Category Talkin’ Nerdy

Talkin’ Nerdy: Hub Needs Moms

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Today on Talkin’ Nerdy I’d like to discuss something which has getting up my craw for some time now, and is really just part of a darker, more disturbing trend that’s been grinding my gears for much of my creative life:  namely, the trend of leaving mother characters out of the fun in fiction, specifically the curious lack of mothers on notable Hub shows.

For instance, take Transformers Rescue Bots….please. OK, that was kind of a cheap shot, but when I first heard about this show and it was compared to the likes of Marvel’s Super Hero Squad Show, I actually thought TRB was going to be lighthearted wacky spoof show a la SHS or Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Instead, we get this somewhat stale show meant to teach kids about safety and clearly and very visibly intended to sell a new wave of Transformers toys to prepubescent boys. Look, I have nothing against safety and lessons about safety; heck, as a kid I received an Officer Friendly coloring book and I liked it well enough, and I understand that it’s show business and many of The Hub’s shows are designed to sell toys, but I have a greater appreciation for the ones that at least try to entertain me a bit in the process of pounding lessons into my head and coaxing me to buy stuff. Rescue Bots‘ biggest crime is that it’s just dull.

It’s second biggest crime is the point of this discussion: OK, the premise of TRB is that these 4 Transformers land on an island town somewhere in Maine called Griffin Rock, where a group of Autobots named Heatwave, Boulder, Blades and Chase respond to Optimus Prime’s message for any active Autobots in space to arrive to Earth. Coming out of a long stasis, learning what became of Cybertron and that they are the only Rescue-Bot team remaining, they are partnered with the Burns family composed of first response rescuers. Together, they learn teamwork and heroism alongside their human friends as they deal with various disasters. Each bot is paired with a different family member relating to what type of vehicle they are: Chase turns into a police car and so is partnered with dad Chief Charlie Burns, Heatwave turns into a fire engine and is partnered with firefighting son Kade Burns, Boulder turns into bulldozer and is partnered with construction engineer son Graham Burns, and Blades turns into a rescue helicopter and is partnered with helicopter pilot daughter Dani Burns. The youngest member of the family, the very blond Cody Burns, is the bland kid protagonist of the show. What’s wrong with this picture? Where’s Mama Burns? Forget where is she, who is she? They never mention a mother or her whereabouts. If Charlie’s a widower or a divorcee, then it must have just happened, since Cody doesn’t appear to be any older than 10. But why does the Burns family not have a mother? Would it have killed the show’s writers to include a mom as part of the team? Actually, from a marketing standpoint, I think I know why: Transformers Rescue Bots is aimed primarily at young boys, who by and large think “girls are icky”, and only a boy with mountain-sized self-esteem would be willing to own a Rescue Bot piloted by a mom. I think the only reason they have a daughter character is to avoid pressure from women’s groups. This show is so overtly boy-centric that the only 2 female characters of any importance on TRB have the androgynous names Dani and Frankie. So while I can see why there’s no Mom Burns, I still think it’s bullocks. If you’re going to put a daughter on the team, then you might as well have a mom. And for anyone who says that moms don’t make good action heroes, Helen Parr/Elastigirl from The Incredibles and Drew Saturday from The Secret Saturdays say hi. Heck, even the Bionic Six had a mom, and she was actually one of the heroes, she didn’t just stay home and bake cookies while the rest of the family was out saving the world.

 

The Transformers Rescue Bots family. But where’s Mom? Is she vacationing on Cyberton or did she just sample some of Sam Witwicky’s college roommate’s brownies??

But, wait: Cody’s platonic little friend Francine “Frankie” Greene doesn’t have a mother either. She has a dad, Doc Greene, but again, no sight, sign or mention of a mom. What the what, Hub? Do the producers of this show have some kind of mother-phobia or something? I could probably see 1 motherless family on the show, but 2? Really?? To add insult to injury, one episode featured a lady scientist whom Doc Greene seemed to have a thing for, and those feelings seemed to be mutual. OK, so it’s all right to have potential girlfriends dangled before the audience’s eyes, but moms are a big no-no? WTH? If the writers are going to give Doc a potential girlfriend, they could’ve just given him a wife to start with, and been done with it.

The Hub’s “Moms are kryptonite” mentality unfortunately isn’t restricted to 1 show on the network. Another guilty party in this alarming trend is Littlest Pet Shop. I actually like LPS so it pains to have to put this show on my hit list, but they’re guilty of the same crime: its’ protagonist, Blythe Baxter, lives with her dad, your typical goofball father Roger Baxter, but Mrs. Baxter is nowhere to be seen and is never mentioned, not even in passing. Even during a series of flashbacks in the “So You Skink You Can Dance”, we see little Blythe and her dad interacting, but still no mom to be seen or heard from anywhere. So was Blythe grown in a test tube or what?? I can at least understand why the Burns family on TRB doesn’t have a mother, though its one of the things I hate most about the show, but I at least get why from a marketing standpoint. Littlest Pet Shop, by contrast, is based on a toy line aimed squarely, if not exclusively, at girls, so I really don’t get why Blythe couldn’t have 2 parents on the show. Part of the reason why Roger is so frequently annoying is that there’s no contrast; the household needs a somewhat more competent parent to provide a counterbalance to Roger’s goofiness. It’s like having the Odd Couple with only Oscar. Heck, I would even take a goofy embarrassing mom over no mom at all. And what’s more, the show’s rivals/frenemy characters, Whitney and Britney Biskit, likewise don’t have a mother. They’re constantly mentioning their father, Fisher Biskit, whose even made a couple of appearances on the show, but again no mother. At first I though maybe Mrs. Biskit was just perpetually off-camera, but then the episode “Bakers and Flakers” aired, and the only parent to show up at the school bake-off was Fisher, basically confirming that the Biskits are likewise motherless.*

The closest thing Littlest Pet Shop has to a mother figure is the character of Blythe’s friend Youngmee Song’s Aunt Christie, but as her title implies, Christie is Youngmee’s aunt, not her mother. Though given her quasi-maternal relationship with her niece and also how so far we have yet to see any of Youngmee’s other adult relatives, the LPS writers could have easily made Christie Youngmee’s mom and it wouldn’t have altered the stories in any way. But apparently protagonists on Hub shows can’t have moms or else it would split the Earth in two. Even an upcoming Hub acquisition, Wizards VS Aliens, features a lead character who lives with his dad and grandma. So grandmothers are OK, but mothers? That’s the line, right? Got it, Hub.

 

Roger Baxter and his daughter Blythe, who was sculpted from magical clay on the island of Themyscira. Hey, show me where Blythe’s mom is and I’ll take it back.

I’m just going to say this right now, if you haven’t guessed already: I hate single fathers in fiction. The Dead/Missing Mom trope is one of my least favorite cliches in fiction, and it’s one I’ve vowed to never employ as a writer. Why, you may ask? I can’t provide a better answer than Jason, who when asked the same question, responded with this: “Because I like marriage humor and MILFs, and with single dads, you don’t get either.” I can’t speak for Transformers Rescue Bots, as I don’t proactively follow that show nor do I regularly converse with its’ fans, but I know that I’m not the only one who’s been asking about the identity or whereabouts of Blythe’s mother. It’s probably a subject that the show’s writers have no plans of ever addressing unless they’re pressured to by fans, similar to the question of whatever happened to Chuckie’s mother on Rugrats; the producers largely ignored this question but fans persisted in asking about it, so the producers were finally forced to acknowledge it and change the status quo accordingly, first with a Mother’s Day special, then by making it the plot of the 3rd movie. I don’t know if LPS needs to go that far, but it wouldn’t kill them to address it at least once, like, say, have Blythe lament “I miss Mom” in some given scene. Of course, if they had given Blythe a mom in the first place, they wouldn’t have to do anything.

Finally, I’d like to give an honorable mention to Dreamworks’ The Croods. It remains to be seen how well this movie will perform at the box office, but I’ll give Dreamworks one iota of credit in regards to the mother of the cave family, Ugga, namely, that they actually have a mother! In far too many animated family movies of this ilk, the mother is just straight-up dead before the movie even starts, but Dreamworks avoided that cliche here, and for that, I’m grateful. If we can see this tired old trope continue to get snuffed out over time, I’ll be a happier camper.

*ADDENDUM: In the subsequent seasons since this article was written, Hasbro has since rectified their ‘no mother’ situation on Littlest Pet Shop at least. Season 4 featured the first ever on-camera mention of Blythe’s mom Betty, and in an admittedly clever bit of comedy, in this same season it was also revealed that Whittany and Brittany Biskit also indeed have a mother. Furthermore, the writers turned the Biskits’ mom Eliza’s sudden appearance into an in-universe joke, implying that Eliza Biskit had been there all along and we the audience had simply never seen her before. Jason plans on doing a full retrospective on LPS’ 4th (and evidently, final) season sometime after season 4 is complete, but in the meantime…

Eliza_Biskit

Good on ya, Hasbro. Well played.

Talkin’ Nerdy: The Plight of Lila Test

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Hello and welcome to a new segment on Twinsanity: Talkin’ Nerdy, where we take a cartoon character or trope and devote far too much attention to it. Why do we do this? Because we’re huge geeks. Why else?

Today I’m going to discuss the situation concerning one of the supporting characters on Cartoon Network’s Johnny Test, a series that’s like a zombie that refuses to stay dead. Now, I’ve already stated my opinions on JT in an article during the early days of Twinsanity (back when it was still called Astral City) titled “What’s Eating Johnny Test”, and anyone who remembers that article already knows how I feel about the show; I think that Test is a better idea than a show and I think that Johnny himself is the worst part of his own show because he’s a selfish jerky Bart Simpson wanna be. No, I won’t be talking about how much I think that Johnny sucks. Rather, I’ll be talking about his mother, Lila.

Ah, Lila Test. She’s got a white collar office job and legs ’til Tuesday.
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I stopped watching Test quite a while ago, but in the time that I had been watching Johnny Test, Lila has since become one of my favorite characters on the show after Susan & Mary and the Dukey the dog. Hey, I can’t help it. I’m a sucker for a lady in a short-skirted dress suit. The problem is that Lila won’t be seen for several shorts at a time. It’s hard enough to try to enjoy a show when the title character is the one that I like the least, but then add to that the fact that 1 of the few characters that I actually like is hardly ever used.

Lila is one of my favorite characters on JT, and I dislike how sometimes the writers seem as though they forget that she exists at all. I get that Lila is the “super busy” mom and that the Test house is role reversed (I actually like this idea, in fact) and that it’s the mom, rather than the dad who has the job and who works during the day, therefore sometimes the writers can use her being at work as an excuse for her to not be at home, and I’m OK with that. My problem is the other times where logically, Lila should be around, but will still be inexplicably absent. For example, in the episodes “Johnny’s Sleepover”, “Johnny’s Big Snow Job”, “Johnny’s Trophy Case”, “Johnny Germ Fighter” and “Outdoor Johnny”, Lila doesn’t appear, or even get a casual mention, which annoys me greatly. Lila never appears on screen in season 1’s “Saturday Night’s all Right for Johnny”, but she was mentioned a few times, particularly in Hugh’s love speech to Johnny, indicating that she was indeed home, just off camera. She’s not present at the Porkbelly World Record ceremony in “Johnny’s World Record” and she’s even a no-show at Johnny’s going away party in “99 Deeds for Johnny Test”. It makes it look like she doesn’t give a frag. Basically, it’s as though Johnny Test‘s writers made Lila a workaholic so they can say that they have a mom in the Test family without actually having her there most of the time.

The biggest blunder of all has to be the half hour 3rd season finale “JX5”. In this story, Darth Vegan and his forces invade the planet Earth. The invasion is broadcast on live TV and there still no sign or mention of Lila whatsoever! Where the heck was Lila during all of this? There’s no way that Lila was just having a normal day at work when the entire flipping planet was facing imminent doom! The invasion had nationwide news coverage, fer cryin’ out loud! If just once, Johnny or 1 of the Twins had mentioned their mom just once instead of temporarily forgetting that they even have a mom, then I might have cut this episode some slack, but as since “JX5” almost seemed like it was intended as a possible series finale and the writers managed to find parts so many other supporting and recurring characters (including a plot hiccup where Hugh gets frozen by Brain Freezer and then he never shows up again nor is he even referred to by anyone else for the rest of the episode, thus leaving us to wonder for months whether or not he was murdered*), for Lila not to make a single appearance or even get a mention by anyone was unforgivably lazy.

Now I understand that in some cases, it could simply be a case that the shows’ writers don’t have anything for Lila to do in these stories, but often times, it seems as though Hugh gets shoehorned into many stories, even when it’s just a couple of brief scenes. If Test‘s writers can come up with some little parts for Hugh, then why can’t they do the same for Lila?

I’m not suggesting that Test‘s writers change the shows’ focus and make it Lila’s show or anything, but Lila is a member of the Test family and she does live in the same house as Johnny, the Twins, Dukey and Hugh. It would just be nice if they would acknowledge the character’s existence more than once in a while. She doesn’t have to be prominently featured in every story. She doesn’t even have to have dialogue in all of her appearances. Just have here there sitting around or doing something so that the character’s existence can be acknowledged. But I’d rather Lila be there and not do much than not be there at all. I’d just prefer it if the character would show up, even in brief cameos, than not show up at all.

*It was just like in the 3rd season finale of The Powerpuff Girls titled “Slumbering With the Enemy” where Mojo Jojo steals a conveniently placed bottle of “Antidote X” from Professor Utonium’s lab (begging the question of why the Prof should happen to have that in the house) and takes away the girls’ powers and then they don’t get them back at the end of the episode, so for the next 3 months, we were left wondering what was going to happen to the PPGs and then the new season starts with no mention of the previous episode’s events. It’e like that. I’m just saying that it can bug a guy.

Talkin’ Nerdy: Robot Chicken Dungeons & Dragons Sketch Gets an F

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I’m sure that most of us here are already familiar with the Adult Swim stop motion animated sketch comedy series Robot Chicken, created by Seth Green and Matt Senriech (sorry if misspelled your last name, Matt), so I wont go into that.  Anyway, RC has done numerous parodies of popular toys, games and TV shows, primarily from the 1970s through the early 00s, so for a while, I was wondering when is RC going to do a parody of Dungeons & Dragons, the Marvel produced Saturday morning cartoon that was loosely based on the popular card game which ran on CBS from 1983 to 1985? I used to watch the D&D cartoon every week. I even have the DVD of the entire series. There were a lot of elements and tropes about the D&D cartoon which were ripe for parody. Well, in Robot Chicken’s 5th season, we finally get a D&D parody sketch and we get…this:


One word: Lame.

Seriously, Robot Chicken? You guys had the Smurfs engaging in an all out battle to the death with Snorks. You had Archie and the gang reenacting the movie Final Destination. You had the cast of Fraggle Rock in a parody of Watership Down You had the Keebler elves fighting off a rampaging Cookie Monster, and that’s really the best that you could come up for a Dungeons & Dragons parody?

Allow me to break down the reasons why this D&D sketch fails:

First, anyone who has seen the show knows that there were 6 kids who transported from our world into the Dungeons & Dragons realm courtesy of the D&D ride at the amusement park, and yet there are only 3 kids shown in the sketch (Hank, Diana and Eric). So what happened to Sheila, Presto and Bobby? If they weren’t going to be there, there should have been a reason provided as to why they weren’t there.

Second, the kids in the sketch barely resembled the cartoon characters that they were supposed to represent. Now, I wasn’t expecting Willie Aames to come back to reprise his role as Hank (although it would have been great if he had), but the guy who’s supposed to be Hank looked nothing like the Hank on the cartoon. They just took the Matt Tracker figure from their earlier MASK sketch and dressed it in an outfit that kinda sorta resembled the one that Hank wore, even though Hank’s Ranger outfit was green, not brown. And also, Hank had medium length rock-star hair, not short hair. Did these guys even see the show?

Third, no lines for Eric. After having seen how brilliantly Reggie Mantle was handled in the aforementioned Archie sketch, I couldn’t wait to see how RC was going to depict the spoiled, sardonic, complaining Eric, but he doesn’t get a single line of dialogue to utter here! Talk about dropping the ball.

Fourth, out of all the tropes and running bits on the show that RC could have made fun of, all we get is a lame  bit about Venger only having 1 horn on his helmet? That’s been joked about in the actual show. They could have parodied how Dungeon Master was always sending the kids off on dangerous missions and also have him sending them to perform demeaning tasks that he himself doesn’t to be bothered with on the promise the he’ll send them home once they’ve completed their tasks (which could include buying DM’s groceries or taking his car to the shop), only to discover that DM could send the kids back home anytime that he wants to and just like having them do stuff for him, and upon finding out the truth, the kids proceed to beat the snot of Dungeon Master. And that was just something that I pulled out of my pants a couple of days ago!

Finally, the sketch ends with a cut to a caption which reads “Venger never found his horn”. Not funny. RC have ended a few of their sketches this way, but it fails to amuse each time it’s been done.

Bottom line: If you know very little about the show, don’t bother trying to spoof it (and this also goes for RC’s painfully unfunny documentary skit about the 90s cartoons).

Robot Chicken is a mixed bag overall. The show is funny when the team has a good concept, but when the show misses the mark, it really misses the mark. I’ve been waiting since the show began to see Seth, Matt and the team write a parody of another CBS Saturday morning cartoon, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, when of if that ever happens, I really hope that they’ll actually put some effort into it and we’ll get a better result than what we got with this parody of D&D.