Recess review

Let's be real, does anyone even still remember Recess at this point?

When it comes to cartoons, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network have typically been the most prevalently discussed, for both the right and wrong reasons. As they received the most attention, for years Disney had remained as a third wheel until slowly climbing out.

It's safe to say that Disney's cartoons have gotten better over the years, even if the mid-2000s boasted mediocre entries (and this is coming from someone who doesn't hate The Buzz on Maggie (seriously, what's everyone's deal with that show?), ever since it strayed from the overrated Disney Afternoon and reliance on existing Disney properties.

Anyhow, Disney is also unique to me, in that I never grew up with it, at all, for my childhood it was the big N and the big CN until I stuck with Nicktoons Network and TBS, then Lifetime/Lifetime Movie Network, then I just stopped watching TV altogether (that is, until I get my own place, a stable income and a determination of whether or not I want to stay single and just stick with streaming until loneliness gets to me.)

I had made it apparent before, but in case you're new, I'm not a fan of Recess. If you're gonna assume the fans drove me to it, I wound up hating this show out of my own volition. It looked to have the makings of becoming Disney's answer to Fairly Odd Parents, and who knows how much worse it could've become had it continued.

So anyway, history

Recess was one of the first few original shows to debut during Disney's One Saturday Morning block in the late-90s. The show was spearheaded by Paul Germain, one of three developers of Rugrats and Joe Ansolabehere, one of three developers for Hey Arnold!.

I'm catching a pattern here. The show was created by third wheels. Arlene Klasky and Garbor Csupo were the primary developers and show-runners of Rugrats, and as for Hey Arnold! Craig Bartlett created and developed the show, and Steve Viksten went as far as voicing a prominent recurring character.

I mean more power to them, if you have ideas don't be afraid to express them, that's my reason for living. Germain and Ansolabehere would go on to crate Lloyd in Space (which to me is a better show) and work on the first season of Pound Puppies, well the reboot of course, I won't judge that one, I went into the latest Sabrina the Teenage Witch adaptation expecting to hate it, but I consider it to be the best animated adaptation, so maybe Pound Puppies could at least be palatable to me.

Ordinarily the drop-off for any show like this at the time is two seasons, three tops. But you wanna know how lo- six seasons. This show lasted for six seasons and got four movies, not just direct-to-video, but direct-to-video and a theatrical film.

Oh they were pushing this, working their mad voodoo to mangle this however they could, while sensible people went on to watch Codename: Kids Next Door (and yeah, I don't hate KND, in fact I like it very much.), I mean after it started airing which was about a year after the show stopped making new episodes.

Maybe I'm more pissed over how Disney tried to milk this show for more than it's worth, or the characters, or maybe I'm just reaching to cry ugly, who knows.

Hate Mail Pitch

Recess follows a trend that's more or less ongoing with many Disney show. Any show that doesn't follow an anthropomorphic character are borderline slice-of-life affairs, at the very least focusing on real kids.

I'm not gonna rag on any kid-focused show for being unrealistic, especially if something other-worldly is the sole point of it. But if it goes wrong then that's when it's a good time to strike. The Replacements was watchable, if not a bit predictable and generic, Phineas and Ferb went on for longer than it should've but still had enough staying power to prevent the Simpsons-type complaints, I guess everything else is fine.

If I had it my way this show would've been rendered boring almost instantly. I feel my biggest issue is that it provides an idealized perspective on childhood. Think of a mix between Codename Kids Next Door and Animal House where kids have roles outside of being average kids and doing over the top acts just to stick it to the higher authorities.

With six seasons, it'd be hard to get my fill through a small sampling, and I'm bound to piss off fans because I didn't look over what they consider highlights. Of the episodes I've seen, I saw one where Spinelli was in a funk over not knowing what career path she wanted to follow, technically twice as a nostalgic revisit (I caught the episode briefly while channel surfing), I saw the episode centering on repairing an old bus, I saw an episode where Mikey fears growing up and relegates to watching a preschooler show, I saw the episode where the school hamster dies, I saw a third of a halloween special with the most laughable werewolf plot ever and since the direct-to-video films are glorified episode compilations... I'm still well below the bar. Oh well.

At the very least I can remember the names of characters that hold some level of importance, and I'm gonna have a little fun in trying to remember their names. Mikey, the fat one who can sing and is also the most sensitive one, Gretchen, the smart one, and she has to hammer that in however often she could, Spinelli, the tomboy, Vince, the sport and diversity quota, Gus, the military one who has a penchant for butting in where he never did before (stay tuned), uh... let's see, Principal Prickly, Randall, the Ashleys, Kurst... Ms. Grotke (I know how it's said, but not how it's spelled), King Bob, Finster... oh and T.J. Detwiler (if I spelled the last name right.)

I get the appeal behind this, but it serves as an unfortunate downfall. Kids seeing kids do things that are otherwise impossible for the sake of making kids happy has a clear appeal, but as an adult this causes the connection to drop. It's sorta like a wooden support beam holding up a deck, and the older you get, the less stable the beam becomes.

Other shows like this have managed to avoid that fate in different ways, shows like The Weekenders, Hey Arnold!, Ed, Edd n' Eddy, The Loud House, Detention, Being Ian, Doug, Gravity Falls, Phineas and Ferb, As Told by Ginger, What About Mimi?, Pepper Ann and others got by through clever writing or raw depictions of real life, or took out there premises and made them mesh well.

Recess doesn't mesh well, it's a real world affair mixed with things that are generally implausible, but treated as if it isn't. I can imagine Spinelli has the know-how for mechanics, but could every kid easily follow and create a monstrosity bus? How could they get access to various ice cream trucks and others within a day's notice? What's a hamster worth? At least with other shows the out there premises can be excused because it's made clear what kind of show it is.

This is one of the few shows that I hate for a lack of a proper appeal. I never grew up with it so I could never apply it to aspects of my childhood, I have a feeling that even if I did watch it growing up, other shows would render it obsolete within a few episodes.

Another issue I have with it is that while there is a bit more to the characters shown, it's either relegated to a few episodes and forgotten about until its convenient, their extra dimensions are either expected or come for convenience to the plot, or are just not good all around. Mikey, Vince, Spinelli and Gretchen, whatever personalities they have, practically represent the more cliched nature of cartoons from the period, fat, black, tomboy, nerd. I only remember Gus for one thing he did, plus his military background, and T.J. is the obligatory obnoxious leader, an amalgamate of those rebellious kids that we outgrow fairly quickly.

T.J. is cocky to a rather insufferable degree, dreaming too big (anyone who wants to be president is brought to that notch by default), something tells me I'd get even more reason. What I've seen so far doesn't fill me with confidence.

Admittedly, the characters we see often do have a bit extra to them, in spite of how limited they are, especially when compared to the other characters. A lot of the characters are strongly identified by archetypes, and are never seen outside of them unless it's for a crisis. We have a girl in aviator gear who likes to ride the swings, two kids who dig a lot, Randall the snitch, 

I could just leave it off here, but I'm feeling adventurous. I'm gonna go over the episodes I remember, well the ones I'm interested in, then I'm gonna give some insight to the movies that followed. The one with Mikey liking a preschool show was admittedly handled... okay. I kinda liked the episode where Spinelli stayed with Ms. Finster, even if the one take away from it was "We're the Men from Over There there there", and now this.

The one with the hamster. (Speedy We Hardly Knew Ye I think)

One hot button topic that has always been hard to work around was death. In this episode, the school hamster dies, and everyone takes it hard. I'm not gonna act like it's the most over the top thing ever, everyone knows of the school animal so the impact is justified. Spinelli however treats it like it is, and it's the oldest joke in the book. The one who doesn't care is the one who cares the most, complete with the grave dive, done then, done now.

But what lacerates this episode right open is the turnout, the president, the army, various others go to see the hamster, every solitary figure happened to come to this particular school and it turns out that Speedy is a series of different hamsters, born out of Ms. Grotke's reluctance to discuss death, I dunno, it blanks when she arrives. A clever twist ruined by some predictability, padding and a garlic crouton.

The one involving an old bus

I love field trip plots, especially field trip plots that go horribly wrong. Don't you? It's a golden rule when it comes to cartoons and road trips, if the car doesn't break down leaving the characters stranded then the episode would be nothing. For some reason I'm fine when movies do it because it ventures out of the characters' usual haunts, but for shows, the mystique dies as soon as the engine starts.

As you'd probably guess, this episode doesn't stray very far. The kids anticipate a trip to some incredibly cool place (it's never shown or brought up any time after so I'll leave it as being the typical "place of interest"), Ms. Grotke has apparently never heard of any song other than "This Old Man", even Doug managed to run through the obligatory road songs.

They break down in I assume to be a ghost town, how else can you explain a barn appearing in the middle of nowhere, and the breakdown occurs because the bus they rode on was hitting its final days. Then they're touched by the great hand of connivence as the kids begin to repair the bus, rendering it an atrocity, and T.J. mounts a seat up on the roof. Watch out for the low bridges.

My disfavor from this episode comes from my disfavor with road trip episodes of any kind. Between being stranded and making it to the destination, there's potential with the latter, you can even incorporate both. But it didn't apply here.

Animation

Okay, you know the drill, I'll call it ugly you won't feel that way.

Compared to the Disney cartoons of old, it stands out, but yeah, it's pretty ugly. Character art designs clash heavily with others, Corn Chip Girl is the biggest example, having rotund eyes that clash considerably with others. Colors are flat and the animation is stilted. It reminds me of The Critic which has a similar level of ugliness and stiffness. It's honestly the worst looking classic Disney show within the One Saturday Morning era. The movie was its peak, I mean maybe the later seasons too but I never got that far.

And now the movies, mostly.

Recess had a full movie released in the show's final year. Recess: School's Out, I saw it in full... once. The soundtrack was underwhelming, having April Winchell provide the same voice to her younger counterpart was a poor decision, I feel T.J.'s rift with his older sister is entirely one-sided (a sociopath may've been afoot.)

Frankly the 2002 Hey Arnold! movie was far more interesting.

But, wanna know what else is interesting and within the realm of Recess? Their other movies.

Say what you will about The Simpsons, at least their longevity is owed more to numerous episodes and one single movie (two in the future), rather than some cheap direct-to-video films. Now, I wouldn't discuss these movies if they weren't interesting, at least not in the same journal. I had talked about these years ago, but for the sake of a complete review, here it is again.

Recess has had not one, but three direct-to-video films, Taking on the 5th Grade, Miracle on Third Street and All Growed Down, and for the record that came out after the Rugrats special All Growed Up.

Miracle came first, just a month after the show ended in November of 2001 while the others were spat out in 2003, late into the year and on the exact same day. Oh, but don't worry, we're not dealing with long crunch periods here. No, we're dealing with the laziest method to making a movie I've ever seen since Curse of Bigfoot.

They are glorified episode compilations!

I can accept low budget studios cranking out movies, but how is shit like this okay!? Wanna know what this means? We have a collection of episodes, three to four, intercut with narrative footage which may last shorter than an hour to forty five minutes of the episode footage. How has nobody talked about this yet?

Even better, the episodes are taken from random seasons, so you're gonna see various quality jumps depending on how early the episodes aired. Not to mention, they only have a small connection to the theme of the movies they appear on.

For example, Miracle had four episodes featured, and only one of them centered on Christmas. The other was a Thanksgiving episode and... not even the others had a connection to Christmas in spite of it being a key aspect of the movie. Another thing, they're presented in flashback form, going for each of these, wanna know what these episodes have? A lot of scenes where the staff discussing them (Ms. Grotke, Principal Prickly and Ms. Finster), weren't around for many of the scenes that happened.

They're lazy, cased closed.

I had never seen Taking on the 5th Grade (which weirdly has a Halloween special attached to it), but I did see part of All Growed Down, and frankly I have a lot to say about it. My generosity knows no bounds.

The Last Movie

So, All Growed Down isn't technically the final hurrah for Recess, depending on whether or not this preceded or followed Taking on the 5th Grade, but it gave me a foreboding feeling of what the show would've become had it continued.

The movie has the main cast get tied up by the kindergarteners, and I forgot to mention, the kindergartners in this are portrayed as a primal tribe. The savagery would only occur if the parents are apathetic, this seems like too obvious of a jab at unruly children.

Keeping with the "flashback" motif, we get three free episodes, one from the first, second and third seasons, and all I learned came from the third episode, which was always bet on the underdog. But then Gus comes in, with the only new segment in the entire movie, and decides to fuck with the continuity.

Now you may be thinking, oh this is rich, coming from someone who likes Sponge on the Run. Well let me ask you this. Where is the Krusty Krab 2? Where is Bubbles the Talking Dolphin? For all I know the movies are a separate continuity, and Kamp Koral would fall under the same continuity.

I can say SpongeBob meeting Patrick as a baby was merely part of a gag which may have just been to fill the "Best Friend Forever" stint in The Secret Box, okay meeting Sandy at camp was a long shot, but again, where's the Krusty Krab 2? SpongeBob had also already known Mr. Krabs and Squidward at the start of the series and we never knew how SpongeBob truly met Gary, so three out of five ain't bad. I can easily view these as separate on a physical and psychological basis, and Sponge on the Run isn't particularly hatable, the weakest of the three movies but watchable nonetheless. It's purists that drive the negativity.

For Recess, the fact that they refer to events in previous episodes shows that it follows the same continuity. I'd say what they did, but it's best I give you some context.

Gus was the newest one of the bunch. He came in as the series began. He had no history prior with the Recess gang. So guess what? They made it so that he met them in kindergarten. And the worst part? This is acknowledged. I can understand the writers not knowing what has been established beforehand, but to know a middle finger to continuity doesn't make it any better.

I watched this movie and wound up shutting it off well into that segment. It goes beyond him turning up at the worst possible time, apparently Gus is the reason the kindergartners are so primitive, why T.J. is so messed up, and to top it all off, Finster gives the implication Gus was telling the truth.

Just think, if the show had gotten more seasons then this would've been a dire sign of things to come. How could anyone mess up this bad? This is the first time in a long time I even had to use an exclamation mark, it was this fucked up.

Overall

If people hate me for this, then I'm gonna take it on the chin. Recess didn't deserve six seasons. I have the feeling Disney wanted to get a hit outside of their usual properties and had to make a false prayer to get one. In spite of how long it aired, Recess turned over no merchandise, no video games, no toys, no happy meal toys, I doubt it would've had ratings that'd justify such a long airing.

It seems people were more into the allusions of more adult aspects, namely one involving addiction through a card game, and anything else, but the execution leaves much to be desired. Other shows handled this much better, and allusions pale to the real thing.

I'm glad that Paul and Joe went on to make shows I'd consider more enjoyable, I don't like to hate on anyone unless their political beliefs crowd their entire personality. But I'm not gonna change my mind on this show. I can change my mind on Ed, Edd n' Eddy, but this will never happen.

I have the same perspective on this that I do The Critic, maybe the art triggers a psychological complex I don't know about, who knows?