things that are not very good
[bitching]
posted by tom / February 25, 2006 / 
- These new VW "My Fast" commercials. Maybe I'm confused, but I think we're supposed to be clamoring for some kind of squat, unappealing plastic figurine all of a sudden. And this somehow induces me to buy... cars, I guess? Catherine reports seeing the campaign extended to fake Craigslist missed connections postings, which, if you know me, you know I find appalling. What happened, VW? Where's the Nick Drake & artful mysteriousness? It feels like you finished selling cars to hipsters who miss Suck.com and moved on to targeting their asshole younger brothers who spend all their time playing GTA and buying DVDs that star Vin Diesel.
- The IT Crowd. I really want to like this series — the people at BoingBoing are nuts about it, the set's littered with EFF stickers, and the BBC is giving away episodes for free on the internet (hurrah for IP socialism!). The only problem: it's just not very funny. Like, at all. The first episode featured two jokes about a non-technical management type trying to use appliances when they weren't plugged in. Done properly, this would build in a way that makes the second time much funnier than the first. But in practice, it just seemed like the writers had forgotten that they'd already used that lame gag ten minutes earlier.
- The Boondocks Cartoon. The IT Crowd is bad in a passive, hapless sort of way. The Boondocks is aggressive in its awfulness. That it's not remotely funny sort of goes without saying — I've always felt that, despite occasional signs of talent, Aaron McGruder's success owes more to liberal guilt than genuine comedic talent. But even his occasional humor is completely absent from the cartoon. It doesn't even try to be funny. What it does try to be is in-your-face. Mostly this just results in it not making any sense, and doing so in as unpleasant a way as possible. One episode ended with the grandfather killing a blind man, then getting left off the hook for some reason. They finished by throwing in a nice little coda about the pointlessness of the victim's life. Classy, guys.
Another had the grandfather open a soul food restaurant, then tried to use the premise to simultaneously score points about drug addiction and obesity in the black community, but succeeded only in producing an incoherent mess. Whatever they were trying to do, the episode ended with a woman ruining her life and debasing herself, begging for a cheeseburger in a way that was not at all funny. The mind behind the show seems to have no talent for anything but cruelty. Oh, and the voice acting for Huey and Riley is mind-bogglingly bad (this is more a casting than a performance issue, though). All in all, it's probably the least appealing cartoon I've ever seen — and I've seen Urotsukidoji.
Comments
Hey Tom and Catherine, just lettting you know that I read your blog all the time at Merrill and love it. Keep up the good work.
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