So, I sacked up and decided to try and see the episode through to the end. Aside from cutting out to answer messages on deviantArt and Discord, I found it hard to get through the first episode in one sitting. It was just so uninteresting, and it was practically unashamed of it. So, let's hope this'll be my definitive review of what I'd consider to be the worst cartoon show of all time, or perhaps one of the most mediocre shows out there.
History
Yeah, sorry, but I need to make sure I get everyone up to speed on a contextual basis.
It isn't exactly easy to find info on this show. Episodes are available, but its inception is a mystery. Even basic research is impossible. You won't find anything on Wikipedia, aside from an entry on their German site which only gives a slight sliver on where it aired.
The show was produced in 2006 for a typical 13 episode season, but didn't come out until 2014. While it seemed like I was able to get a clue on what network the show aired on in Germany, out of three, I'm stumped on all fronts. This apparently aired on eoTV and Fix and Foxi domestically, but another network identified was Your Family Entertainment, a holding company responsible for managing the works of one of the principal producers.
I don't know for sure if this ever aired in the US, but an English version exists, provided it's not the only version that ever existed. While I got an idea on where this aired in Germany, it was said this got released (at least according to TVTropes) in the US. But no network was ever specified on there, plus the nearly eight year window opens up more questions. If I had to guess, had this actually come out in 2006, maybe Nicktoons would've got it as around that time they were acquiring shows from around the world.
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| And she couldn't possibly blame her brother for that as it'd be a cartoon and not a sitcom. |
If this wasn't released on television in the US, maybe it got a worldwide release on DVD. The one promotional image I found of it looks like it'd belong on a DVD case. Also, in the US this is referred to as MP4ORCE Beyond Real, and there's more to that come the actual episode.
The studio behind this was Berlin Animation Film. You may recognize them as one of the studios behind the relatively forgettable film Happily N'Ever After. The show was backed by the studio's owner, Berliner Film Companie (or BFC Entertainment.) Aside from working on this and Happily N'Ever After, they are perhaps best known for producing the age all classic, Da Boom Crew.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume it's incredibly cheap to produce anything in Germany. It was the same country that brought us Uwe Boll for the love of Edward Canby. For a better idea on why I feel this way, check out the average Warner Bros. International Television show produced with assistance from UFA International Film & Television GmbH. They aired in syndication, consider that a fair warning, okay they also produced a cheap ass TV movie for Fox in the late-90s too.
Voices for the show were recorded in Germany, as well as in Toronto. Among eight actors credited to this, two are singled out. The first singled out is Jeff Burrell, he came from New York and moved to Berlin some time after (hey, what I wouldn't give to get out of this state for good, or at least out of the boroughs permanently.) He plays Devlan13, who I'm going to refer to as Dumbass13 later on.
The other top billed actor is Jonathan Mallen, who appeared in a number of things, which include Mean Girls and Angela Anaconda. In this he plays the cocky stereotype guy. Then there's Jonathan Failla, and this is going into the participant section. I don't know who he played, but he looks like he played a deep-voice guy who happens to be the villain. He never appeared in anything I've seen before.
We then get into more familiar territory, we have the voice of Wyatt from 6Teen, he's uncredited but my instincts tell me he's voicing a token black guy. Then there's Tajja Issen, aka Atomic Betty, aka one of many shows I have a bone to pick with. There's Marty Sander who's listed as a female for some reason. Look, I'm not getting much on them, they've been off the map since 2008 with some other German exclusive show which oddly looks more interesting in terms of style.
The remaining two actors only had this show to their name, so you know at least one of the two have to suck ass.
An Episode
As mentioned before, I cut out a few minutes into the episode. But just know that when I tried to be fair and see it all the way through, it didn't feel rewarding. Waiting for messages on deviantArt and Discord was a more fulfilling experience than this show.
First thing's first is the intro, while I could find diddly on the composer, the vocals were performed by Natascha Grin and Vernon D. Hill. I imagine they're big in Germany, but I couldn't find anything painfully interesting about them to warrant further discussion. As for the song, when you take into account where this show came from, it'd make perfect sense. It's a Europop techno song, Euro's in the name so you can't help but point out that association. As for the song itself, even for the year it came out, it sounds dated, what with its incorporation of rap and tone deaf vocals. The song itself may be catchy to some, but at large it comes off as generic, thanks to its inane lyrics. Sorry to say, but it's one of those you gotta hear for yourself deals.
The episode begins with my favorite kind of characters, archetypes. We have the cocky annoying arrogant archetype, the blonde girl type, the alternative looking girl that people latch onto and make a shit ton of fanart out of (but that never happened since I'm one of two people who heard of this show) type, and the most wonderful of them all... black. But wait, he's not just black, he's a black nerd. You really reinvented the genre. While I'm not the kind of person who loses it over representation, I will say that the inclusion of an African American character this way seems hollow.
Anyways, this show abides to the ever-typical stop the bad douche framework. These four gamers, or how a fifty+ year old man imagines gamers to be like, are up against a villain who for the life of me I can't remember the name of, so I'll just call him The Emo Tick (if you heard of The Tick, whether it be the cartoon or the Fox show or whatever came after, you got taste)
I'm just gonna say right off the bad, the dialog is garbage. While it isn't littered with slang, it sounds incredibly forced. I have the feeling the people behind this have never encountered another human being before, or perhaps this show was produced entirely by a machine. Most of the dialog consists of stating the obvious, lines falling in line with character archetypes, and at one point someone uses the word "overrated" as a diss against a villain early on in the episode.
Right after a round of the game they're playing (and for the record it's actually called MP4ORCE: Beyond Real, stated in full to add to the ass dialog), we meet Damien Darkstone, aka Damien Dumbshit, aka Devlan13, aka Dumbass13, aka...
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| Kevin 11 |
I was kidding around when I compared the villain douche to The Tick, but that is low-key Kevin 11 from Ben 10. I imagine this show was completed some time after Kevin got introduced. For everyone throwing inane rip-off accusations at other shows, check out MP4ORCE and then talk to me about rip-offs, provided your head doesn't explode from what you witness.
So why am I calling this kid a dumbass? Well he plays a rival character who's against the main four, holy redundancy Batman, and he always loses. He wouldn't last ten seconds with that World of Warcraft player from South Park. But anyway, before I get off-track, getting his ass handed to him one time two many had left him desperate. So what happens? He sees a cheat code, a very specific cheat code that allows him to win every time. Guess what ha- he types it in, and as a result gets the show's entire conflict going.
You know, people gave Mabel shit for getting Weirdmageddon going. But personally, I understand why she did it, she felt scared of what her future would hold. She had a drive for accepting Bill Cipher's deception. Think what you want about what Mabel did, but by default, she had a better reason to do what she did than Damien. Damien didn't question an oddly specific cheat code that came out of nowhere, and I mean he didn't look it up it just popped up on his screen. I guess it was sent by the Emo Tick because Damien aided him in the game, but how could he not question it. Damien comes off as the kind of person who'd download just about anything. Bet his computer is littered with junk and spyware.
After each landing a spot in the high score chart, they are contacted by Claxon, or as blonde, bland and bad at acting say, "the guardian from MP4ORCE." Please note this girl has some of the worst acting in any show I've ever seen. All I can say about this guardian guy is...
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| Dude, you look like sperm. |
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| Never heard that one before. |
Following some more totally natural dialog that doesn't suggest these kids had never spent much time out of the arcade, they get sent to a station where they'd be put into the game to take the Emo Tick head on. Throughout this, I think they want us to hate the cocky kid, call it a blind hunch but I think they want us to hate this kid, he doesn't shut up.
Meanwhile, Damien Dumbshit has evolved into Dumbass13, and in case you weren't paying attention, the A grade dialog has your back, they feel the need to explain key plot points as if you have the attention span of a reality show junkie. Because, as his nickname implies, he's an idiot, he freed Emo Tick from the game, and now he's set on digitizing the world so he could rule it from his own domain (he has ghost attributes in the real world, shown through scenes that try to be funny, but come off as tacky, with an exposition-based coating.)
Now, did someone say let's pad out the episode by including a gearing up montage and then showing the characters point out the game characters they've become? Well you got this far, what do you think happens? This does nothing but alert Emo Tick to them being in the game.
After padding that'd make Scooby Doo and the Cyber Chase blush, we get into the game, and we start off in an ice level, the finest of all levels. If this show went on I imagine they'd incorporate a sewer level somehow. In this, we get the typical video game representation in TV show schlock, desperate attempts to establish camaraderie through the ever common and totally not repetitive concept of teamwork, running low on energy where the stakes are little to none. Hey, if this show is so reliant on exposition, just say that if they die in the game, they die for real. Gamebox 1.0 never mentioned this directly, but even that film handled things better, regardless of how cheesy it is.
Also now we get a whole new collection of archetypes related to their video game characters, we have the cocky hero type, the voice of reason who often scolds the cocky hero type and tends to act like an ass when the cocky hero type falls flat, Tommy Wiseau if he were a girl and sucked harder at acting... black guy?
The only thing interesting that happens is some banter between Emo Tick and Dumbass13, the latter is more standoffish than I imagined. Congratulations, you had one series of moments that didn't make me feel like my brain was dripping out of my nose. From here it's just combat, with nothing new or exciting to warrant a word beyond acknowledgement. They obviously win the game, I know, I didn't expect that either, Dumbass13 devolves to Damien Dumbshit and goes to deal with his mother. Probably gave away her credit card info for something advertised online.
If you're expecting some drama to have happened during the fight, you'd be shit out of luck. The voice of reason one gets frozen, and this doesn't hold any emotional weight, just some incredibly stupid dialog to follow the discovery. The show isn't a comedy, it's hardly a gritty action show, it's the closet we have to sheer nothing. But there is a lesson in all this. Don't cheat. Yeah, I'm gonna say it, Sabrina's Secret Life did morals better than this, at least the plots of the episode would fit in with the moral.
Nothing else interesting happens, and that could go for the entire episode, stay tuned for the closing statements, because I will put down harder than the Great Grape Ape.
Animation
The animation is deceptive. On the surface, it looks good, but if you pay close attention there're nuances you can't ignore. We've got a whole kettle of fish in the first episode alone. Some characters are completely still while only one moves in most scenes. In the very beginning, it looks like these gamer dorks are acting like they're a movie character pretending to play video games (the screens don't move but they sure do), heck, during the montage, it looks as though they pasted JPGs of the game characters onto the screen and moved them with a mouse. It looks to be a mix between 2D and 3D animation, but they couldn't quite pull it off.
And I can't stand the art style.
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| Anime grin FTW. Why would anyone smile while shutting their eyes in these kinds of shows? |
A big hangup I have with anime styled shows is their over-consistency. You see one anime styled show, you've seen like 80% of the rest. You can identify many nuances (and how many times am I going to use that word in my lifetime?) in shows like these. Frankly, I'm just sick of seeing it. Somehow, the art style looks incredibly bland here, nothing ever truly pops out unless it's something you can't possibly ignore.
All of that just amplifies how bland this show truly is.
Overall
I'd just like to point this out for the last time, the first time I saw this episode, I quit after a few minutes. Trying to sit through the episode to the end felt like hell to me. It was a big mistake. If this did air in the states, either nobody watched it or they did and tried their hardest to forget it even existed. It's rare to see a show try its hardest to be as bland as possible, bland characters taking it up the ass through archetypical characterizations, a bland premise that begs for comparisons to existing properties, a bland art style, and other things that I'm too wiped to point out directly. Also plagarism.
I would normally say don't watch this show at this point, but given how I'm one of two people who've heard of it... more people need to see this show. More people need to talk about this show. People love to ravage more comedic shows because they're easy targets, well now I discovered a skid mark so vile it's bound to open a grander can of worms in the action genre of cartoons. Bring this show up to whoever you want, RebelTaxi, Saberspark, Mr. Enter, anybody who can put this on the map. We can't leave this stone unturned, no matter how heavy and out of the way it is.
All I wanna do now is check out an episode of The Loud House themed around a video game, you know, cleanse the mind with something more palatable, get some pizza and sleep. But first, I just got a pop-up, ooh, Channeleven Lives Forever cheat code. Well if Damien Darkstone taught me anything, it's to not approach weird messages with caution. Just insert my credit card info and-
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