Tag Johnny Test

Cartoon Country: Johnny Test in “Johnny’s Big Snow Job”

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Today Cartoon Country looks at the season 1 Johnny Test episode, “Johnny’s Big Snow Job”. The plot: it’s winter time in Porkbelly, and Johnny, being the Totally Rad Dude (TM) that he is, wants a snow day so he can snowboard and slack off from school, but the town is instead in the midst of an unseasonable heat wave. So as always he turns to his much more appealing and interesting genius twin sisters, Susan and Mary, to whip up a snow making machine. They do, Johnny overdoes it as usual, and wackiness ensues.

OK, time for the nitpicks:

1. In the middle of the story, after the machine goes haywire, Johnny remarks that he and his family have been trapped indoors for a month. A month?? Yeah, even by cartoon logic I have to call BS on that. I live on the East Coast and I’ve unfortunately been snowed in during my share of winters; most people are climbing the walls after 2 days, but these guys are just nonchalantly chillaxing at home after being trapped inside for a month? No. By Day 30 it should be like Lord of the Flies in there.

2. Notice anything missing in that scene? Where the smeg was their mom, Lila? Yeah, I know part of her character’s shtick is that she’s “super busy” and all that, but come on. They’ve all been buried under several feet of snow. The dad Hugh said that the entire town had run out of food. If that were truly the case, then all non-essential businesses would be closed. No way would Lila be off having a normal day at work in the middle of a Snowpocalypse. And if she somehow were able to tunnel her way out to go to work, then they could just travel to the next nearby town and get some freaking food! How hard would it have been for the artists to simply draw Lila at the table with the rest of the family? Even if Kathleen Barr wasn’t available to voice the character, the writers could have acknowledged her existence, given the extraordinary circumstances. That was just lazy. (Unless the family resorted to cannibalism and ate Lila somewhere around day 15, and I can’t believe that for a second; if they really were going to resort to that, then Johnny would logically be the first one to go into the pot.)

That aside, “Johnny’s Big Snow Job” was fairly entertaining, by Johnny Test standards, anyway. Some of the gags were pretty amusing, like the weatherman plugging a sports drink in the middle of his broadcast or the montage where Johnny and Dukey are begging the twins to make it snow (the fact that you got to see Susan and Mary in swimsuits didn’t hurt either), and this was a season 1 episode, back when the show was still a co-production between Teletoon and Warner Bros., so the animation was pretty decent.

And it was all downhill from there.

And it was all downhill from there.

Why The Test Twins Are Awesome!

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  1. They’re cute.
  2. They’re twins. We multiple births have to stick together.
  3. They’re geniuses. Big ups to the super geeks!
  4. They make wearing thick framed glasses seem cool.
  5. They have an amazing high-tech laboratory stored within their otherwise ordinary suburban house. Yeah, Dexter did it first, but it’s still very cool.
  6. They wear those symbols (Susan – star, Mary – crescent moon) as hair clips and also on their shorts and those symbols are present on everything they wear.
  7. They once dressed as super villains with stylish hair and black spandex outfits.
  8. Mary has that cute voice and wears those cute green moon insignia sneakers.
  9. Susan wears that adorable mini-skirt.
  10. They genetically modified Johnny’s dog Dukey, giving him human intelligence, the ability to speak and mad martial arts skills. Top that, Dog Whisperer!
  11. They’re the best thing about Johnny Test. Easily. It certainly isn’t Johnny himself, whom I find to be nails-across-a-chalkboard annoying.

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.