Polished off Season 2 of Centaur World. Still fun and weird but I don’t think the songs were as good as season 1’s. Not sure if the antagonist fully deserved the end they got but it was suitable dramatic for a musical at least.
3 Likes
3 Likes
back at it again
11 Likes
1 Like
Is this an informal remake of Summer Time Machine Blues? That rules.
Makoto Ueda wrote it, so I should’ve figured it fits into the tatami continuity
2 Likes
that’s precisely it. although they are both based on a stage play maybe. i thought it was a movie but it’s just a disney plus(?!) show that will be airing over a couple of weeks
3 Likes
amphibia is pretty cool imo. it has enough in common with centaurworld and kipo to make the three of them constitute a pretty well defined kids cartoon subgenre, but also has enough to distinguish itself to keep it entertaining imo.
in this case i feel like, even more than centaurworld, the animators are paying more attention to classic looney tunes style squash n stretch stuff, as well as a lot of really specific facial expressions that remind me a lot of really old cartoons but that i don’t have the vocabulary to describe specifically. i enjoy it mostly for that reason, and also for being vaguely concerned with serial narrative stuff while at the same time having very little regard for continuity or realism in other aspects (e.g. a main character getting thrown off a cliff at the end of one episode as the punchline to a joke, then reappearing in the next episode as though it never happened)
it also does the thing where every episode contains two stories with their own titles, which is smart because basically all of the narrative arcs you can do in the span of a cartoon short are familiar enough by now that you don’t really need to stretch it out into a full 25 minutes or whatever.
i do feel like too many of the episodes basically follow the same plot of one or more of the main characters doing something incredibly selfish/stupid/both, then learning the error of their ways and trying to correct their mistake. on the other hand, that combined with the more madcap stuff that happens in between does make it kind of funny, like it basically has the narrative structure of an educational / didactic kids show but moment by moment plays out more like the kind of anarchic looney tunes shorts. sorry i keep mentioning looney tunes i just don’t know what else to compare it to.
anyway i’m posting about it now mainly to talk about the weird pseudo crossover stuff it being a disney show has allowed it to do. in one episode in the second season, the first story has a character who for all intents and purposes is kermit the frog, and the second story has frog versions of gruncle stan and sus from gravity falls. the sort of irritating thing is that, as though this wasn’t obvious enough, there is a scene in the middle of the episode where those characters directly comment on the fact that they are alternate universe versions of someone else, which felt too on the nose. but the funny part is that the frogstan is explicitly the villain of the episode, and it ends with him… getting killed? like he gets pulled into a closet with a bunch of monsters and red liquid seeps out under the door. he says ‘don’t worry kids, that’s wax’ but then in the next scene the characters comment about how he is dead. i didn’t know you were allowed to say dead on a kids show! i guess times have changed.
the show has strayed away from outright killing ‘sentient’ seeming characters in the past, but has always been weirdly violent anyway. like the characters are constantly killing and eating various buglike animals they encounter. there’s a lot of dead animals on the show. idk
3 Likes
1 Like
they’re over this now, the cute frog family regularly murders people starting around halfway through season 2
2 Likes
i used the 90s series of these videos as part of my research for a thing
1 Like
So the movie’s going to open in japan next week which’ll be a theatrical compilation film except a month later the show will start airing on disney plus over there only HOWEVER the final episode will be an original story not covered in the novel or the theatrical film (also I didn’t find until fairly recently that this is only 6 episodes like Orbital Children was which feels a lot rarer than it used to be).
1 Like
I got into Amphibia during my post-surgery recovery at the end of last year and I really enjoyed it?? It’s all very cartoony but still has a nice amount of substance and heart.
Matt Braly captures the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land pretty well, like cultural differences which don’t make sense, or confidently using metaphors or idioms that nobody else understands.
I’m never the fondest of the cute psycho trope in Polly’s character, though she gradually gets better over time. The continued use of purposefully bad portmanteau is great, as well as the face zoom-in stuff. And Ann and Sprig’s relationship, at least in the first season, reminds me of Rigby and Mordecai, which is a nice thing.
Plus the season finales are v good and feel like deserved send-offs. The references aren’t too intrusive, except for the ones you mention (and maybe a few others later on). And it got to all play out mostly on the creator’s terms! Thumbs up from me.
3 Likes
Watched all of Adventure Time: Distant Lands last night and it is pretty good as far as basically pure fan-service could be.
Is Centaurworld like, a real show? I assumed it was just like, some parody show that was like a high-budget shitpost, based on the name.
3 Likes
I haven’t really watched much in the way of cartoons lately (really should finish Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before my free year of Paramount Plus is over), but I’ve had a weird thing of late where I’ve been dipping into various iterations of Scooby Doo.
I was a super cynical little shit as a kid so I always dunked on the looped backgrounds, reused animations, bad jokes and everything, but I guess at 35 I’ve got some sorta appreciation for it.
Also started Mystery Inc. which seems alright, just dunno about this Shaggy x Velma stuff.
3 Likes
Keep watching Mystery Inc trust me
5 Likes
oh yeah i forgot to mention my favorite background gag in the show, maybe in any show (though bob’s burgers has so many it’s hard to say for sure). but there’s an episode where they go to a shopping mall and all of the shops in the background have like, frog-pun themed mall store parody names like “Hop Topic” (sorry can’t remember the others) but one is just called “Frog Claire’s”
2 Likes
I was also weirded out but it works in retrospect: Shaggy is the world’s worst beard
2 Likes
mystery inc is so far beyond every other scooby doo thing
even thirteen ghosts of scooby doo is a distant second
3 Likes
I forgot they did a movie! Where they get the 13th ghost!
Though I gotta guess they got someone else (Maurice Lamarche? If I’m remembering right) to be Vincent Van Ghoul since, y’know.
1 Like