I finally caught an episode of Boondocks on Cartoon Network. I'm not a regular reader of the strip but I've always liked it. And I loved the print ads I've seen around town.
Last night's episode combined racial profiling, anal rape, WMDs and Samuel L. Jackson as a white guy. It was as militant, political, satirical and funny as the strip. It was also Japanese.
Seriously, what the hell?
The character designs are almost nothing like the strip. Why did Aron MacGruder think the show should look like 'Ghost in the Shell'? They're not even designed for comedy. And they move like the old 90's 'Spider-Man' show before they got cheap and reused old animation. It's a bizarre decision that will hang up this show. It may survive on the goodwill of the strip but if it wants to go beyond it, this show has to decide what it wants.
1 comment:
I don't know. I kind of like the animation style. Maybe I've been watching too much Inuyasha lately.
I've caught the Boondocks a could times, but usually about 5 minutes into it. I enjoy it, but it's definitely not the strip. I wouldn't say better or worse, but different.
In the strip, Huey is powerful, intelligent, opinionated, but still a child. The world is somewhat realistic.
In the cartoon, they seem to strip away some of the innocence of Huey. He comes across not so much as a crusader trying to fix the world, but rather as the sole voice of reason in a world gone completely mad. The cartoon seems less hopeful than the strip.
In the strip, his phone calls to the whitehouse, FBI, etc have the edge of maybe Huey could win, and fix things. In the cartoon, I don't get that impression. In the cartoon he seems more resigned to the idea that things are just going suck and though it's important to try, things are not going to get any better.
It's probably good that they didn't try to make them the same thing. Afterall, look at the terrible results they go when the transitioned Garfield and Heathcliff from newspaper to animation.
In short, if you are looking for the same thing in the cartoon that you find in the strip, you may be disappointed, but they are both worth the time.
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