User blog:Primitive Star/When Earwax Attacks review

So this episode... is not good. It's bad. It's awful. It's terrible. It's abysmal. What is it about this episode that makes me despise it with every fibre of my being? Well, I think it's the fact that it did not get one single thing right. There's absolutely nothing, NOTHING good I can say about this episode. The story? It makes zero sense and it seems like the writers made it up as they went along. The animation? Extremely cheap and lazy looking. There are plenty of shortcuts used which are all painfully noticeable. The dialogue? Absolutely abysmal. Everyone always has to state exactly what's happening on screen. Guys, kids have an attention span of over two seconds. There's only one good thing I can say about the show. Well, I wouldn't say good, but there's one aspect of the show in which it doesn't fail miserably in most parts. Most of the voice acting is tolerable. However, there is one BIG exception, and that is the voice acting of Fleabag himself. It honestly grates on my ears. And there's little things (relatively speaking) as well, like the godawful designs of Dr Spamflex and Frank Foreskin Forcemire. So let's get into this trainwreck of a dumpster fire of an episode and pick apart everything that just went wrong.

Let's start with the story. It's awful. The writers think that the definition of a plot is random crap happening with no relation. Or, at least, that's what they think little kids like in a story. The episode begins with Gene and Gerald sitting and watching this gross out show on TV. It's hosted by this guy named Dr Spamflex, who we'll get into in more detail later on in the review. Then, all of a sudden, the two boys are disturbed by... two twins silently watching a butterfly. The two boys suddenly shout "Oh no! It's the Smuglies!!!", and here's another big problem with this episode's plot. There are so many scenes that have no point to them. A long stretch of time in this episode is dedicated to letting us know that two characters with absolutely no importance to the plot exist. If this scene was removed, absolutely nothing about the episode would change. If a scene isn't funny and is of no importance to the plot, there's no reason for it to exist and it should be cut. So Dr Spamflex sets out a competition. He'll give a prize to the person who can bring in the grossest thing. So Gene and Gerald throw random crap into a toilet bowl, but lightning strikes it for no reason and somehow this causes a sentient being with a considerable intellectual capacity to hop out. How lightning striking a toilet bowl full of random junk creates life which already has the abilities to speak and walk is foreign to me. If there was supernatural activity based around it, like maybe the lightning strike came from a thunderstorm with weird activity going on, then maybe it'd be justified, but no. So anyway, Dr Spamflex's show is getting low ratings. What do you think this will cause him to do? Quit his job and get a different job? Start a different TV show? Start covering a different range of topics in his TV show in order to keep it fresh? Nope, he - get this - turns evil. He has to be one of the worst villains in animation history. I mean, c'mon, give me some sort of intriguing backstory as to why he's decided to turn evil! Anyway, he decides to create a giant earwax monster and unleash it upon the town. He tries using his own earwax, but the monster he creates is tiny. So he steals Fleabag's earwax and it creates a giant monster which attacks the town, hence this episode's title. And then the episode does something really dumb. Once Fleabag's earwax is missing, his hearing impairment is gone. You know, the hearing impairment that wasn't mentioned once beforehand? Seriously, the show establishes two characters who have nothing to do with the episode and fails to mention something that would have a clear payoff? Even if they had mentioned it earlier, it would've been useless if it hadn't shown that it was a serious setback for Fleabag, but failing to mention it at all? C'mon! So Fleabag defeats the monster with gross-out power, Gene and Gerald get their own TV show, and Dr Spamflex's TV show gets cancelled. This horrible episode finally ends and I can finally stop talking about it. Oh wait, no, I can't, I only talked about the story. There's still the animation, the dialogue, the characters, the voice acting... uurgh...

Now to talk about the animation. Of course, Fleabag Monkeyface is a TV show, and it's not expected to have the same quality animation as you'd expect in a full feature-length movie. It's fine for a TV show to have low quality animation as long as it does it right. And this show does not. There are numerous painfully obvious shortcuts used when making the episode. Not only that, but CGI does not work well with gross-out shows. It makes everything look uncanny. This TV show didn't have to be CG. It would've worked ten times better with 2D animation. Why didn't they go with that? Not to mention the character designs. Gene and Gerald look almost identical to George and Harold from Captain Underpants (hell, even their names are similar). Fleabag Monkeyface looks awful. The Smuglies' designs are passable, but don't stand out at all. Not to mention Dr Spamflex and Frank Forcemire's horrendous designs. They both look like giant p***ses. I don't know whether or not that was intentional, but Dr Spamflex's design must've been looked at by like twenty people, surely at least one of them must've noticed it, unless, of course, it was intentionally like that.

The characters. They're all awful. Gene and Gerald are huge rip-offs of George and Harold from Captain Underpants. Hell, the entire show is a huge rip-off of Captain Underpants. A TV show about two kids making a superhero based on toilet humour? Anyway, Gene and Gerald don't stand out. At. All. They stand out neither from themselves or other kid characters. Fleabag Monkeyface has an awful design and a horrendous voice that makes me want to cut off my ears. The Smuglies are incredibly bland and generic. None of the characters stand out in my mind.

And, of course, I have to talk about the jokes. None of them work. Most of it is just gross-out humour. Most shows work because they have a wide variety of humour. One reason this show fails is because there's only one type of humour, gross-out humour.

And the dialogue. It makes no sense. Every time something happens, it gets repeated by one of the characters, as if kids can't tell what's happening in front of it. And, at one point, Dr Spamflex talks about how Fleabag is defeating him, and Deathbeak says how his powers are too strong, BEFORE HE EVEN STARTED USING THEM!!!

Overall, this episode is just garbage. An atrocious episode from an atrocious show. The end.