Animotion and Car Tunes

[Thad]

Futurama picked up through season 14.

Okay by me. Season 11 was a little creaky in places but I liked more of it than I didn't.

[Niku]

Okay, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is not what I expected. It’s much, much better than what I expected.

Even if you’re like “I don’t really want or need an eight episode Scott Pilgrim anime” I recommend at least watching the first episode.

[Mothra]

Scott Pilgrim is amazing. So, so glad they went the direction they did with it.

Pantheon S2 marks the end of the show, turns out, and looking into it, evidently they had a two-season order initially, then got cancelled after one season, so they got news this would be it halfway through the production of season 2.

This means that season 2 starts very strong, then starts becoming pretty bad, then halfway through, it just becomes season 3 and speedruns through the S3 content. I think this is overall a good thing, and it mercilessly cuts out a lot of meandering S2 plotlines, but it results in a LOT of great ideas not being given fully the time they deserve.

The final episode is a deus ex machina on a scale I don't think I've ever seen, which isn't GREAT, but it's in-keeping with the theme of the show I suppose to have godlike beings affecting godlike change.

Overall, I loved this show. It aims big, commits, and takes its world very seriously. I'm glad it got to wrap things up.

(Spoilers) Thoughts on Pantheon:

⇳ Click to Expand Summary

* Ended up really loving the three main characters - Ellen Kim is such a strong lead character for a show like this, it's kind of rare you get a "the mom" character actually being given a big, weighty story like this. Maddie and Caspian were also very good.

* There are a ton of Ghost in the Shell references in this show, but crucially, they're all aesthetic, and they're all earned. They fit into this world seamlessly. That's how you do it.

* By far the most realistic depiction of what a VR society would look like I've ever seen. The avatars/virtual bodies depicted are so fucking wildly different in art style and form and what have you, it really feels like there's no "baseline" of what a person looks like in VR. One guy is Guts from Beserk, one guy is a massive floating Wizard of Oz head, one person looks like a younger version of herself, one guy is the dude from the Preserving Worlds ep on the game Worlds. Mmuah.

* Upload is utterly horrifying and it KILLS YOU and I like that the show really focused on that for S1. I understand why they couldn't constantly remind the viewer that upload kills you in S2, because they wanted to explore the implications of upload, but it was a bit odd.

* The time jump shit ruled. I love the depopulated Earth, the massive server cubes in every city, the orbital ring, the need to expand and move on to space for cooling and power. The fact that the bombing attack on one of the servers costs a million lives was horrific. One building, one million people.

* The decision to bring back the Steve Jobs character, and have him be the villain for S2, sucks so incredibly bad. Thank god they were forced to wrap that up early.

* The American AI lady sucks so bad. Her family drama stuff was solid, with her sister, but god, what a boring character otherwise.

* MIST was a little rocky at the start but I loved her shitty rink-a-dink body, and I grew to like the character a lot as well. Reminded me of that CEO dude in GitS: SaC who carts around in his trash-can bot.

* THE COVID STORYLINE GUYS ARE WE REALLY DOING THIS? Another mercy of S2 being cut short.

* Re: The Finale: WE'RE DOING UNIVERSE SIMULATIONS NOW, SHOW?? Is there a better way to make the viewer check out than to ask "what is real" when you're wrapping up the entire story? Bleh.

[beatbandito]

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off was already looking good as a 1:1 with contextual updates. The change was eh, as the second episode AoTing of it was inevitable. All the movie cast returning is fun, but they are pretty universally bad at voice acting. Metric returning as Clash at Demonhead is the best part. I wish they just gave Emily Haines Brie Larson's role completely.

[Upthorn]

I liked Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, but think I'd have liked it much better as a second season of a full adaptation of the graphic novels.

[Thad]

All the movie cast returning is fun, but they are pretty universally bad at voice acting.

Her?

[beatbandito]

PRETTY universal. Scott and most of the evil exs are the big standouts. Cera sounds like he did the voices at home and doesn't have a recording space.

[beatbandito]

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off was already looking good as a 1:1 with contextual updates. The change was eh, as the second episode AoTing of it was inevitable. All the movie cast returning is fun, but they are pretty universally bad at voice acting. Metric returning as Clash at Demonhead is the best part. I wish they just gave Emily Haines Brie Larson's role completely.

Okay, episodes 3 and 4 were much better, but waited to finish it to not pull a fast karate flip too many times. Show is fine. The ending was a little off-theme for the parts I thought the story did best. If everything was like 3 & 4 with no real resolution that would be fine. But some of the self reflections get too goofy to be touching.

[Newbie]

As somebody who never read the original, I enjoyed the parts of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off that paired up characters who didn't interact much in the film. It was nice to see characters like Knives transcend the roles they initially occupied. While the show does "cute" and "animated spectacle" pretty well, the humor is a little subdued by comparison to the film. (Wallace is a great example, as probably my favorite character in the movie: while he has more screen time in the series, his antics amused, but they didn't make me laugh.) The big exception for me was the reveal of where the portal came from, which was fantastically absurd.

I'll second beatbandito's comments about the voice acting. Mae Whitman comes across well just because her character's line delivery is always at maximum, and Chris Evans gets to use the cheesiest voice for Lucas Lee, but a lot of the Evil Exes sound pretty similar.

[Thad]

In case you still haven't seen it, I Know That Voice is now available for free on YouTube.

[Mothra]

Really loved Master of the Universe: Revolution. Wraps up the He-Man mythos in a nice way, and understands what's fun and weird about this world and these characters.

The ah... the new characters are not particularly good still, but everything else is fantastic. I would not have expected this much love to go into a Netflix he-man special.

It has an absolutely buck-wild cast: William Shatner, Stephen Root, Lian Cunningham, Gates McFadden, Keith David, Mark Hamill, John de Lancie, fuggin, Jeffrey Combs...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27052533/

Feel like Hamill was of course the standout, de Lancie was amazing as usual, and Lena Headey's Evil-Lyn was a joy to watch this season as much as the last.

I could listen to Hamill and de Lancie chew scenery forever

[Niku]

Hazbin Hotel is messy and chaotic and way too briskly paced, and strangely just assumes you've already seen the pilot and kicks off basically on episode 2, but it's a really fun mess overall. The songs are mostly great and it is basically bursting with theater kid energy. It remains a very "maybe do not touch or acknowledge the fandom" sort of thing, but definitely recommend.

(I do currently prefer Helluva Boss, the independent sister show that has been running on YouTube for A While now and is halfway through season two, but Helluva Boss also showcases the sneaky emotional energy that the Manic Cussy Hell Shows are actually working with since it has had more time with its ensemble to date).

[Thad]

The Thundercats comic gave me a hankering to re-watch Thundercats.

So anyway, I started rewatching Silverhawks.

Previous thoughts on Silverhawks:

I also like the writers' various theories on why Silverhawks was not as successful.

Peter Lawrence points out that none of the protagonists are actually interesting or well-developed besides Commander Stargazer; Leonard Starr blames the show's failure on its distinct lack of Leonard Starr; and Steve Perry points out that the Silverhawks toys weren't nearly as good as the Thundercats ones.

They all kinda have a point.

and more discussion on the next page in the Fossilized Thundercats thread.

Silverhawks is...muddled. It has a cowboy named Bluegrass who has a mohawk and plays rock music. That has to be executive meddling, right? "Lawrence, you idiot, kids don't want to listen to hillbilly music!"

I feel like the mohawk might have been a Kenner idea. I had the toy; the mohawk keeps his hat on.

I think the biggest problem is that the characters just aren't interesting (aside from Stargazer). Thundercats had an interesting cast (aside from Tygra) and that went a long way.

Also, the Thundercats are explorers and the Silverhawks are cops.

It's also striking how bad the first episode of Silverhawks is. It opens strong, with Mon-Star escaping from prison, but most of the rest of the episode is a damn infodump and then there's a training exercise at the end. The Silverhawks don't even get to outer space in the first episode. It's insane.

It's not so bad when you look at it as half a first episode; the second half kinda gives it some resolution. And Thundercats worked much the same, but Thundercats did it a hell of a lot better. It opens strong out the gate (by cribbing liberally from Star Wars and Superman, granted), introduces the Mutants (while holding off on Mumm-Ra until episode 2), fight scene, tearful goodbye scene, death scene, crash landing, another fight scene, ending. It's packed tightly; there's a whole lot of dialogue to introduce the cast of characters (and some weird choices like starting them all out naked) but it's actually rooted in character, not just rattling off who they are and what they do.

I feel like the difference might have been executive meddling/toy company pressure, too. I got the impression Starr was given pretty broad leeway to develop Thundercats, whereas Silverhawks feels like they're pushing as hard as they can to introduce the entire toy line upfront. (Reminds me of the bit in Batman veeeeee Superman where they watch videos of Flash and Aquaman. Or the way-too-many-characters introduced in Pryde of the X-Men.)

[Thad]

Oh also the show that has a guy named Bluegrass who plays rock 'n' roll has a guy named Pokerface who has a slot-machine face.