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Showing posts with label Dove Cameron. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dove Cameron. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 17, 2018
Sam & Cat, Reviewed
Apparently, you weren't just fine since you didn't even complete your episode order.
When the best part of your show is the theme song, you know you're in trouble.
Ray discussed Sam & Cat during the Dan Schneider write-up posted recently, and thinking about it now has made me want to talk about the show in greater detail. Ray's definitely invited to join if he wants to, and hopefully, we can figure out exactly what made this show a failure.
Yeah, I'm not beating around the bush here. Sam & Cat was a terrible show. Even at the time, I wasn't crazy about it, and I stopped keeping up with it after the first couple episodes and watched as it collapsed under its own weight. It was a spin-off of two of Dan Schneider's hits, iCarly and Victorious. I guess there's some uniqueness to spinning off two different shows, but that's where the interest ends. The show follows Sam Puckett (iCarly) and Cat Valentine (Victorious) as they live in Cat's grandmother's place in Venice Beach and go through wacky adventures while running their own babysitting service.
Alright, the first thing I have to ask is.......why? Who asked for this show to happen? Why select these two characters? iCarly was on its last legs and was going to end very soon. Victorious was supposed to carry the torch from that point, which was made more clear by it winning Favorite TV Show at the Kids Choice Awards in 2012. Then it got cancelled, and the last season did the show no favors by being poorly written and unremarkable outside of a few episodes (like "Opposite Date" and "One Thousand Berry Balls"). With these events taking place, I don't think this is what was needed to fill the void. Sam & Cat was pretty generic for the most part, and I don't think most people would be upset if it never happened. It doesn't really remind me of either show it was conceived from. Sam and Cat just go through random stuff every week and we were expected to laugh at it. The only connection to the original shows are Sam and Cat themselves, and they're not nearly entertaining enough to elevate the material they are given.
Which leads me to my next point: The chemistry. There's almost none of it between Sam and Cat. I mean, I know that's what happens when you create sitcom pairings through putting every character in a random name generator, but every episode just feels off. Sam and Cat are roommates and business partners, but they almost never feel like friends. They don't really bring out the best in each other or make you want to watch the next episode just to see what they do next. They're both characters that need someone stronger than them to play off of. On iCarly, Sam had Carly, Freddie, Spencer, and Gibby to play off of on a regular basis. All of them had different personalities and ways of communicating. Victorious had Tori, Jade, Andre, Robbie, Beck, Trina, Sikowitz, and Sinjin to play off of Cat. That's eight different people Cat had the chance to interact with on a regular basis. On this show, Sam and Cat only have each other, Dice, Goomer, and Nona. That's hardly anyone decent enough to be a foil to. And the characters are much weaker. Dice is alright but nothing special, Goomer is a moron, and Nona barely has much screen time at all. The supporting cast doesn't steal the show, but just emphasizes exactly why this show was a bad idea.
What really stands out is that Sam and Cat aren't really themselves in this show. They come off like watered down, stereotypical versions of themselves. Which hurts the comedy a lot because you can tell they really need stronger characters to bring out their personalities. Every situation is based on two things: Sam being lazy and gluttonous, and Cat being stupid and weird. I feel like at one point, their characters were more than that. With the spin-off, they just walk around and spit out as many punchlines as they can until the laugh track breaks. There's no value to the sitcom beyond it being Sam and Cat teaming up and doing things. On both the original shows, there were stakes to what the characters were doing. Sam had to save Carly from being killed by her prison friends or Cat had to go to San Diego to light a candle and celebrate her favorite actress who she thought passed away. Here, Sam just sits around watching TV and eating chili biscuits while Cat is doing one-woman shows about Abraham Lincoln. What reason do I have to care about anything these two are doing?
That's why it shouldn't be a surprise that "The Killer Tuna Jump" is the best episode of the series, because it tries to be more like iCarly and Victorious than any other episode. Jade, Freddie, and Robbie instantly outshine every other character on the show and make them look like amateurs. What they do on screen is way more interesting than whatever Sam and Cat do most of the time, and it makes me feel like if Jade was in Sam's place, the show would be ten times better. Ray mentioned something about the Victorious characters having this air of coolness about them, and I see it here in this episode. Jade takes the attention away whenever she's on screen. Freddie is the same way too, and Robbie to some extent also because of how much better his jokes are than Goomer's, for instance. For the first time, I actually care about what Sam and Cat are doing, because they get to be around characters they are already familiar with or have more to offer than the characters specifically created for the show. Sam and Cat don't really have much of a social life outside of hanging out with a kid younger than them and a mentally disabled man older than them. So for them to finally act like girls in high school and not outdated sitcom buddies was really satisfying.
Sam & Cat came at a time when Nickelodeon was trying to create a new generation of shows, many of which were given the ball to run with and were sacked by the network before they could even cross the goal line. I'm looking at How to Rock and The Haunted Hathaways as examples. It was never made to last, mostly because of the flimsy premise and the fact that Ariana Grande was literally blowing up in the pop world around the time the show debuted. By the time the show was cancelled, Ariana's second album was close to hitting stores and she was only racking up more hits. Plus, it was apparent that as time went on, the actors were getting more tired and the show had absolutely nothing to say.
This is also when Schneider's Bakery officially started to decline. iCarly and Victorious got progressively worse around 2011/2012. These shows have been airing on TeenNick a lot over the past number of weeks and since it's more convenient that way for my TV, I've been watching the channel more times than I could count. Victorious in season three/four is almost a completely different show from season one, and iCarly began to suffer from bad pacing and less interesting stories. I think the stress of working on two popular shows at the same time was too much for Schneider and the writers, and I understand that Schneider was the kind of person to spread himself thin over all of his projects, but both shows suffered from getting the same amount of attention. All Sam & Cat did was continue the decline. The writing of the show was awkward and juvenile compared to its predecessors, and it was first time a Schneider's Bakery show had nothing to offer me. It was dumb, it was bland, it was slow, and it wasn't worth watching more than a couple times. Even now, I'm struggling to think of a non-"Killer Tuna Jump" episode that I like. Not just like at the time, but right now. "Twinfection" wasn't too bad, mostly because Cat outsmarted Sam and tried to act like a normal person for once.
Sam & Cat is the show that officially put an end to Dan Schneider's run. I mean, it was popular with the kids, but it wasn't anywhere near as good as all the shows that came before it, and ended up inheriting the bad writing that plagued iCarly and Victorious as they were coming to an end. Would I watch it over Henry Danger and Game Shakers? Yeah, but by default. That's only because I know Sam and Cat from better shows, when they were better characters with actual personalities and interacted with characters that made them better. So what I just said was I prefer getting slapped in the face over getting kicked down low and getting shot. And what makes it worse is that Schneider's Bakery (along with Nickelodeon) never recovered.
...and yeah it just ends mid-sentence there, folks. Like I said, technical issues. This has been a known thing for a while which is why I took steps to try to preserve as much of Mike's original draft as possible...unfortunately Blogspot managed to eat those too :( So I'm going to post it now, see if Mike can piece together what was missing (fortunately it wasn't too much at least) then add my own thoughts.
I took care of it. I actually didn't lose anything because I forgot what I was going to say anyway. I might do one for Victorious next.
Well in that case...you actually like Ten Thousand Berry Balls? I thought that episode was the poster child for the syndromes Victorious was suffering in its final season (half-season?) I don't mean to make this all about iCarly and Victorious when it's supposed to be about Sam & Cat but the comparisons are inevitable when they're the source material to begin with. Like Mike I've been watching reruns on TeenNick (why isn't it TeeNick anyway?) a bit more, especially since Victorious since if nothing else I feel it just has better rewatchability (perhaps that's more what I was getting at when I said it's better than iCarly). Except...it doesn't quite have the rewatchability I thought it had (or very specifically here, that final half-ish season). Said half-ish season premiered right when I was getting into both this network and Disney Channel, and at that specific time and place any episode of Victorious was like an incredibly hip and cool breath of fresh air compared to say ANT Farm or Dog With a Blog (and keep in mind I like those shows). The two or three Disney Channel shows that can realistically compete on grabbing that same teen zeitgeist - Shake it Up and even Wizards of Waverly Place and to at least some extent Good Luck Charlie - just didn't come anywhere close. It was like Nick gave Schneider free reign to do what he felt was needed to grab that teen demo, and it really felt like he created a Nickelodeon Breakfast Club in television format for the 2010s from that benefit.
Fast-forward a half-decade later and...I'm watching Wanko's Warehouse, an episode I had considered during that intervening half-decade one of the finest episodes of that final half-ish season and...I'm wondering just where the magic went. I'm still inclined to think Star-Spangled Tori was a great episode despite it being a finely-pointed series of unwarranted embarrassing events against its main character, but now I'm certain that's going to change if I watched it again. And Brain Squeezers is just...a bizarre episode. And an odd portent of what was coming with Sam & Cat.
Mike literally took the words out of my mouth and improved upon them in this entire article, to the point where it's become one of my most favorite on this blog so far (by him or myself). So rather than agree with him on "Sam & Cat sucks" I'm going to add more my thoughts on the why and how. Like Mike said, Schneider had a peculiar habit of spreading himself thin - yet that didn't hurt him during Drake & Josh's entire run which was at least at points concurrent with Zoey 101 (a series that I for the most part just find...strange, if not at least well-intended in some of its social messages). Though given the final season of iCarly, the final season of Victorious, the first season of Sam & Cat and the Gibby spin-off pilot (yes that was a thing) were all happening at the same time, no duh something there had to suffer, and as it turned out it was ultimately everything. Pairing Sam with Jade seems an obvious choice but that's a choice that's really only genuinely obvious in hindsight. See, Sam and Cat were the moneymakers for the network. Their characters (or at least their respective actors) ate up tons of social media buzz at the time, especially Ariana (naturally, as she seems to be a better master at SM than almost all the other actors involved in either production save maybe Victoria herself) and the shipping....oh man. The shipping. You think GMW shipping was bad? That ain't nothing compared to iCarly and Victorious shipping (and even cross-shipping). The Schneider character shipping literally inspired the GMW shipping, really.
The point is, pairing Sam and Cat as opposed to say Sam and Jade maybe didn't make the most creative sense, but who cares because it made the most business sense and it's clear that was the only real requirement or thought process that went into the show. This show was as much the product of demographics marketing and consensus as it was Schneider himself. Put the two main characters together and then...and then.... Eh, Dan will think of something (spoiler alert: he didn't).
Mike's definitely right about one thing (everything): it was also the beginning of the end. And I don't just mean Schneider's creative magic, but I very specifically mean that at the moment it was decided that this show's main creative criteria is putting whoever happens to be the most popular together, was the moment that lead to Dan screaming and yelling his way out of having Nickelodeon studio space and any association with Henry Danger beyond having his name on the credits half a decade later. The show didn't have a direction and didn't have much creative input because the network itself decided those were the least important facets. The network thought that in turn because, very clearly, it simply didn't have a high opinion of its own audience.
That said, I thought Tuna Jump was...ok, although obviously the highlight was indeed Jade, Freddie and Robbie. They absolutely did make the episode. Twinfection was...ok, but again what made that episode was another character/actor completely stealing the show (yes even if it was just Jennette still - but it seems like they absolutely cast the reins off her for this one, and it was nice seeing Melanie being expanded beyond literally a few-seconds long single scene - and oh yeah Twinfection will forever go down for all the creepers being super-excited about Jennette and Ariana kissing on-screen, even if the exact context of that scene thoroughly destroys those fantasies). My favorite episode is actually Yay Day, because that was the one episode that most felt like they were actually trying to live up to the premise, particularly the part about Sam and Cat becoming best friends through circumstance.
Mike also mentioned How to Rock and Haunted Hathaways, the former again concurrent with Victorious'/iCarly's final season (and thus when I first started watching the network) and the latter premiering a year later. I've seen exactly three episodes of How to Rock before that show effectively evaporated out of the human record - the pilot (on a random rerun), and two premieres, the episode where they take a driving test and the Christmas episode which ended up being the de facto series finale (I also read both the books from which this series is based off of - yeah, really - and I really enjoyed those). From what I saw, I thought it was decent, although I thought the driving episode was pretty mediocre. I also saw just about every episode of Haunted Hathaways although for the most part that was back when those premiered, and even the latest episode I've seen in reruns would've been at least a year ago. But from what I can remember...it's definitely hit-or-miss, and at a certain point the show observingly was less about its ghost/living blended family premise and more about "how much stuff can we dump on Amber Montana today?" (Or Amber Frank, as she's professionally known now). Also, Haunted Hathaways was cast off when Dan's magic over the network was already fatally weakened, after Sam & Cat's cancellation, while How to Rock was at Dan's height, effectively a sacrificial offering to Dan depending on who you talk to. Doesn't make it any less frustrating either way - and let's not talk about 100 Things to Do Before High School, which I awarded Best Show on the Network - for its first and only season.
But...I don't know what else to say, especially since what Mike wrote really should go down as the definitive primer on Sam & Cat, and yes I mean that. Should it have happened at all? Creatively - in a very, very different form perhaps with differently characters (or at least one different character) entirely. But as a business decision, it was inevitable. The numbers made it too good to pass up. And it was the numbers that dictated the creativity of the show, and it was those numbers the show fell and died on.
When the best part of your show is the theme song, you know you're in trouble.
Ray discussed Sam & Cat during the Dan Schneider write-up posted recently, and thinking about it now has made me want to talk about the show in greater detail. Ray's definitely invited to join if he wants to, and hopefully, we can figure out exactly what made this show a failure.
Yeah, I'm not beating around the bush here. Sam & Cat was a terrible show. Even at the time, I wasn't crazy about it, and I stopped keeping up with it after the first couple episodes and watched as it collapsed under its own weight. It was a spin-off of two of Dan Schneider's hits, iCarly and Victorious. I guess there's some uniqueness to spinning off two different shows, but that's where the interest ends. The show follows Sam Puckett (iCarly) and Cat Valentine (Victorious) as they live in Cat's grandmother's place in Venice Beach and go through wacky adventures while running their own babysitting service.
Alright, the first thing I have to ask is.......why? Who asked for this show to happen? Why select these two characters? iCarly was on its last legs and was going to end very soon. Victorious was supposed to carry the torch from that point, which was made more clear by it winning Favorite TV Show at the Kids Choice Awards in 2012. Then it got cancelled, and the last season did the show no favors by being poorly written and unremarkable outside of a few episodes (like "Opposite Date" and "One Thousand Berry Balls"). With these events taking place, I don't think this is what was needed to fill the void. Sam & Cat was pretty generic for the most part, and I don't think most people would be upset if it never happened. It doesn't really remind me of either show it was conceived from. Sam and Cat just go through random stuff every week and we were expected to laugh at it. The only connection to the original shows are Sam and Cat themselves, and they're not nearly entertaining enough to elevate the material they are given.
Which leads me to my next point: The chemistry. There's almost none of it between Sam and Cat. I mean, I know that's what happens when you create sitcom pairings through putting every character in a random name generator, but every episode just feels off. Sam and Cat are roommates and business partners, but they almost never feel like friends. They don't really bring out the best in each other or make you want to watch the next episode just to see what they do next. They're both characters that need someone stronger than them to play off of. On iCarly, Sam had Carly, Freddie, Spencer, and Gibby to play off of on a regular basis. All of them had different personalities and ways of communicating. Victorious had Tori, Jade, Andre, Robbie, Beck, Trina, Sikowitz, and Sinjin to play off of Cat. That's eight different people Cat had the chance to interact with on a regular basis. On this show, Sam and Cat only have each other, Dice, Goomer, and Nona. That's hardly anyone decent enough to be a foil to. And the characters are much weaker. Dice is alright but nothing special, Goomer is a moron, and Nona barely has much screen time at all. The supporting cast doesn't steal the show, but just emphasizes exactly why this show was a bad idea.
What really stands out is that Sam and Cat aren't really themselves in this show. They come off like watered down, stereotypical versions of themselves. Which hurts the comedy a lot because you can tell they really need stronger characters to bring out their personalities. Every situation is based on two things: Sam being lazy and gluttonous, and Cat being stupid and weird. I feel like at one point, their characters were more than that. With the spin-off, they just walk around and spit out as many punchlines as they can until the laugh track breaks. There's no value to the sitcom beyond it being Sam and Cat teaming up and doing things. On both the original shows, there were stakes to what the characters were doing. Sam had to save Carly from being killed by her prison friends or Cat had to go to San Diego to light a candle and celebrate her favorite actress who she thought passed away. Here, Sam just sits around watching TV and eating chili biscuits while Cat is doing one-woman shows about Abraham Lincoln. What reason do I have to care about anything these two are doing?
That's why it shouldn't be a surprise that "The Killer Tuna Jump" is the best episode of the series, because it tries to be more like iCarly and Victorious than any other episode. Jade, Freddie, and Robbie instantly outshine every other character on the show and make them look like amateurs. What they do on screen is way more interesting than whatever Sam and Cat do most of the time, and it makes me feel like if Jade was in Sam's place, the show would be ten times better. Ray mentioned something about the Victorious characters having this air of coolness about them, and I see it here in this episode. Jade takes the attention away whenever she's on screen. Freddie is the same way too, and Robbie to some extent also because of how much better his jokes are than Goomer's, for instance. For the first time, I actually care about what Sam and Cat are doing, because they get to be around characters they are already familiar with or have more to offer than the characters specifically created for the show. Sam and Cat don't really have much of a social life outside of hanging out with a kid younger than them and a mentally disabled man older than them. So for them to finally act like girls in high school and not outdated sitcom buddies was really satisfying.
Sam & Cat came at a time when Nickelodeon was trying to create a new generation of shows, many of which were given the ball to run with and were sacked by the network before they could even cross the goal line. I'm looking at How to Rock and The Haunted Hathaways as examples. It was never made to last, mostly because of the flimsy premise and the fact that Ariana Grande was literally blowing up in the pop world around the time the show debuted. By the time the show was cancelled, Ariana's second album was close to hitting stores and she was only racking up more hits. Plus, it was apparent that as time went on, the actors were getting more tired and the show had absolutely nothing to say.
This is also when Schneider's Bakery officially started to decline. iCarly and Victorious got progressively worse around 2011/2012. These shows have been airing on TeenNick a lot over the past number of weeks and since it's more convenient that way for my TV, I've been watching the channel more times than I could count. Victorious in season three/four is almost a completely different show from season one, and iCarly began to suffer from bad pacing and less interesting stories. I think the stress of working on two popular shows at the same time was too much for Schneider and the writers, and I understand that Schneider was the kind of person to spread himself thin over all of his projects, but both shows suffered from getting the same amount of attention. All Sam & Cat did was continue the decline. The writing of the show was awkward and juvenile compared to its predecessors, and it was first time a Schneider's Bakery show had nothing to offer me. It was dumb, it was bland, it was slow, and it wasn't worth watching more than a couple times. Even now, I'm struggling to think of a non-"Killer Tuna Jump" episode that I like. Not just like at the time, but right now. "Twinfection" wasn't too bad, mostly because Cat outsmarted Sam and tried to act like a normal person for once.
Sam & Cat is the show that officially put an end to Dan Schneider's run. I mean, it was popular with the kids, but it wasn't anywhere near as good as all the shows that came before it, and ended up inheriting the bad writing that plagued iCarly and Victorious as they were coming to an end. Would I watch it over Henry Danger and Game Shakers? Yeah, but by default. That's only because I know Sam and Cat from better shows, when they were better characters with actual personalities and interacted with characters that made them better. So what I just said was I prefer getting slapped in the face over getting kicked down low and getting shot. And what makes it worse is that Schneider's Bakery (along with Nickelodeon) never recovered.
...and yeah it just ends mid-sentence there, folks. Like I said, technical issues. This has been a known thing for a while which is why I took steps to try to preserve as much of Mike's original draft as possible...unfortunately Blogspot managed to eat those too :( So I'm going to post it now, see if Mike can piece together what was missing (fortunately it wasn't too much at least) then add my own thoughts.
I took care of it. I actually didn't lose anything because I forgot what I was going to say anyway. I might do one for Victorious next.
Well in that case...you actually like Ten Thousand Berry Balls? I thought that episode was the poster child for the syndromes Victorious was suffering in its final season (half-season?) I don't mean to make this all about iCarly and Victorious when it's supposed to be about Sam & Cat but the comparisons are inevitable when they're the source material to begin with. Like Mike I've been watching reruns on TeenNick (why isn't it TeeNick anyway?) a bit more, especially since Victorious since if nothing else I feel it just has better rewatchability (perhaps that's more what I was getting at when I said it's better than iCarly). Except...it doesn't quite have the rewatchability I thought it had (or very specifically here, that final half-ish season). Said half-ish season premiered right when I was getting into both this network and Disney Channel, and at that specific time and place any episode of Victorious was like an incredibly hip and cool breath of fresh air compared to say ANT Farm or Dog With a Blog (and keep in mind I like those shows). The two or three Disney Channel shows that can realistically compete on grabbing that same teen zeitgeist - Shake it Up and even Wizards of Waverly Place and to at least some extent Good Luck Charlie - just didn't come anywhere close. It was like Nick gave Schneider free reign to do what he felt was needed to grab that teen demo, and it really felt like he created a Nickelodeon Breakfast Club in television format for the 2010s from that benefit.
Fast-forward a half-decade later and...I'm watching Wanko's Warehouse, an episode I had considered during that intervening half-decade one of the finest episodes of that final half-ish season and...I'm wondering just where the magic went. I'm still inclined to think Star-Spangled Tori was a great episode despite it being a finely-pointed series of unwarranted embarrassing events against its main character, but now I'm certain that's going to change if I watched it again. And Brain Squeezers is just...a bizarre episode. And an odd portent of what was coming with Sam & Cat.
Mike literally took the words out of my mouth and improved upon them in this entire article, to the point where it's become one of my most favorite on this blog so far (by him or myself). So rather than agree with him on "Sam & Cat sucks" I'm going to add more my thoughts on the why and how. Like Mike said, Schneider had a peculiar habit of spreading himself thin - yet that didn't hurt him during Drake & Josh's entire run which was at least at points concurrent with Zoey 101 (a series that I for the most part just find...strange, if not at least well-intended in some of its social messages). Though given the final season of iCarly, the final season of Victorious, the first season of Sam & Cat and the Gibby spin-off pilot (yes that was a thing) were all happening at the same time, no duh something there had to suffer, and as it turned out it was ultimately everything. Pairing Sam with Jade seems an obvious choice but that's a choice that's really only genuinely obvious in hindsight. See, Sam and Cat were the moneymakers for the network. Their characters (or at least their respective actors) ate up tons of social media buzz at the time, especially Ariana (naturally, as she seems to be a better master at SM than almost all the other actors involved in either production save maybe Victoria herself) and the shipping....oh man. The shipping. You think GMW shipping was bad? That ain't nothing compared to iCarly and Victorious shipping (and even cross-shipping). The Schneider character shipping literally inspired the GMW shipping, really.
The point is, pairing Sam and Cat as opposed to say Sam and Jade maybe didn't make the most creative sense, but who cares because it made the most business sense and it's clear that was the only real requirement or thought process that went into the show. This show was as much the product of demographics marketing and consensus as it was Schneider himself. Put the two main characters together and then...and then.... Eh, Dan will think of something (spoiler alert: he didn't).
Mike's definitely right about one thing (everything): it was also the beginning of the end. And I don't just mean Schneider's creative magic, but I very specifically mean that at the moment it was decided that this show's main creative criteria is putting whoever happens to be the most popular together, was the moment that lead to Dan screaming and yelling his way out of having Nickelodeon studio space and any association with Henry Danger beyond having his name on the credits half a decade later. The show didn't have a direction and didn't have much creative input because the network itself decided those were the least important facets. The network thought that in turn because, very clearly, it simply didn't have a high opinion of its own audience.
That said, I thought Tuna Jump was...ok, although obviously the highlight was indeed Jade, Freddie and Robbie. They absolutely did make the episode. Twinfection was...ok, but again what made that episode was another character/actor completely stealing the show (yes even if it was just Jennette still - but it seems like they absolutely cast the reins off her for this one, and it was nice seeing Melanie being expanded beyond literally a few-seconds long single scene - and oh yeah Twinfection will forever go down for all the creepers being super-excited about Jennette and Ariana kissing on-screen, even if the exact context of that scene thoroughly destroys those fantasies). My favorite episode is actually Yay Day, because that was the one episode that most felt like they were actually trying to live up to the premise, particularly the part about Sam and Cat becoming best friends through circumstance.
Mike also mentioned How to Rock and Haunted Hathaways, the former again concurrent with Victorious'/iCarly's final season (and thus when I first started watching the network) and the latter premiering a year later. I've seen exactly three episodes of How to Rock before that show effectively evaporated out of the human record - the pilot (on a random rerun), and two premieres, the episode where they take a driving test and the Christmas episode which ended up being the de facto series finale (I also read both the books from which this series is based off of - yeah, really - and I really enjoyed those). From what I saw, I thought it was decent, although I thought the driving episode was pretty mediocre. I also saw just about every episode of Haunted Hathaways although for the most part that was back when those premiered, and even the latest episode I've seen in reruns would've been at least a year ago. But from what I can remember...it's definitely hit-or-miss, and at a certain point the show observingly was less about its ghost/living blended family premise and more about "how much stuff can we dump on Amber Montana today?" (Or Amber Frank, as she's professionally known now). Also, Haunted Hathaways was cast off when Dan's magic over the network was already fatally weakened, after Sam & Cat's cancellation, while How to Rock was at Dan's height, effectively a sacrificial offering to Dan depending on who you talk to. Doesn't make it any less frustrating either way - and let's not talk about 100 Things to Do Before High School, which I awarded Best Show on the Network - for its first and only season.
But...I don't know what else to say, especially since what Mike wrote really should go down as the definitive primer on Sam & Cat, and yes I mean that. Should it have happened at all? Creatively - in a very, very different form perhaps with differently characters (or at least one different character) entirely. But as a business decision, it was inevitable. The numbers made it too good to pass up. And it was the numbers that dictated the creativity of the show, and it was those numbers the show fell and died on.
Monday, April 16, 2018
An explanation of my ratings system (and some other minor updates)
Well it's pretty much what it says so, uh, let's get to it:
A++: Somebody pretty much plucked a show idea out of my head and made it exactly the way I would, and further into perfection.
Examples scored: none so far, and honestly I'm wondering just what would end up getting this grade. Linda and Heather-a-Rooney was the closest this actually got to literally happening as per the description, but it'd have to applicable to an entire series in order to be truly A++ worthy (obviously movies, mini-series or specials are excepted).
A+: Virtually perfect. Maybe some flaws, maybe even a bad episode or three, but it's very clear this is the cream of the crop when it comes to the network, if not just television period.
Examples scored: Gravity Falls, DuckTales (interestingly enough, both of these are DXD animation - go figure)
A: Something getting this grade is good enough to set a great mood for the rest of the day or turn around a bad one (to give you an idea what kind of bar we're setting here)
Examples scored: A few Andi Mack episodes at least; I'm pretty sure this was the highest grade I ever bothered to give Girl Meets World (Girl Meets She Don't Like Me - yes, really), the absolute best DCOMs/NOMs might be able to make it here (Phineas and Ferb: Across the 2nd Dimension), Game of Thrones (yes really)
A-: Still potentially good enough to be the highlight of your entire workday (unless you, like, skydive for work). Maybe still clearly flawed in some way - maybe it's still tied down by the conventions and tropes of its genre or format, or maybe it's the best episode of a mediocre or even lousy series, or maybe it's just outshined by other episodes, but it's still a must-watch
Examples scored: most of the Andi Mack episodes we bothered to review so far, a handful of typical Disney Channel faire (Girl Meets World, Jessie, Liv and Maddie, you get the idea), truly exceptional DCOMs/NOMs (Teen Beach Movie, Lemonade Mouth, Splitting Adam)
B+: The veneer might be a bit transparent on this one - maybe there's just something about it that prevents it from juuuust being taken that seriously. But still, not only is it solidly entertaining but you come out of it feeling like you actually gained something from watching it.
Examples scored: Ice Princess, D.E.B.S., most decent-good Disney Channel/Nickelodeon stuff will likely end up here (again, GMW, Jessie, LaM, the Nickelodeon imports/imports-in-spirit like the Every Witch Way/I Am Frankie canon, so on), most good or even great DCOMs (How to Build a Better Boy, Geek Charming, Jinx)
B: It's still very good, and you still watch it feeling like you took something away from it that's greater than just sheer entertainment value but...not as much. Maybe it was a great episode for a particular character (maybe even the character the episode actually focuses on!) but...that's pretty much it.
Examples scored: Most of say Liv and Maddie and good Jessie up to the end of Season 2 will likely fit in here, higher-quality DCOMs/NOMs (the first High School Musical)
B-: It's entertaining, but that's it. Probably not a lot to takeaway other than it just being exceptionally entertaining.
Examples scored: Jessie through late Season 2, lots of Liv and Maddie in here too, good Bizaardvark and Stuck in the Middle, good Disney/Nick shows in general, lots of DCOMs/NOMs (the last High School Musical)
Note: Chances are I'll probably score "so bad it's good" stuff in here. I don't give scores objectively, I grade from the gut, so to speak. Such examples would include...well, just off the top of my head, my favorite of The Adventures of Henry Danger so far.
C+: At this point you're probably just going to find a good way to spend a half-hour/hour/feature-length time period decently entertained. Basically, it's all filler. Velveeta cheese dip, if you will.
Examples scored: most Bizaardvark, most Stuck in the Middle, Bunk'd topped out here (exactly once), EuroTrip, your average network show that I bother to watch, good Henry Danger and Thundermans at this point. And...yes, I'd score most of iCarly here.
C: It's...average. It's decent enough to watch.This is probably the threshold for something you'd bother to tune into on a regular basis.
Examples scored: A lot of network television I bother to watch, Raven's Home really tops out here, most of Thundermans as of this point, The Adventures of Henry Danger (provided that's even still around)
C-: Ok, now we're starting to scrape the barrel. You tell yourself you'll try to watch every premiere but...you don't beat yourself up if you miss a week or seven. Even if you do regularly watch it, it might just be as background filler or paired with another activity like Twitter surfing or...writing this blog. AV Club calls it the Gentleman's F but...I think we need to go lower still for that to really hold true.
Examples scored: For me, a lot of GMW (#SorryNotSorry), a lot of Raven's Home, pretty much most of Nickelodeon period at this point.
D+: For me, the true Gentleman's F. There's reason to watch but...not really. Maybe worth watching just to satisfy a curiosity. Really, you're not giving it a lower grade due to some gut-feeling obligation. Maybe it only took you just past the halfway point of the way into the episode to predict how it ends.
Examples scored: A "high-quality" episode of Bunk'd, Game Shakers or School of Rock.
D: For a regular series, this is something that you gave a try to...and gave up after a few episodes. For a movie or special, it'd be something you'd seen once and...decided that's all you need in your life. You pretty much predicted all the plot points a third of the way in.
Examples scored: Bunk'd, Game Shakers and School of Rock as a whole, One Crazy Cruise
D-: For a series, you maybe gave it one or two episodes before just giving up, or maybe even consistently bad word-of-mouth is killing it. For a movie or special, maybe you gave up on it even as you were nearing the end. At this point, it's not even a viable alternative to checking your Twitter feed.
Examples scored: I don't know if I gave Invisible Sister this grade, but that's a good example all the same. Marvin Marvin (remember that one, kiddies?), Blogspot/Blogger itself.
F: You pretty much get this already, folks. It's just awful. Not truly worth watching. You feel like you've seen the entire episode just a few minutes after the front credits.
Examples scored: The new MacGyver pilot, the Minority Report pilot
F-: Yes that's right we go a step beyond when it comes to grading awfulness. Now you're just being vindictive and spiteful when awarding grades. You hate it that much. Not only does it meet the criteria for at least a D+ grade but you found something personally offensive about it. You're literally demanding your time back. The only way you even bothered to finish this, if at all, is because it was on your DVR and you abused the Fast Forward button.You can correctly guess every finite plot point and plot twist from watching the previews.
Examples scored: Crowded
F--: This one really must've done something wrong. You feel like it's a personal attack on you, and you need to respond back to the creators in kind. It felt like literal torture to watch. The only reason you finished it is for review purposes - and even there you lied because again you heavily abused the fast forward button. You feel like it's actively promoting extremely disgusting and distasteful attitudes without anything else to redeem it. It's just not funny, or entertaining, or anything. It's quite simply, offensive garbage.
Examples scored: The pilot of Riverdale (hey, it started out really, really bad, folks), Undateable's The Backstreet Boys Walk Into A Bar, The Mysteries of Laura's The Mystery of Whatever Episode I reviewed. Xfinity and DirecTV as actual services.
Extra Thoughts:
- it turns out Mike wrote a really good review of Sam & Cat but...I'm still trying to overcome technical issues in posting it. Yay, Blogspot!
A++: Somebody pretty much plucked a show idea out of my head and made it exactly the way I would, and further into perfection.
Examples scored: none so far, and honestly I'm wondering just what would end up getting this grade. Linda and Heather-a-Rooney was the closest this actually got to literally happening as per the description, but it'd have to applicable to an entire series in order to be truly A++ worthy (obviously movies, mini-series or specials are excepted).
A+: Virtually perfect. Maybe some flaws, maybe even a bad episode or three, but it's very clear this is the cream of the crop when it comes to the network, if not just television period.
Examples scored: Gravity Falls, DuckTales (interestingly enough, both of these are DXD animation - go figure)
A: Something getting this grade is good enough to set a great mood for the rest of the day or turn around a bad one (to give you an idea what kind of bar we're setting here)
Examples scored: A few Andi Mack episodes at least; I'm pretty sure this was the highest grade I ever bothered to give Girl Meets World (Girl Meets She Don't Like Me - yes, really), the absolute best DCOMs/NOMs might be able to make it here (Phineas and Ferb: Across the 2nd Dimension), Game of Thrones (yes really)
A-: Still potentially good enough to be the highlight of your entire workday (unless you, like, skydive for work). Maybe still clearly flawed in some way - maybe it's still tied down by the conventions and tropes of its genre or format, or maybe it's the best episode of a mediocre or even lousy series, or maybe it's just outshined by other episodes, but it's still a must-watch
Examples scored: most of the Andi Mack episodes we bothered to review so far, a handful of typical Disney Channel faire (Girl Meets World, Jessie, Liv and Maddie, you get the idea), truly exceptional DCOMs/NOMs (Teen Beach Movie, Lemonade Mouth, Splitting Adam)
B+: The veneer might be a bit transparent on this one - maybe there's just something about it that prevents it from juuuust being taken that seriously. But still, not only is it solidly entertaining but you come out of it feeling like you actually gained something from watching it.
Examples scored: Ice Princess, D.E.B.S., most decent-good Disney Channel/Nickelodeon stuff will likely end up here (again, GMW, Jessie, LaM, the Nickelodeon imports/imports-in-spirit like the Every Witch Way/I Am Frankie canon, so on), most good or even great DCOMs (How to Build a Better Boy, Geek Charming, Jinx)
B: It's still very good, and you still watch it feeling like you took something away from it that's greater than just sheer entertainment value but...not as much. Maybe it was a great episode for a particular character (maybe even the character the episode actually focuses on!) but...that's pretty much it.
Examples scored: Most of say Liv and Maddie and good Jessie up to the end of Season 2 will likely fit in here, higher-quality DCOMs/NOMs (the first High School Musical)
B-: It's entertaining, but that's it. Probably not a lot to takeaway other than it just being exceptionally entertaining.
Examples scored: Jessie through late Season 2, lots of Liv and Maddie in here too, good Bizaardvark and Stuck in the Middle, good Disney/Nick shows in general, lots of DCOMs/NOMs (the last High School Musical)
Note: Chances are I'll probably score "so bad it's good" stuff in here. I don't give scores objectively, I grade from the gut, so to speak. Such examples would include...well, just off the top of my head, my favorite of The Adventures of Henry Danger so far.
C+: At this point you're probably just going to find a good way to spend a half-hour/hour/feature-length time period decently entertained. Basically, it's all filler. Velveeta cheese dip, if you will.
Examples scored: most Bizaardvark, most Stuck in the Middle, Bunk'd topped out here (exactly once), EuroTrip, your average network show that I bother to watch, good Henry Danger and Thundermans at this point. And...yes, I'd score most of iCarly here.
C: It's...average. It's decent enough to watch.This is probably the threshold for something you'd bother to tune into on a regular basis.
Examples scored: A lot of network television I bother to watch, Raven's Home really tops out here, most of Thundermans as of this point, The Adventures of Henry Danger (provided that's even still around)
C-: Ok, now we're starting to scrape the barrel. You tell yourself you'll try to watch every premiere but...you don't beat yourself up if you miss a week or seven. Even if you do regularly watch it, it might just be as background filler or paired with another activity like Twitter surfing or...writing this blog. AV Club calls it the Gentleman's F but...I think we need to go lower still for that to really hold true.
Examples scored: For me, a lot of GMW (#SorryNotSorry), a lot of Raven's Home, pretty much most of Nickelodeon period at this point.
D+: For me, the true Gentleman's F. There's reason to watch but...not really. Maybe worth watching just to satisfy a curiosity. Really, you're not giving it a lower grade due to some gut-feeling obligation. Maybe it only took you just past the halfway point of the way into the episode to predict how it ends.
Examples scored: A "high-quality" episode of Bunk'd, Game Shakers or School of Rock.
D: For a regular series, this is something that you gave a try to...and gave up after a few episodes. For a movie or special, it'd be something you'd seen once and...decided that's all you need in your life. You pretty much predicted all the plot points a third of the way in.
Examples scored: Bunk'd, Game Shakers and School of Rock as a whole, One Crazy Cruise
D-: For a series, you maybe gave it one or two episodes before just giving up, or maybe even consistently bad word-of-mouth is killing it. For a movie or special, maybe you gave up on it even as you were nearing the end. At this point, it's not even a viable alternative to checking your Twitter feed.
Examples scored: I don't know if I gave Invisible Sister this grade, but that's a good example all the same. Marvin Marvin (remember that one, kiddies?), Blogspot/Blogger itself.
F: You pretty much get this already, folks. It's just awful. Not truly worth watching. You feel like you've seen the entire episode just a few minutes after the front credits.
Examples scored: The new MacGyver pilot, the Minority Report pilot
F-: Yes that's right we go a step beyond when it comes to grading awfulness. Now you're just being vindictive and spiteful when awarding grades. You hate it that much. Not only does it meet the criteria for at least a D+ grade but you found something personally offensive about it. You're literally demanding your time back. The only way you even bothered to finish this, if at all, is because it was on your DVR and you abused the Fast Forward button.You can correctly guess every finite plot point and plot twist from watching the previews.
Examples scored: Crowded
F--: This one really must've done something wrong. You feel like it's a personal attack on you, and you need to respond back to the creators in kind. It felt like literal torture to watch. The only reason you finished it is for review purposes - and even there you lied because again you heavily abused the fast forward button. You feel like it's actively promoting extremely disgusting and distasteful attitudes without anything else to redeem it. It's just not funny, or entertaining, or anything. It's quite simply, offensive garbage.
Examples scored: The pilot of Riverdale (hey, it started out really, really bad, folks), Undateable's The Backstreet Boys Walk Into A Bar, The Mysteries of Laura's The Mystery of Whatever Episode I reviewed. Xfinity and DirecTV as actual services.
Extra Thoughts:
- it turns out Mike wrote a really good review of Sam & Cat but...I'm still trying to overcome technical issues in posting it. Yay, Blogspot!
Saturday, March 31, 2018
Blurt! Nickelodeon Original "Movie" *REAL* Review
I actually had a real nifty quote picked out but I can't remember it so I'll just go with "don't fart don't fart don't fart"
What is it? Well it's advertised as a Nickelodeon Original "Movie" but yeah, let's talk about that, right here, right now.It's an hour long, with commercial breaks - which means it's something akin to 44 minutes long without 'em. Now, that does fit the typical accepted definition of a "movie" (by four minutes) but still...that's kinda lame. I really don't get this somewhat unique trend Nickelodeon likes of putting out these hour-long "movies" that started back in 2015, but whatever. I understand the kiddie networks are getting hammered (see Mike's post immediately below) but still, this is ridiculous. I would say it's at least better than Disney putting the DCOM label on an obvious hour-long pilot but...Disney did that exactly once. There have been many more hour-long specials passed off as "movies" by Nickelodeon than 90-minute movies, so yeah, Nickelodeon's still worse.
Where did it air? Well if you didn't get it from my long rant immediately above...Nickelodeon.
Who stars in it? Jace Norman, the actress from Knight Squad (which aired immediately afterwards on the original broadcast), Jojo Siwa who I'm really, really tempted to just flat out claim right here, right now, that she pretty much just moved straight to Nickelodeon studios and actually lives there now, probably in the room right next to Daniella Monet's, and umm...a bunch of people I don't recognize.
Why are we reviewing this? Because I said I'd give this a *real* review if it ever does better than a C+ so...review spoiler alert.
Down in the comments where I first talked about how shitty DirecTV is (p.s. DO NOT SIGN UP FOR DIRECTV THEY SERIOUSLY SUCK, I MEAN IT, THIS IS MY OFFICIAL ANTI-ENDORSEMENT, JUST GO WITH NETFLIX LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE WITH A BRAIN IS DOING) Mike mentioned how he thought Jace was a pretty good actor. Well, it turns out, he at least kinda is. He's really good at nailing down that teen/tween angst and apathy to comedic effect that, well...Dan Schneider was really good at, really, and I can see how that two ended up being a natural pairing. I can also see how Jace was initially cast as a somewhat generic, tween heartthrob but...he also carries on the role of "everyman dude just going through puberty" really well, too.
It's a very Jace-focused vehicle, with everybody else - the Knight Squad chick (I'll learn her name soon enough), Jojo, everyone else - really not getting all that much screen time in comparisons, so it rises and falls based on the quality of Jace's acting, and fortunately Jace is, as Mike pointed out, exactly the type of talented actor to carry it, so there you go.The jokes...I mean, I really don't know if they're legitimately cleverly written or if it's entirely Jace's delivery, but I guess at a certain point it's moot. The whole premise and gimmick...is surprisingly weak, but again Jace carries it enough that it's not much an issue. In fact, I really can't decide if the scriptwriting stands on its own or if it's all Jace.
But...I suppose in the end it doesn't matter as long as it's good, right?
Movie Grade: B-. It just barely made it but hey, I promised I'd give it an honest review if it does better than a C+ and here we are.
Movie MVP: If the review isn't clear enough, if Mike's comment doesn't make it clear enough, it's obviously Jace. Almost by default since he gets like 70% of screen time. Jojo actually comes pretty close though, if it weren't for the lopsided screentime bias.
Extra thoughts:
- Again, I can't emphasize this enough: DO NOT SIGN UP FOR DIRECTV. I'm not kidding when I say, as a DirecTV user, I would rate my satisfaction right there at an F-. The only reason why I'm not even tacking on an extra minus there is because I think that's a distinction best reserved for rival Xfinity. There's no reason on this thing we live on called God's Green Earth why anybody would sign up for either service, not when there's Netflix and...speaking of Dan Schneider, I think it's pretty clear that the writing's on the wall that for Nickelodeon and Disney Channel...well, given its current connotation I don't want to say time's up but...not for sex abuse reasons (I'll get into that more retroactively in the Dan post) but for whatever reason the audience landscape has changed so drastically Nick and Disney Channel can't help but find themselves obsolete. Nick and Disney Channel themselves know this, hence Noggin, DisneyNOW and Disney's big annoucement of launching their own streaming service which I predict will fully replace Disney Channel...in five years or less.
- And shoutout to Jojo because she's actually surprisingly good here in this too. She reminds me of a more likable version of Dylan from Speechless in this.
What is it? Well it's advertised as a Nickelodeon Original "Movie" but yeah, let's talk about that, right here, right now.It's an hour long, with commercial breaks - which means it's something akin to 44 minutes long without 'em. Now, that does fit the typical accepted definition of a "movie" (by four minutes) but still...that's kinda lame. I really don't get this somewhat unique trend Nickelodeon likes of putting out these hour-long "movies" that started back in 2015, but whatever. I understand the kiddie networks are getting hammered (see Mike's post immediately below) but still, this is ridiculous. I would say it's at least better than Disney putting the DCOM label on an obvious hour-long pilot but...Disney did that exactly once. There have been many more hour-long specials passed off as "movies" by Nickelodeon than 90-minute movies, so yeah, Nickelodeon's still worse.
Where did it air? Well if you didn't get it from my long rant immediately above...Nickelodeon.
Who stars in it? Jace Norman, the actress from Knight Squad (which aired immediately afterwards on the original broadcast), Jojo Siwa who I'm really, really tempted to just flat out claim right here, right now, that she pretty much just moved straight to Nickelodeon studios and actually lives there now, probably in the room right next to Daniella Monet's, and umm...a bunch of people I don't recognize.
Why are we reviewing this? Because I said I'd give this a *real* review if it ever does better than a C+ so...review spoiler alert.
Down in the comments where I first talked about how shitty DirecTV is (p.s. DO NOT SIGN UP FOR DIRECTV THEY SERIOUSLY SUCK, I MEAN IT, THIS IS MY OFFICIAL ANTI-ENDORSEMENT, JUST GO WITH NETFLIX LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE WITH A BRAIN IS DOING) Mike mentioned how he thought Jace was a pretty good actor. Well, it turns out, he at least kinda is. He's really good at nailing down that teen/tween angst and apathy to comedic effect that, well...Dan Schneider was really good at, really, and I can see how that two ended up being a natural pairing. I can also see how Jace was initially cast as a somewhat generic, tween heartthrob but...he also carries on the role of "everyman dude just going through puberty" really well, too.
It's a very Jace-focused vehicle, with everybody else - the Knight Squad chick (I'll learn her name soon enough), Jojo, everyone else - really not getting all that much screen time in comparisons, so it rises and falls based on the quality of Jace's acting, and fortunately Jace is, as Mike pointed out, exactly the type of talented actor to carry it, so there you go.The jokes...I mean, I really don't know if they're legitimately cleverly written or if it's entirely Jace's delivery, but I guess at a certain point it's moot. The whole premise and gimmick...is surprisingly weak, but again Jace carries it enough that it's not much an issue. In fact, I really can't decide if the scriptwriting stands on its own or if it's all Jace.
But...I suppose in the end it doesn't matter as long as it's good, right?
Movie Grade: B-. It just barely made it but hey, I promised I'd give it an honest review if it does better than a C+ and here we are.
Movie MVP: If the review isn't clear enough, if Mike's comment doesn't make it clear enough, it's obviously Jace. Almost by default since he gets like 70% of screen time. Jojo actually comes pretty close though, if it weren't for the lopsided screentime bias.
Extra thoughts:
- Again, I can't emphasize this enough: DO NOT SIGN UP FOR DIRECTV. I'm not kidding when I say, as a DirecTV user, I would rate my satisfaction right there at an F-. The only reason why I'm not even tacking on an extra minus there is because I think that's a distinction best reserved for rival Xfinity. There's no reason on this thing we live on called God's Green Earth why anybody would sign up for either service, not when there's Netflix and...speaking of Dan Schneider, I think it's pretty clear that the writing's on the wall that for Nickelodeon and Disney Channel...well, given its current connotation I don't want to say time's up but...not for sex abuse reasons (I'll get into that more retroactively in the Dan post) but for whatever reason the audience landscape has changed so drastically Nick and Disney Channel can't help but find themselves obsolete. Nick and Disney Channel themselves know this, hence Noggin, DisneyNOW and Disney's big annoucement of launching their own streaming service which I predict will fully replace Disney Channel...in five years or less.
- And shoutout to Jojo because she's actually surprisingly good here in this too. She reminds me of a more likable version of Dylan from Speechless in this.
Tuesday, March 27, 2018
What does Dan Schneider's departure mean for Nickelodeon?
It's the end of an era, apparently.
Multiple news outlets have reported that Nickelodeon has decided not to extend their current deal with Dan Schneider and Schneider's Bakery, effectively ending their relationship that has lasted several years.
This is huge news for the network. Not just that, but Nickelodeon has also decided to cancel Game Shakers. A fifth season of Henry Danger is still planned, for whatever reason.
There are also claims of Schneider being verbally abusive, long production days, and the longstanding rumors of him sexually abusing his young female stars.
I'm not here to talk about any of that because that wasn't my intention with this post and that's an entirely different topic. What I wanted to discuss was how this will change the live-action landscape of Nickelodeon. Dan Schneider has been part of the network since the days of All That, and he has been the creative mastermind behind most of Nick's most successful live-action shows. Is this because he's just that good, or because other content creators were never given the same respect and opportunities? There have been memorable shows made by other creators over the years, but Schneider's Bakery has dominated for three decades now.
This was probably a long time coming. Beyond just being shows of really poor quality, Henry Danger and Game Shakers just don't have the same success that Drake & Josh or iCarly had. Nickelodeon was most likely disappointed that both shows were going under the radar. Now that these shows are on borrowed time, there has to be an overhaul somewhere.
Let's look at how things are now. Henry Danger has at least one season left. Game Shakers is finished. The Thundermans is on its way out. Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn is also heading for the door. The only show left is Knight Squad, which might not even be around next year. Of course, there are other shows coming, but who's making them? Schneider leaving means that this is a completely new generation of live-action shows. By 2020, the Nickelodeon we used to know will no longer be around.
This really is bittersweet, mostly because of how I grew up as a huge fan of Schneider's shows, and now as more allegations are coming out against him, I don't know what to believe about the man anymore. I guess Nickelodeon had to move on at some point. Schneider's Bakery has been treading water for too many years now. Henry Danger and Game Shakers are going to be footnotes in a couple years, and it's not like going to another network will help improve the quality for future shows. This is something that will have huge implications years down the line, but for now, all we can do is just sit around in shock.
Aaaannnnnd...it's me. Hopefully Blogspot won't fail on the text editing so you can tell it's more, or even worse delete what Mike said.
First of all, I do want to talk about the alleged sexual abuse done by Dan - or rather, do my part to clear up the rumors regarding the lack of any accusations. I forget where I read it - I want to say it's NickAndMore!'s blog although his post is decidedly absent of any analysis beyond repeating what the newswire itself says or maybe it's his Twitter account - if it's something else I'll link to it as soon as I find it - but whoever it was, it made a good point about how no one's stepped forward after all this time, especially during the height of #MeToo and #TimesUp and especially after both the creator of The Loud House and now the creator of Ren and Stimpy - some of Nickelodeon's greatest hits, the latter almost synonymous with the network itself (at least until Spongebob) and the former the one gleaming non-Spongebob hit on the network, animated or otherwise - have been outed, but still nobody's come forward pointing their finger at Dan. Let's face it - Dan's very appearance - rotund and nerdy - and his very occupation just makes him a ripe and natural target for pedophilia accusations from people who just see it as a one-second opportunity to play Crazy Days and Nights or even just The Drudge Report. I'm not trying to dilute or lessen the impact of such accusations - again, if you know my history as I've talked about on this blog, I'm probably the last person to do that - but rather, just point out that so far none exist, and if there was ever a time for someone to feel most comfortable for pointing it out, now's definitely the time.
Dan's a smart guy, and he's also a married guy (his wife has her own franchise, Hungry Girl) and he knows any actual sexual assault will pretty much permanently destroy any ability to earn any real money for the rest of his life. At this point, just given the lack of evidence, I'm not inclined to believe he's sexually assaulted anyone. Of course, that will turn 180 instantly the moment even one accusation actually comes forward, but with zero such accusations I feel I have no choice but to give him the benefit of the doubt. I really also do believe that Micheal Jackson - yes, the king of pop - is pretty much innocent of sexual assault, but given how he loved to hang around with those much younger than him, it's only natural people would be creeped out. I feel that's just the same case here - he had a natural talent to be "with it" with a teen and really tween crowd, and the nature of his business necessitated he not only hang out with but personally evaluate the talent of teen and tween talent, and that's just going to naturally creep people out. The fact that what appeals to tweens and teens can seem...exceptionally creepy from an adult perspective well, needless to say that doesn't help either.
But onto the issues at hand, the real reason why he was let go and the quality of his shows, both of which are deeply intertwined.
I feel I do myself a disservice by not mentioning how Drake & Josh and - yes really, Victorious - is one of my most favorite shows of all time. The others...yes, including All That, Zoey101 and even iCarly - were not so much my cup of tea, but then again I was watching this through strictly an adult's perspective (the first episode of iCarly I ever bothered to watch on premiere was the one with Jimmy Fallon in it, where she gets forcibly canceled by the FCC). I can see how kids - or at least tweens - still saw a lot of appeal in those shows. iCarly especially - let's face it - had a lot of lowest common denominator appeal with its demo. To continue my unfiltered, brutal honesty, iCarly's success was in featuring two extremely bratty tween girls and their random guy friend going almost literally just whatever seemed cool at the time, or at least during the table pitch. They went into space, they went to Japan, they crash a fan's wedding. And in not one of those episodes did they even make use of much of the premise or setting - it was Carly and Sam acting bratty and Freddie being drug along for the ride in what amounted to slightly different set changes. Then again, this wasn't all that much different from Disney Channel's biggest successes of the time, Suite Life on Deck and Wizards of Waverly Place, except WoWP at least typically used its premises and sets a little better.
Of course even WoWP matured and iCarly (and SLoD)...didn't. But that's ok, because just like how SLoD eventually gave way to Jessie which I still insist was KidCom at Tiffany's in comparison (at least in its second and especially first season, before it devolved into another inferior Suite Life clone [and don't give me any guff about how that's what it literally was to begin with]), iCarly gave way to Victorious which was a much more mature and dare I even say sophisticated take, really nailing the teenage perspective and zeitgeist through the three calendar years or so it ended up running through. A lot of people joke it's The Breakfast Club: the 2010s show and...I don't think that's inaccurate at all. Whereas Carly and Sam were bratty strictly as a comedy delivery device, Tori, Beck, Jade, and Andre pulled off a really slick, cool air that was the right mix of rebellion and just outright apathy, with Cat and Trina being excellent foils that ultimately helped magnify the other four's coolness (although I'll have to admit a lot of that slick coolness was rubbing off on Carly and Sam towards the end too). That's the difference between writing for tweens, and writing for actual teens. It's something that Disney Channel...well, they don't bother to do much anymore, if at all. They flirted with it in JONAS especially (and we all saw how well that worked), then again with I Didn't Do It (and again, we all saw how that worked) and to a lesser extent with Good Luck Charlie, Jessie and Liv and Maddie and between all those two exactly two of them worked and only then by trying to have mixed appeal to even a sub-tween demo along with an older teen or even outright adult demo (Jessie really dropping any real teen and especially adult appeal it had by mid-season 2 aside from Debby's sex appeal - and if you're going to ding me for that comment, you should've read the IMDb boards on Jessie and Debby Ryan before thinking I'm wrong on that, and on that note I'm glad those boards are gone). Of all those named shows, Victorious was the only one that successfully managed to hold onto the actual older teen demo it was aiming for - but not the only one in Nickelodeon's history or even on Dan's resume as with Zoey101 and for me especially, Drake & Josh (I regard the success of that show to be credited to how it was more of an adult-style sitcom that just happaned to star teens).
Then...it all came crashing down almost immediately after Victorious aired its last episode. And I don't just mean for Dan Schneider, but Nickelodeon as a whole and it even managed to drag Disney Channel down with them, but that's another post (that I've already written, multiple times, and probably continue to write in the future). Sam & Cat...was a disaster. I'm not sure what happened exactly other than it felt phoned-in, relying on an assumed magic inherited from iCarly that never bothered to transfer. Especially right after Victorious, it just came off as too generic to be taken credibly as a Schneider's Bakery creation.
Then we have Henry Danger which is a success...for some reason...but to its credit it at least bothers to make use of its premise (some episodes). And we have Game Shakers which is...iCarly 2.0, for 2017. Game Shakers obviously wasn't the success Nickelodeon was hoping for, or even what the network and Schneider insist it actually is. What also doesn't help is that it insists on having actual game tie-ins which, even if they are of strictly a mobile nature, still represents a steep production cost on top of what it would've been otherwise. But I really feel that if you had to pick a point where it really fell through, it was back on Sam & Cat. The insane production schedule (for those not in the know, the first season had 40 episodes, at least half of the show's anticipated ultimate episode count, something virtually unprecedented, although they only made about 35 or so) and the lack of return on that investment no doubt was where it first soured. Actually, maybe even back on Victorious which ended on 65 episodes even though most people thought it was automatic at an 80 final episode count, if not into the 90s or even up to 100. Victorous' premature episode axe was such a surprise they didn't even have time to put together a proper finale (rumors have it that Victorious was supposed to even run concurrent with Sam & Cat with potentially intertwined storylines). Not to mention the iCarly spin-off about Gibby that was put to filmed pilot, but never picked up (I'd love to know if any of you have seen this).
And...well, let's talk about those expenses which probably was the singular most contributing factor. Multi-cam shows are meant to be cheap by design, that's the whole reason why they use multiple cameras to film everything in the first place (so you can get things on fewer takes and those multiple cameras help hide things that normally would need additional production values to hide otherwise, namely that invisible fourth wall). Dan Schneider was driving up costs so high, however, that it pretty much defeated the purpose (iCarly ended up being much more expensive than Zoey101, the sole single-cam show Dan did for Nickelodeon). To Dan's credit, the vast majority of those costs went straight to the players themselves, but to clearly an excessive degree. Here's a bit of trivia for you - "minute-for-minute" Miranda Cosgrove was the highest paid actress in all of Hollywood during the run of iCarly. She got paid $180,000 per 26 minutes of usable film (or basically per regular episode, or half of an hour special, or a third of a 90-minute special). Jennette McCurdy got $150,000 per episode, as well as the entire cast of Victorious. For comparison's sake, Sofia Vergara, lead actress of Modern Family - one of if not the most popular "adult"/"family" sitcoms during that same time - got paid $90,000 per episode - or in other words, half of Miranda Cosgrove's running rate. When adjusted for "minute-by-minute" considerations that gets reduced to a quarter of what Miranda made for the same amount of footage. And keep in mind, Modern Family is a single-cam show! (Actually, a very complexly shot show at that.) To put that in another perspective, that's more than the per episode rate commanded back at Disney Channel by Miley Cyrus, Ashley Tisdale, Brenda Song, Debby Ryan, Dove Cameron, Rowan Blanchard, Sabrina Carpenter, Bridgit Mendler and your choice of either Bella Thorne or Zendaya combined (Disney Channels' rates top out at $20,000 and if the show wasn't named for your character you might only be seeing $15,000 or even just $10,000 per episode - with one exception, when they gave Miley a whopping 5 grand pay bump per episode, whee).
Yeah, needless to say that's not exactly sustainable, when one of your actresses cost more than all of the lead actresses at the rival network put together. And now you know why they had such nonsense like having every single episode of iCarly be a "special" that would air once a month, and then for the rest of that month well...I hope you enjoy Bucket and Skinner and Marvin, Marvin!
I can't imagine Jace commands anywhere near that amount now, or Cree or Madison on Game Shakers but...yeah. This was a long time coming, but it has nothing to do with sexual assaults or even angry outbursts (although the latter certainly doesn't help his case, though it just makes him look like he's coming out a punk in the public eye more than an actual critical reason for letting him go). It has everything to do with...well, he's just getting old, and everyone loses their touch, no exceptions. Myself, working in the publishing industry (well, kinda sorta, more on that in the future) and even being an author myself (kinda sorta, although I'm happy to say that the "author" part is starting to actually weigh more in my life), well it's only natural that I see it all the time. I see it with my favorite authors all the time, and so on. So, it was inevitable, and now that Nickelodeon is starting to feel the effects of Dan's erosion of talent and product, well, that's what we've come to.
Multiple news outlets have reported that Nickelodeon has decided not to extend their current deal with Dan Schneider and Schneider's Bakery, effectively ending their relationship that has lasted several years.
This is huge news for the network. Not just that, but Nickelodeon has also decided to cancel Game Shakers. A fifth season of Henry Danger is still planned, for whatever reason.
There are also claims of Schneider being verbally abusive, long production days, and the longstanding rumors of him sexually abusing his young female stars.
I'm not here to talk about any of that because that wasn't my intention with this post and that's an entirely different topic. What I wanted to discuss was how this will change the live-action landscape of Nickelodeon. Dan Schneider has been part of the network since the days of All That, and he has been the creative mastermind behind most of Nick's most successful live-action shows. Is this because he's just that good, or because other content creators were never given the same respect and opportunities? There have been memorable shows made by other creators over the years, but Schneider's Bakery has dominated for three decades now.
This was probably a long time coming. Beyond just being shows of really poor quality, Henry Danger and Game Shakers just don't have the same success that Drake & Josh or iCarly had. Nickelodeon was most likely disappointed that both shows were going under the radar. Now that these shows are on borrowed time, there has to be an overhaul somewhere.
Let's look at how things are now. Henry Danger has at least one season left. Game Shakers is finished. The Thundermans is on its way out. Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn is also heading for the door. The only show left is Knight Squad, which might not even be around next year. Of course, there are other shows coming, but who's making them? Schneider leaving means that this is a completely new generation of live-action shows. By 2020, the Nickelodeon we used to know will no longer be around.
This really is bittersweet, mostly because of how I grew up as a huge fan of Schneider's shows, and now as more allegations are coming out against him, I don't know what to believe about the man anymore. I guess Nickelodeon had to move on at some point. Schneider's Bakery has been treading water for too many years now. Henry Danger and Game Shakers are going to be footnotes in a couple years, and it's not like going to another network will help improve the quality for future shows. This is something that will have huge implications years down the line, but for now, all we can do is just sit around in shock.
Aaaannnnnd...it's me. Hopefully Blogspot won't fail on the text editing so you can tell it's more, or even worse delete what Mike said.
First of all, I do want to talk about the alleged sexual abuse done by Dan - or rather, do my part to clear up the rumors regarding the lack of any accusations. I forget where I read it - I want to say it's NickAndMore!'s blog although his post is decidedly absent of any analysis beyond repeating what the newswire itself says or maybe it's his Twitter account - if it's something else I'll link to it as soon as I find it - but whoever it was, it made a good point about how no one's stepped forward after all this time, especially during the height of #MeToo and #TimesUp and especially after both the creator of The Loud House and now the creator of Ren and Stimpy - some of Nickelodeon's greatest hits, the latter almost synonymous with the network itself (at least until Spongebob) and the former the one gleaming non-Spongebob hit on the network, animated or otherwise - have been outed, but still nobody's come forward pointing their finger at Dan. Let's face it - Dan's very appearance - rotund and nerdy - and his very occupation just makes him a ripe and natural target for pedophilia accusations from people who just see it as a one-second opportunity to play Crazy Days and Nights or even just The Drudge Report. I'm not trying to dilute or lessen the impact of such accusations - again, if you know my history as I've talked about on this blog, I'm probably the last person to do that - but rather, just point out that so far none exist, and if there was ever a time for someone to feel most comfortable for pointing it out, now's definitely the time.
Dan's a smart guy, and he's also a married guy (his wife has her own franchise, Hungry Girl) and he knows any actual sexual assault will pretty much permanently destroy any ability to earn any real money for the rest of his life. At this point, just given the lack of evidence, I'm not inclined to believe he's sexually assaulted anyone. Of course, that will turn 180 instantly the moment even one accusation actually comes forward, but with zero such accusations I feel I have no choice but to give him the benefit of the doubt. I really also do believe that Micheal Jackson - yes, the king of pop - is pretty much innocent of sexual assault, but given how he loved to hang around with those much younger than him, it's only natural people would be creeped out. I feel that's just the same case here - he had a natural talent to be "with it" with a teen and really tween crowd, and the nature of his business necessitated he not only hang out with but personally evaluate the talent of teen and tween talent, and that's just going to naturally creep people out. The fact that what appeals to tweens and teens can seem...exceptionally creepy from an adult perspective well, needless to say that doesn't help either.
But onto the issues at hand, the real reason why he was let go and the quality of his shows, both of which are deeply intertwined.
I feel I do myself a disservice by not mentioning how Drake & Josh and - yes really, Victorious - is one of my most favorite shows of all time. The others...yes, including All That, Zoey101 and even iCarly - were not so much my cup of tea, but then again I was watching this through strictly an adult's perspective (the first episode of iCarly I ever bothered to watch on premiere was the one with Jimmy Fallon in it, where she gets forcibly canceled by the FCC). I can see how kids - or at least tweens - still saw a lot of appeal in those shows. iCarly especially - let's face it - had a lot of lowest common denominator appeal with its demo. To continue my unfiltered, brutal honesty, iCarly's success was in featuring two extremely bratty tween girls and their random guy friend going almost literally just whatever seemed cool at the time, or at least during the table pitch. They went into space, they went to Japan, they crash a fan's wedding. And in not one of those episodes did they even make use of much of the premise or setting - it was Carly and Sam acting bratty and Freddie being drug along for the ride in what amounted to slightly different set changes. Then again, this wasn't all that much different from Disney Channel's biggest successes of the time, Suite Life on Deck and Wizards of Waverly Place, except WoWP at least typically used its premises and sets a little better.
Of course even WoWP matured and iCarly (and SLoD)...didn't. But that's ok, because just like how SLoD eventually gave way to Jessie which I still insist was KidCom at Tiffany's in comparison (at least in its second and especially first season, before it devolved into another inferior Suite Life clone [and don't give me any guff about how that's what it literally was to begin with]), iCarly gave way to Victorious which was a much more mature and dare I even say sophisticated take, really nailing the teenage perspective and zeitgeist through the three calendar years or so it ended up running through. A lot of people joke it's The Breakfast Club: the 2010s show and...I don't think that's inaccurate at all. Whereas Carly and Sam were bratty strictly as a comedy delivery device, Tori, Beck, Jade, and Andre pulled off a really slick, cool air that was the right mix of rebellion and just outright apathy, with Cat and Trina being excellent foils that ultimately helped magnify the other four's coolness (although I'll have to admit a lot of that slick coolness was rubbing off on Carly and Sam towards the end too). That's the difference between writing for tweens, and writing for actual teens. It's something that Disney Channel...well, they don't bother to do much anymore, if at all. They flirted with it in JONAS especially (and we all saw how well that worked), then again with I Didn't Do It (and again, we all saw how that worked) and to a lesser extent with Good Luck Charlie, Jessie and Liv and Maddie and between all those two exactly two of them worked and only then by trying to have mixed appeal to even a sub-tween demo along with an older teen or even outright adult demo (Jessie really dropping any real teen and especially adult appeal it had by mid-season 2 aside from Debby's sex appeal - and if you're going to ding me for that comment, you should've read the IMDb boards on Jessie and Debby Ryan before thinking I'm wrong on that, and on that note I'm glad those boards are gone). Of all those named shows, Victorious was the only one that successfully managed to hold onto the actual older teen demo it was aiming for - but not the only one in Nickelodeon's history or even on Dan's resume as with Zoey101 and for me especially, Drake & Josh (I regard the success of that show to be credited to how it was more of an adult-style sitcom that just happaned to star teens).
Then...it all came crashing down almost immediately after Victorious aired its last episode. And I don't just mean for Dan Schneider, but Nickelodeon as a whole and it even managed to drag Disney Channel down with them, but that's another post (that I've already written, multiple times, and probably continue to write in the future). Sam & Cat...was a disaster. I'm not sure what happened exactly other than it felt phoned-in, relying on an assumed magic inherited from iCarly that never bothered to transfer. Especially right after Victorious, it just came off as too generic to be taken credibly as a Schneider's Bakery creation.
Then we have Henry Danger which is a success...for some reason...but to its credit it at least bothers to make use of its premise (some episodes). And we have Game Shakers which is...iCarly 2.0, for 2017. Game Shakers obviously wasn't the success Nickelodeon was hoping for, or even what the network and Schneider insist it actually is. What also doesn't help is that it insists on having actual game tie-ins which, even if they are of strictly a mobile nature, still represents a steep production cost on top of what it would've been otherwise. But I really feel that if you had to pick a point where it really fell through, it was back on Sam & Cat. The insane production schedule (for those not in the know, the first season had 40 episodes, at least half of the show's anticipated ultimate episode count, something virtually unprecedented, although they only made about 35 or so) and the lack of return on that investment no doubt was where it first soured. Actually, maybe even back on Victorious which ended on 65 episodes even though most people thought it was automatic at an 80 final episode count, if not into the 90s or even up to 100. Victorous' premature episode axe was such a surprise they didn't even have time to put together a proper finale (rumors have it that Victorious was supposed to even run concurrent with Sam & Cat with potentially intertwined storylines). Not to mention the iCarly spin-off about Gibby that was put to filmed pilot, but never picked up (I'd love to know if any of you have seen this).
And...well, let's talk about those expenses which probably was the singular most contributing factor. Multi-cam shows are meant to be cheap by design, that's the whole reason why they use multiple cameras to film everything in the first place (so you can get things on fewer takes and those multiple cameras help hide things that normally would need additional production values to hide otherwise, namely that invisible fourth wall). Dan Schneider was driving up costs so high, however, that it pretty much defeated the purpose (iCarly ended up being much more expensive than Zoey101, the sole single-cam show Dan did for Nickelodeon). To Dan's credit, the vast majority of those costs went straight to the players themselves, but to clearly an excessive degree. Here's a bit of trivia for you - "minute-for-minute" Miranda Cosgrove was the highest paid actress in all of Hollywood during the run of iCarly. She got paid $180,000 per 26 minutes of usable film (or basically per regular episode, or half of an hour special, or a third of a 90-minute special). Jennette McCurdy got $150,000 per episode, as well as the entire cast of Victorious. For comparison's sake, Sofia Vergara, lead actress of Modern Family - one of if not the most popular "adult"/"family" sitcoms during that same time - got paid $90,000 per episode - or in other words, half of Miranda Cosgrove's running rate. When adjusted for "minute-by-minute" considerations that gets reduced to a quarter of what Miranda made for the same amount of footage. And keep in mind, Modern Family is a single-cam show! (Actually, a very complexly shot show at that.) To put that in another perspective, that's more than the per episode rate commanded back at Disney Channel by Miley Cyrus, Ashley Tisdale, Brenda Song, Debby Ryan, Dove Cameron, Rowan Blanchard, Sabrina Carpenter, Bridgit Mendler and your choice of either Bella Thorne or Zendaya combined (Disney Channels' rates top out at $20,000 and if the show wasn't named for your character you might only be seeing $15,000 or even just $10,000 per episode - with one exception, when they gave Miley a whopping 5 grand pay bump per episode, whee).
Yeah, needless to say that's not exactly sustainable, when one of your actresses cost more than all of the lead actresses at the rival network put together. And now you know why they had such nonsense like having every single episode of iCarly be a "special" that would air once a month, and then for the rest of that month well...I hope you enjoy Bucket and Skinner and Marvin, Marvin!
I can't imagine Jace commands anywhere near that amount now, or Cree or Madison on Game Shakers but...yeah. This was a long time coming, but it has nothing to do with sexual assaults or even angry outbursts (although the latter certainly doesn't help his case, though it just makes him look like he's coming out a punk in the public eye more than an actual critical reason for letting him go). It has everything to do with...well, he's just getting old, and everyone loses their touch, no exceptions. Myself, working in the publishing industry (well, kinda sorta, more on that in the future) and even being an author myself (kinda sorta, although I'm happy to say that the "author" part is starting to actually weigh more in my life), well it's only natural that I see it all the time. I see it with my favorite authors all the time, and so on. So, it was inevitable, and now that Nickelodeon is starting to feel the effects of Dan's erosion of talent and product, well, that's what we've come to.
Sunday, February 4, 2018
DuckTales Reviewed: The First 10 Episodes Wrap-Up
Grappling Hook!
What is it? Half-hour animated adventure comedy
Where did it air? Disney XD
Who stars in it? Probably by far the most recognizable and the one who's been stealing all the casting highlight headlines from this show is none other than David Tenant as Scrooge himself; a bunch of others I'm too lazy to look up now, but there've been some pretty recognizable names even just for bit roles (more on that later).
Why are we reviewing this? Woo-oo! (hah, the most obvious choice for quote gets put here!)
Spoiler alert: I friggin' love this show. Yes it lives up to the hype, maybe even thensome. But first....
...as far as I'm concerned, the big elephant in the room is WTF Disney XD what are you thinking? when it comes to how the episodes are even friggin' aired. As I mentioned before, it got so bad just from word-of-mouth (even the creators themselves) that I on principle just refused to even watch the show until I had all the episode recorded on my DVR so I can view them in the proper order - and indeed I did have to wait until all of them aired because the final of the 10 that did air so far was originally intended to be the third episode (if you count the first two episodes as just one). The creators have said that this was delayed until December because...it mentions Christmas in passing and because it has snow in it (because they go off venturing into the mountains so of course it's going to have snow no matter what time of year the episode takes place). So yeah maybe *one* episode was out of order. Except the actual intended 10th episode was the sixth. But then again it did have a monster theme so it was saved for Monstober. ...except the mummy-themed episode aired in like September or November or something. My point is the airing order was all kinds of screwed up. They just about only got the first two right, it turns out.
So yeah, as far as I'm concerned I made the right call.
Does the viewing order make a difference? Based on feedback from other people and my own experience...you bet your sweet bippy it does. Yeah, Disney XD really screwed the pooch on this one. No wonder their viewership is about at the same level as, I dunno, that thing on ABC on Saturday mornings where Jack Hannah pretends to be Animal Ryan Seacrest and does his countdown of the top ten best moments of out-of-context/no-context animal encounters that last all of about 20 seconds per clip.
Anyway, it's hard to talk about this show without the context of the original 90s series or the comic strip that predates that way, way back (or even the animated Disney adaptation of A Christmas Carol which I thought was the whole origin story of Scrooge - Scrooge McDuck, Ebenezer Scrooge, you can see how I can make that connection right?) The original cartoon has always had a reputation for being more subdued and toned-down than the strip, but I think this new series takes the zany and edgy-ish-for-kids nature of the strip to a notch or two above that, even. Even that aside, the writing is very sharp, the pacing is on point, the characters are amazingly fluid and natural especially for animation period, let alone for being cartoon anthropomorphic ducks and...speaking of fluid, the animation comes off as absolutely top-notch.
Actually, when they first announced this, I was expecting it to borrow the animation style of the Mickey Mouse shorts since at that point in my mind the success of those shorts was the whole impetus for relaunching DuckTales in the first place. And while the Mickey Mouse shorts clearly do borrow from and are inspired by sources like the original Walt Disney theater shorts and the Carl Barks DuckTales comics in the first place (with some heavy contemporary influences, natch), DuckTales takes even that a notch further. Really, everything they could throw at this production-wise, they threw, and then scrounged around some more for that "even then some." And it pays off, it's one of the most polished things either network's ever had.
And yeah, it heavily homages the original series, and even flat-out reinvents/remakes whole episodes, but it's not afraid to go heavy on that reinvention angle. And unlike a lot of other efforts, it works. It's a fresh take for old-ass Millennials who loved the original series, and just a really high-quality, super-enjoyable series for much younger fans (or even fans not so much younger) who've never seen a single second of the original series.
Of course, it also feels like DuckTales-themed Gravity Falls in a lot of ways (which isn't surprising because despite Alex Hirsh's uninvolvement with this one, a lot of the staff nonetheless carries over) but...given how much I loved Gravity Falls (and believe me I'm far from the only one) that's not necessarily a bad thing. You can definitely see character parallels - Weeby is Duck-Mabel (down to Grappling Hook!), the triplets are Duck-Dipper and two of his paper copier clones who I guess managed to stay unwet, Launchpad is Duck-Soos, Scrooge is Duck-Grunkle Stan, I could go on. Hell, Gyro is Duck-Old Man McGurkin and Glumgold is Duck-Gideon as a really old-ass Scottish billionaire (ok, that one might be stretching it). Yeah, the Gravity Falls influence is everywhere, but still, that's not a bad thing, and the Gravity Falls influence and parallels fit so seamlessly into the DuckTales mythos even if it all ends up being strictly coincidental. Really, I'm more convinced now that the success of Gravity Falls has more to do with inspiring Disney to reboot the series than the success of the Mickey Mouse shorts.
So, is this better than the original series? I honestly think...hell yeah it is! The original series...I think suffers from a lot of nostalgia boost. I've seen it not that long ago and my adult-ass eyes see it as...a very soft 90s cartoon appropriate for kids the age I was when I was first watching it. This new series really shows just how much the craft of storytelling has really improved over those 20-30 years (damn I'm old) and how much more credit networks and showrunners are giving to their audience, even younger ones.
Series So Far Grade: I think this is an incredibly easy call: an A+. Yes, this means on average every single episode is practically perfect, something I'm not even sure Gravity Falls could claim for this blog (unless I also gave that series an A+, which implies the same thing - I honestly don't remember and I'm too lazy to look up my own damn blog). Yes, in a lot of ways it's just DuckTales-themed Gravity Falls. But I think that's exactly why people were so hyped up for it in the first place. Hell, that's why I was so hyped up on it, whether I even realized it or not. And again, if you're going to steal, steal from the finest. This might be one of the greatest things ever in the entire history of DXD, and across all the Disney-branded networks. I mean it when I say it lives up to the hype, an incredibly tall order that may be.
Series So Far MVP: I'm gonna give it to Margo Martindale just because she's exactly who I would've cast as Ma Beagle - and they did it! They actually friggin' did exactly that! Just the fact that they went out to get Margo Martindale as Ma Beagle, in my mind, shows how much they care and how much thought they put into this series, how well they know their audience (especially Millennials who grew up with the original show and likely have been exposed to at least some of Martindale's other well-known roles) and how much they care about not leaving out new viewers.
Extra Thoughts
- Just to emphasize, yes, I really do feel watching these episodes in the "proper" order does help the series get to that A+ status, although I don't think the show over-focuses on the kids as much as some fans think, or at the very least I think these fans over-estimate how interesting Scrooge and especially Donald are, with Donald easily being my least favorite/who I find to be the least-interesting character. Donald never was a big part of the original cartoon, being absent for pretty much the entire run from what I can remember, and I think his inclusion into the series is a large influence from the Mickey Mouse shorts. That said, The Tower of Luck Whatever, I Forgot The Episode Name Already! made fantastic use out of him. But I definitely don't feel like his presence is missed in the episodes he's absent from (or even the episodes Scrooge was absent from, particularly The Terror of the Terra-Firmans!)
- I was originally going to write every sentence with an exclamation mark, just like the episode titles! But clearly I forgot about that! Which is probably just as well anyway! Since that gimmick would get really old! Really fast!
- If you're curious, and I bet you are! The correct airing order of the episodes can be found on Reddit! You can just Google search Reddit Ducktales to find the thread!
- I bothered to go back and re-read the archive of my own blog after all! And yeah, it does turns out! That I did give Gravity Falls an overall series grade of A+! After all!
What is it? Half-hour animated adventure comedy
Where did it air? Disney XD
Who stars in it? Probably by far the most recognizable and the one who's been stealing all the casting highlight headlines from this show is none other than David Tenant as Scrooge himself; a bunch of others I'm too lazy to look up now, but there've been some pretty recognizable names even just for bit roles (more on that later).
Why are we reviewing this? Woo-oo! (hah, the most obvious choice for quote gets put here!)
Spoiler alert: I friggin' love this show. Yes it lives up to the hype, maybe even thensome. But first....
...as far as I'm concerned, the big elephant in the room is WTF Disney XD what are you thinking? when it comes to how the episodes are even friggin' aired. As I mentioned before, it got so bad just from word-of-mouth (even the creators themselves) that I on principle just refused to even watch the show until I had all the episode recorded on my DVR so I can view them in the proper order - and indeed I did have to wait until all of them aired because the final of the 10 that did air so far was originally intended to be the third episode (if you count the first two episodes as just one). The creators have said that this was delayed until December because...it mentions Christmas in passing and because it has snow in it (because they go off venturing into the mountains so of course it's going to have snow no matter what time of year the episode takes place). So yeah maybe *one* episode was out of order. Except the actual intended 10th episode was the sixth. But then again it did have a monster theme so it was saved for Monstober. ...except the mummy-themed episode aired in like September or November or something. My point is the airing order was all kinds of screwed up. They just about only got the first two right, it turns out.
So yeah, as far as I'm concerned I made the right call.
Does the viewing order make a difference? Based on feedback from other people and my own experience...you bet your sweet bippy it does. Yeah, Disney XD really screwed the pooch on this one. No wonder their viewership is about at the same level as, I dunno, that thing on ABC on Saturday mornings where Jack Hannah pretends to be Animal Ryan Seacrest and does his countdown of the top ten best moments of out-of-context/no-context animal encounters that last all of about 20 seconds per clip.
Anyway, it's hard to talk about this show without the context of the original 90s series or the comic strip that predates that way, way back (or even the animated Disney adaptation of A Christmas Carol which I thought was the whole origin story of Scrooge - Scrooge McDuck, Ebenezer Scrooge, you can see how I can make that connection right?) The original cartoon has always had a reputation for being more subdued and toned-down than the strip, but I think this new series takes the zany and edgy-ish-for-kids nature of the strip to a notch or two above that, even. Even that aside, the writing is very sharp, the pacing is on point, the characters are amazingly fluid and natural especially for animation period, let alone for being cartoon anthropomorphic ducks and...speaking of fluid, the animation comes off as absolutely top-notch.
Actually, when they first announced this, I was expecting it to borrow the animation style of the Mickey Mouse shorts since at that point in my mind the success of those shorts was the whole impetus for relaunching DuckTales in the first place. And while the Mickey Mouse shorts clearly do borrow from and are inspired by sources like the original Walt Disney theater shorts and the Carl Barks DuckTales comics in the first place (with some heavy contemporary influences, natch), DuckTales takes even that a notch further. Really, everything they could throw at this production-wise, they threw, and then scrounged around some more for that "even then some." And it pays off, it's one of the most polished things either network's ever had.
And yeah, it heavily homages the original series, and even flat-out reinvents/remakes whole episodes, but it's not afraid to go heavy on that reinvention angle. And unlike a lot of other efforts, it works. It's a fresh take for old-ass Millennials who loved the original series, and just a really high-quality, super-enjoyable series for much younger fans (or even fans not so much younger) who've never seen a single second of the original series.
Of course, it also feels like DuckTales-themed Gravity Falls in a lot of ways (which isn't surprising because despite Alex Hirsh's uninvolvement with this one, a lot of the staff nonetheless carries over) but...given how much I loved Gravity Falls (and believe me I'm far from the only one) that's not necessarily a bad thing. You can definitely see character parallels - Weeby is Duck-Mabel (down to Grappling Hook!), the triplets are Duck-Dipper and two of his paper copier clones who I guess managed to stay unwet, Launchpad is Duck-Soos, Scrooge is Duck-Grunkle Stan, I could go on. Hell, Gyro is Duck-Old Man McGurkin and Glumgold is Duck-Gideon as a really old-ass Scottish billionaire (ok, that one might be stretching it). Yeah, the Gravity Falls influence is everywhere, but still, that's not a bad thing, and the Gravity Falls influence and parallels fit so seamlessly into the DuckTales mythos even if it all ends up being strictly coincidental. Really, I'm more convinced now that the success of Gravity Falls has more to do with inspiring Disney to reboot the series than the success of the Mickey Mouse shorts.
So, is this better than the original series? I honestly think...hell yeah it is! The original series...I think suffers from a lot of nostalgia boost. I've seen it not that long ago and my adult-ass eyes see it as...a very soft 90s cartoon appropriate for kids the age I was when I was first watching it. This new series really shows just how much the craft of storytelling has really improved over those 20-30 years (damn I'm old) and how much more credit networks and showrunners are giving to their audience, even younger ones.
Series So Far Grade: I think this is an incredibly easy call: an A+. Yes, this means on average every single episode is practically perfect, something I'm not even sure Gravity Falls could claim for this blog (unless I also gave that series an A+, which implies the same thing - I honestly don't remember and I'm too lazy to look up my own damn blog). Yes, in a lot of ways it's just DuckTales-themed Gravity Falls. But I think that's exactly why people were so hyped up for it in the first place. Hell, that's why I was so hyped up on it, whether I even realized it or not. And again, if you're going to steal, steal from the finest. This might be one of the greatest things ever in the entire history of DXD, and across all the Disney-branded networks. I mean it when I say it lives up to the hype, an incredibly tall order that may be.
Series So Far MVP: I'm gonna give it to Margo Martindale just because she's exactly who I would've cast as Ma Beagle - and they did it! They actually friggin' did exactly that! Just the fact that they went out to get Margo Martindale as Ma Beagle, in my mind, shows how much they care and how much thought they put into this series, how well they know their audience (especially Millennials who grew up with the original show and likely have been exposed to at least some of Martindale's other well-known roles) and how much they care about not leaving out new viewers.
Extra Thoughts
- Just to emphasize, yes, I really do feel watching these episodes in the "proper" order does help the series get to that A+ status, although I don't think the show over-focuses on the kids as much as some fans think, or at the very least I think these fans over-estimate how interesting Scrooge and especially Donald are, with Donald easily being my least favorite/who I find to be the least-interesting character. Donald never was a big part of the original cartoon, being absent for pretty much the entire run from what I can remember, and I think his inclusion into the series is a large influence from the Mickey Mouse shorts. That said, The Tower of Luck Whatever, I Forgot The Episode Name Already! made fantastic use out of him. But I definitely don't feel like his presence is missed in the episodes he's absent from (or even the episodes Scrooge was absent from, particularly The Terror of the Terra-Firmans!)
- I was originally going to write every sentence with an exclamation mark, just like the episode titles! But clearly I forgot about that! Which is probably just as well anyway! Since that gimmick would get really old! Really fast!
- If you're curious, and I bet you are! The correct airing order of the episodes can be found on Reddit! You can just Google search Reddit Ducktales to find the thread!
- I bothered to go back and re-read the archive of my own blog after all! And yeah, it does turns out! That I did give Gravity Falls an overall series grade of A+! After all!
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