Or, why I feel Fairly Odd Parents always sucked.
Before the advent of NewGrounds and YouTube, the best way to share your animated works with the world was through college classes and dedicated festivals. The latter is where Pixar and Mike Judge got their starts. But that wouldn't be enough.
Enter the world of televised animated short collections, Nicktoons Network Animated Film Festival, Random Cartoons, The Cartoonstitute, Cartoon Sushi and Liquid Television. KaBlam doesn't count as they primarily used episodic shorts and Shorty McShort Shorts doesn't count either because... well, if there was one thing Enter was right about during his shittier days is that this was a low point for Disney XD.
And I had to hold off on Oh Yeah! Cartoons since this was the point to the entry. This, along with the various others, was a good opportunity for animators to share their works with the world, and maybe, hopefully, not-assuredly, get a greenlight. Oh Yeah! Cartoons was a part of my childhood. I had never seen every episode, but I have seen the show... in general. We all know the deal with the shows that made it to series from it, Fairly Odd Parents and ChalkZone.
I'd say I'd make a comparison because of that fact alone, but it gets deeper. They share the same principal production companies (well save for FOP till later on) and even the same composer, Guy Moon. Plus, I'd say both had different flavors of seasonal degradation (a fancy term for seasonal rot.)
Also, I hate the FOP pilot shorts nowadays, but I didn't have enough material to make a good review out of it, and since neither this or that could exist separately, I figured why not?
Overall Impressions
Before we get deeper into the fundamentals, I'd like to go over how well the shorts held up for me. Going into the FOP shorts as an adult, it started a bit rough, just wanted to relive some childhood memories, but it felt like I gained an ulcer the more shorts I rewatched. No wonder they're not on YouTube. Plus, I, ironically, wasn't a fan of Cosmo's voice in the earlier seasons. I don't know why. I pointed out how I felt the first season was crap in my opinion... right?
For ChalkZone, since I saw the show first I had no idea they were part of Oh Yeah! Cartoons at first (I vaguely remember the Oh Yeah! Cartoons bump on television some time ago. It was seamless when I saw them in the show proper, but I'll get back to you on that. ChalkZone is so good, not even the songs at the end bug me.
Bleeding into the actual series
There's a clear distinction between the FOP series and its pilot shorts. You could never include the latter on the former without someone questioning it. Along with odd character designs that wouldn't be incorporated later on, there're stylistic choices that were ditched before the show began, like us not seeing Timmy's parents right away (which was already a stupid idea, but Craig McCracken did a worse job with it)
For ChalkZone, I didn't realize it at first but a majority of the segments from the earlier episodes were more episodes from Oh Yeah! Cartoons (I just thought the first two were it). That was due to Nickelodeon wanting to age Rudy up for future installments (I know, surprising since they wanted SpongeBob to be younger, but I'm not saying that as if I somehow believe I'm friends with Stephen Hillenburg, my name's not Stan), and they had a two year gap as an explanation for it. So yeah, it could work, and they did, and it did.
Art Direction
The FOP shorts should clue you in to how bad of an artist Butch Hartman is. The whole thing feels... off. There had to be a reason for why the art direction took a drastic 180 when the show got picked up. Timmy has an elongated head, characters look wonky, environments are... okay they're mostly the same. It's not hard to look at, but you'd have to wonder why it got booted so soon.
ChalkZone's art direction from the shorts to the full series is... surprisingly very consistent. Rudy was the only one to get changed, but that was after two episodes and, again, this was explained. The only differences I noticed were slight drops in frame-rate, but the consistency of the first episodes of the show proper are similar to the first two shorts.
Frankly the only thing different from the shorts to the series was how Rudy's dad sounded, and it was a welcome change.
Watchability
This will cover how the episode execution compares to the show it became. Since I have much to unpack, I'll start with ChalkZone.
When you check out the show for the first time, with the first season, you've essentially seen the Oh Yeah! shorts. The style, spirit, writing quality, it never changed when it got to the full series. Bill Burnett knew full well how to keep the show watchable when you got older.
Then... FOP. The show already became infamous for its level of degradation, but if you view the episodes as entirely part of the show, you'd notice that it had been degrading since the beginning. Of the segments I've seen, they had different reasons of pissing me off.
The Temp got to me because I feel it wasn't executed properly. Oh, he didn't give Timmy exactly what he wanted, send him back to the very cult he was escaping from.
The superhero one? Felt like it was rushed especially toward the end.
The zappy's? Felt like it went from one plot to another, had a better idea for how the short could've gone, but what do I know?
Fairy Flu? Alright maybe it was fine, I'm not gonna whine about how Timmy was treated in it, even though I could say it was a torture episode and there'd be some air to it. I mean he didn't even do anything but not want to go to Vicky's house for Tootie's birthday party. I will say this, how can you get a sauerkraut allergic reaction if you don't even eat it? Food-borne allergies only happen when the food is ingested. This is illogical even by Fairly Odd Parents standards, and back then they tried to bring sense to their insanity (well, after the first episode of the show proper.), and Vicky just breathed on him for the record.
Many others are what I'd to classify as cases for Vicky. Back before she became what she was now, she was, otherwise, the typical mean teenager. My point is that it feels like she got more grief than what she would normally deserve back then. All she really did most of the time was bug Timmy, and going by the Craig McCracken principle, if you're mean to the protagonist, you're worse than Hitler.
Vicky tries to pull a prank on the Squirrely Scouts in Scout's Honor, and she is put in an exhibit with no chance of opening her mouth. This could've been better if the Cream Puffs stuck up to Vicky after she blackmailed them into doing her chores, but no, she did one thing that episode and now she has to suffer for it. All of this just to get a badge for finding a mythical creature.
Too Many Timmys, I'll say nothing, I haven't seen the segment in a while so I don't wanna go off of a judgement that may not be true.
But that seems to have been a recurring deal for FOP when it came to Vicky. She had been demonized for many episodes for Timmy's sake, sometimes the punishment doesn't fit the crime. So, rather than making better decisions when it came to writing, they just tried to make her as evil as humanly possible just to carry on as such. That was the lazy route for the record.
Funny thing is, this principle was carried over to Grojband, some Canadian show. I'm not into it because I'd be in for more of the same, though I question how good of a brother Corey is, as he exploits Trina's emotions and steals her diary to write hit songs, when she's at an age where she's perpetually in that time of the month and he's not helping matters. And people said the show only got bad later on.
A little food for thought.
Closure
I couldn't decide whether or not to make a dedicated entry for FOP's Oh Yeah! Cartoons shorts or just do a comparison, but I guess for now I managed to kill two birds with one stone. I did what ChalkZone did and put in an older short with a new dedicated episode and gave justification for such.
As I got older, I got wiser to how poorly the show held up. Guess Butch's outing helped clear the path for me to make these kinds of points (along with Danny Phantom no longer being as beloved as it was back then. I hope I'm not alone in my more extreme perspectives on FOP (and I don't mean on the latter seasons, obviously.)
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