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A grown man reviews kids' programmes (impressed, single ladies?).
It's been years since I watched kids' telly on weekend mornings regularly, but it's a habit I seem to be getting back into, perhaps in the same way you get back into the habit of smoking crack or drinking meths. Anyway, before this renewed habit leaves me mumbling incoherently to myself whilst I sit on a piece of wasteground and defecate in my own trousers, here's some comments on what I saw.
First up, an episode of Generator Rex. The perfect back-up for householders concerned about winter power-cuts! Nay, but I jest, this is actually a cartoon about Rex, a 15 year old who has gained the ability to produce bio-organic machines from his body due to a mysterious world-wide Event, and now puts this ability to work in the service of Providence, one of those mysterious international secret service-type organisations you only get in cartoons, battling the mutants created by The Event. His compadres in this titanic struggle are a talking mutant monkey and Agent Six, who is just the biggest rip-off of the Tommy Lee Jones character from The Men In Black films (and cartoon) you ever saw.
Actually, for my money, one of the main problems is that, being so like that character, Agent Six is actually fairly badass, whereas Sexy Rexy himself is a bit annoying. He can turn his hands into massive hammers and drills and stuff, but his attempts at wisecracks and macho boasts all fall a bit flat. To go back to The Men In Black, those films had the advantage of (a) Will Smith as leading man and (b) decent writers. Rex doesn't really have the charisma, if a cartoon character can have charisma, or the material. I suspect the budget mostly went on animating lots of enormous machines-cum-monsters which play a prominent role as antagonists or tools of the antagonists. I found them reasonably impressive, although I imagine those who've seen more of Transformers or mecha anime would probably find them derivative too.
The plot of the episode I saw centred around Van Kleiss, the chief baddie, coming to the United Nations to make some kind of peace deal, under diplomatic immunity. In fact, it's all part of an evil scheme to gather together the world's diplomats and hold them hostage until the world submits. Van Kleiss has filled tunnels under the UN Building with some kind of magic soil that can turn into what look like giant tree roots and shoot up through the soil to attack buildings or people (to be honest, I didn't quite get that bit). I do have two problems with this plot, however: (1) it's a massive cliche to have the bad guy attack the some diplomatic body whilst under a flag of truce (Battlestar Galactica, for one, starts out that way) and (2) it accords the UN an importance in world politics it doesn't really have. The governments of the world couldn't give a damn about the United Nations, except and insofar as it acts as a front for the US, Russia, China and the other major powers (who rarely agree on anything anyway, which is why the UN rarely works). If an international super-villain took a bunch of UN diplomats hostage and asked the world to submit or they would die, the world would likely tell him to get lost.
The producers may think that their target audience doesn't know all that, and they may have a point. However, they seem prone to this kind of thinking. Rex ultimately defeats Van Kleiss by punching holes through the tunnels, so that the magic soil all flows out into the Hudson River. But the tunnel's only about knee-deep in water at most and the soil's all piled up on the sides - chances are that doing that wouldn't result in a huge torrent of water sweeping away all the soil. Who cares though; the dumb kids won't notice that! To me, when you think so little of your audience that you spend more time on drawing cool robots than spending five minutes changing your plot slightly to make it plausible, your show has a problem even if it's aimed at kids.
Comments
Second programme up - an episode of Victorious, which if there was an Emmy for Worst Pun Used in the Title of A TV Show for Twelve Year Old Girls, would be a sure-fire winner. Victorious, you see, centres on the doings of Victoria, an aspiring singer and student at a Hollywood school for the performing arts - shades of Fame and High School Musical. She's played by Victoria Justice (who should immediately be obliged to surrender that name to someone much cooler) and to judge by the ecsatic reaction she gets from the tweenies whenever she steps up to the microphone, VJ herself may be some sort of singer of the Miley Cyrus type. Assuming she's actually doing the singing, she's not bad for that genre.
In spite of supposedly being a teenager, Victoria (and indeed her sister, of whom more anon) look about thirty, which is particularly weird given that her friends all look much nearer the age they're supposed to be. Of course, this being the Hollywood version of school, everyone's good looking, even the two nerdy boys. The girls all look as if they're wearing about six tonnes of make-up apiece and I've never seen hair that's been so comprehensively "done". They must have needed a small industrial plant to style those glossy locks. Victoria hangs around with these friends, who all fall into the usual high school programme cliches with a small dose of ethnic stereotyping (class bitch, Jewish nerds, black guy who's good at music, and so on). They get into "hilarious" scrapes.
In this episode, the plot was mainly driven by Victoria's need to get a bithday present for her insanely materialistic and narcissistic airhead of a sister. She buys what we are assured are a deeply-desirable pair of boots. To me they looked like bog-standard suede boots covered with a lot of glass beads, that you could get for about ten quid from a market stall, but what do I know? Ho, ho, Materialistic Bint already owns a pair, so Victoria has to get creative. Salt of the earth that she is, she and the black guy write a song about her deep love (?) for her sister and perform it for her.
Predictably, sister isn't interested in a song; she wants stuff. Incidentally, the performance is at their house in front of their parents, who meekly leave the house on request to let them sort out the dispute rather than telling Materialistic Bint to knock off her bullshit and show appreciation for her sister's efforts like most real parents would. All Victoria can give her is the recording of the song, which MB promptly passes of as her own and get sells to a record producer. But, oh, the irony, she can't sing, and having humiliated herself in the studio, MB has to admit that she didn't sing the original and call in Victoria to save her backside.
Now I'm not completely idiotic (no, seriously) and I can see this is aimed at young girls who probably don't realise quite how cliched most of this show is. I'll also give it points for being pretty moral - love is better than materialism, cheaters never prosper and so on. But the end of the programme totally undermines this - Beyonce decides she wants to record the song, so the recording by Victoria is stopped anyway. So what's the moral here? "Love is better than materialism, but being famous is better than both. Cheaters never prosper, but if you're powerful enough you don't need to cheat because the system will give you what you want anyway." Well done, Hollywood.
^ ITV, Sunday morning from about 8 am on.
"Sexy Rexy" is a nickname Private Eye used to give a solicitor involved in suing it a lot, but now you mention it it is rather paedo...
^ The choice was totally random. Normally I listen to the radio in the morning anyway, but they have a church service on just after 8, so I was channel surfing looking for something to watch.
When I was actually a kid, I tended to prefer the BBC kids programmes, but that was mostly habit I think.
Well, it's not a kid's programme as such, but this morning I watched an old episode (1999) of "The World's Deadliest Storms" on ITV4. It's basically a clips show of footage from TV news and people with camcorders of particularly dramatic, mostly destructive, weather events, fronted by one Don Lafontaine. He is a man with a very over-excited delivery of the Billy Mays/Barry Scott school, and just in case that combined with footage of tornadoes trashing small Mid-West towns wasn't enough to get a reaction, the producers stuck-on near constant loud and over-dramatic music too. Clearly, they have zero faith in their audience being able to recognise something inherently exciting when they see it.
The show ranges world-wide, but is basically centred on the US and Canada and by the end of it, you will wonder how North America ever got populated in the first place . It's a bit like the joke about every animal in Australia seemingly being out to kill you; it looks as if, in North America, even the weather hates you. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, ice storms, lightning - the list just goes on and on. Particularly memorable are the guy from somewhere in Quebec whose house was left standing in the middle of a massive flood that swept away the rest of his neighbourhood ("Ah call zis ma lucky 'ouse!") and the father and son from Portland, Oregon, who had to flee from a mudslide in their car. Disappointingly, though, neither of the Portland men turned out to be a certain very tall troper from near there (he favours long coats, fedoras and social conservatism, if you don't know who I mean).
As ever with these kind of shows, you have to marvel at the ability of human beings, faced with peril to themselves and others, to keep filming it rather than just running like hell. This is even more notable given that this episode predates video cameras in mobile phones. However, the programme unsurprisingly seems to operate (mostly) on the rule of not showing anyone actually being killed, so you can usually be fairly safe in the knowledge that they got away with it. The fact that half of the people filming are shouting "Awesome!" all the time also rather kills some of the drama.I mean, they don't seem that worried by this deadly weather, so why should we be?
The programme also included some film of a South Korean boat being swamped by a wave in which five men get swept into the sea but only one appears to be rescued. For me, that leaves a bit of a nasty taste in the mouth. Is the rule "No deaths shown (but Koreans don't count)", then?