Plot: Scaredy Squirrel is a squirrel who lives in a town with other animal people and hijinks ensue I guess.
Breakdown: Have you ever merely seen and heard a show’s theme song and instantly got a bad feeling about the entire show? One example of that feeling is with Scaredy Squirrel, also known as diet-more-annoying-much-less-funny-even-considering-the-post-movie-seasons-Spongebob Squarepants.
The opening I’m referring to is one where the title character, Scaredy, and yes that’s really his name, basically scream/scats the tune of the opening theme. You can practically feel your ears curl up in agony.
Scaredy himself is just a more annoying version of Spongebob. He works a crappy minimum wage job, he’s constantly happy, he has a high-pitched voice, lives in a giant food item (an acorn) he’s always being overly nice to everyone, he’s a complete dork, he’s neurotic, and even though it’s fully justified because, well, squirrel, he also has buck teeth.
He has a best friend whose two biggest traits are being fat/constantly eating and being dumb. Though, unlike Patrick whose main shtick is his stupidity, they put way more emphasis on the over-eating and fat jokes, which amount to him just always eating everything edible in his path. His voice actor also sounds like a higher pitched Dom DeLuise.
But let’s back away from Spongebob for a second and analyze this as a show. It’s still bad….The art is about as simplistic as humanly possible. I know, I know, kid’s cartoon, but there’s really nothing creative here, and the ‘kids cartoon’ excuse is such a terrible one. I’m not demanding realistic detail, but nothing stands out or even reminds me of anything good. I didn’t even realize what animals some of the characters were, and I’m still fuzzy on some of them. Like Paddy, the antagonist of the first half. I couldn’t tell if he was supposed to be a weasel or a rat.
The backgrounds are also lacking a hell of a lot of detail; like the artists just threw some random shapes together and called it a day. Also, the animation, done in Flash, is really lazy. It’s not really terrible, but it is not by any means good.
Going into the stories, like many similar shows, the episodes are broken up into two parts with two different stories. The first segment, called Pranks for Nothing, involves Scaredy accidentally causing a prank war with an egotistical jackass of a….weasel (?) named Paddy.
He initially doesn’t want to partake in the prank war, which consisted mostly of sudden wedgies and a pie to the face (real creative, guys), but after being fed up with his pranks he decides to retaliate with wuss-ified versions of pranks like flinging him across a room to land on a soft mat, making him slip on a bunch of banana peels and dumping oatmeal on his head.
Tied in the pranks, Paddy decides to trick Scaredy into thinking he broke his leg during the banana peel prank to make him basically be his guilt slave. This is also very inconsistent with the way Scaredy has been acting. He complains about pies to the face causing numerous broken nose incidents per year and makes every prank pretty harmless, yet he let Paddy slip continuously on a floor covered in banana peels only to slam face first into a refrigerator….
Scaredy waits on Paddy hand and foot. After Paddy calls him to the house to do some menial task for him, he sees Paddy take off the fake cast for a minute, which is incredibly dumb. He just called Scaredy to the house and knew he was on his way. Why take off the fake cast?
Anyway, Scaredy realizes that the entire thing was a prank that Paddy was setting up as his tie-breaking prank. Something even the dumbest of kids figured out the instant that Paddy walked on screen with a broken leg.
Paddy makes Scaredy set up a party in his honor where he plans to reveal that his leg wasn’t broken all along, at least I assume, but Scaredy, knowing he’s a faker, turns the tide on him during his speech. He rips the fake cast off, revealing his leg isn’t broken and then dumps a whole bunch of…..yellow goo stuff? On him. He ends up slipping on the goo, making him actually break his leg, and Scaredy, while offering to take care of him out of guilt yet again, runs over his other foot with a wheelbarrow. The end…?
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What a completely cliché and predictable first episode. Prank war trope + faking an injury to make someone their slave? No part of this episode was creative in the least from the writing to the art to the characters to the jokes. Everything was just flat and completely forgettable.
Beyond that, this show is just noise. I didn’t even bother watching the second segment because it was so much of a chore to sit through the first one. Everyone’s voice actor is ungodly annoying and grating, like they’re purposely directed to be that way. Their mannerisms are annoying. Their lines have no life behind them; there’s no life in this show. It’s just noise.
Verdict?
There are much better crazy, random cartoons out there to entertain yourself or your kids or whatever.
Recommended Audience: Not for people with sensitive ears, but otherwise absolutely nothing offensive. E for everyone.
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The Anime Madhouse 