy films, I am pretty savvy about pop culture, and I don't live under a rock. So, while I don't live under a rock, I'm also not a complete idiot. But beyond that, I think you will just have to watch these and draw your own conclusions.



Premise of the screener: End of the Line uses paper doll cut out animation. It starts out with a paper doll cut out of a lauded hockey player, who turns out to be a washed up janitor. He ends up going to a sports memorabilia store, and the whole story devolves into a parody of Brokeback Mountain. What worked for me was the fact that the hockey player resembled Ronald Reagan (his name is Rob Roy, so when people say, "Rob, Wha?" he says yes-- haha, speech impediments are funny!) There is a Vincent Van Gogh-headed clerk named Glen (who says at one point that he has an ear, just in case you didn't figure out who he was), and a Weeble (Iiterally) boss, who is asthmatic and clearly doing Danny DeVito from Taxi. There is a washed out football player selling autographs.

My thoughts: I actually kind of enjoyed this pilot, and I watched it twice. The cartoon does a decent job of spoofing rampant consumerism: Glen uses a John Cusack move (Say Anything) with a boom box over his head to attract customers to the store-- until they are distracted by the pretty balloons of a floating couch ad outside the store. Yes, we stupid cows in American culture are distracted by the shiny objects. I get it. So, a little obvious, but I actually liked the animation and thought it had some wit and verve.


Premise of the screener: Squid Dragon Legend's hero has a name that sounds suspiciously like Jon Bon Jovi. Only he has purple hair. He has a Yoda-like sword, and the voiceover intones that even though our hero is The Chosen One, he has to have training-- for some reason. It is his job to save the world from the Squid Dragon who is DEVOURING THE PLANET, EVEN AS WE SPEAK! A young, buff, blonde, stupid Monk encounters a skimpily clad blonde (Uma!) warrior, and they are both seeking the young warrior.

My thoughts: This was a killer spoof on the ridiculous and inane dialogue (which I mean in the nicest possible way) of anime that I actually loved, will show my kids, and would willingly watch again. It's wicked funny, very dry, and has a witty sexual-entendre between the young dopey monk and the blonde sex bomb that has rendered me completely unable to watch anime with my kids anymore without dissolving into a puddle on the floor. There is, laced with the innuendo, some witty repartee involving pronoun antecedents, and taking things literally that makes my English major geek heart sing: "Perhaps we should stop speaking!"


Premise of the screener: Strange Transmissions is the "tale" of a young, geeky man in a white t-shirt who has embarked on gathering transmissions from around the universe in an attempt to solve life's Big Questions: Why Are We Here? Are We Alone? And What is That Smell?

My thoughts: I just hated it. And that is the whole point of my T.S. Eliot anecdote above: I am probably just not the right audience for this pilot. I tried to watch it twice. It was only 15 minutes long, but I only got through 8 minutes the first time and ten minutes the second time before I just sort of wandered away--even though I was still sitting in front of the computer. I just couldn't watch anymore. It was too random for me-- and I used to teach Faulkner to college students. I kept thinking, "Thanks for showing me how random your brain is." The problem is that it smacked of way too much effort. Even with stream of consciousness, our brains work to categorize, to package, to make connections between objects. If you put three objects on a desk: a set of keys; a cell phone; and a lipstick, items that you just randomly pull from your purse and ask college Freshmen to write about the connections between the three objects, they can do it for fifteen minutes. Because they want to make connections. So, Strange Transmissions's complete failure to make any kind of connections just smacked of effort -- you have to TRY to do that. To make something THAT random. And James Joyce did it well. The makers of Strange Transmissions did not.