Reviewing a review

 Think I made it abundantly clear about how I feel about MrEnter, though for however you feel it's all down to perspective. Frankly he's better now than when he began, he learned better anyhow, most I ever disagreed with him was on The Buzz on Maggie, which people seem to hate for no reason.

This is in response to his review of Dork Hunters from Outer Space. It was a decent review, certainly entertaining and one I never heard of, but after checking out an episode myself, I feel like there are some things I feel like addressing.

Firstly, in regard to finding info about the show. He claimed this show had no Wikipedia article, and that is false. There has been an article for this show on Wikipedia since April 30th 2021. Just saying. There are two gripes I have with this oversight. One, it is the fact that it failed to shed light on the low quality of German cartoons. For perspective, it is incredibly cheap to produce content in Germany and their cartoons reflect this.

Hell, check out my review of MP4ORCE: Beyond Real.

I can forgive this oversight, because it wasn't as bad as when the Cinema Snob reviewed To Catch a Yeti, missing an opportunity to discuss the film's connection to the Canuxploitation movement (and have a whole slew of shot-on-video movies to review)

But for the second oversight is the creator, Rick Ungar. He was behind shows like Biker Mice from Mars and various Marvel shows in the 90s, and is currently a political commentator. That would've been interesting to bring up, once more just saying. I'm going on this because I found the show's Wikipedia article through a Google search.

Next up is the plot. I don't know if he decided to leave it up to personal interpretation for fun, but I feel the plot was pretty easy to piece together; a group of evil aliens, identified as dorks, infiltrate earth in order to acquire microgalaxies, though to be fair lest our heroes' galaxies or the earth's galaxy is at stake, I'll give it this, the intent behind those is not made abundantly clear.

As for the leads, half are aliens who wound up on earth, and as they are able to detect dorks based on their odor, are recruited to seek out the dorks before they cause a nasty panic. Most of the hunters are actually humans by the way. There is also an alien resembling a dog, and him being with a school principal makes sense in terms of keeping teenaged heroes at bay. A Jewish goldfish is the inverse to the dog and helps keep tabs on the heroes.

Now granted, some details are not made abundantly clear, but I feel there is enough to make a solid guess. I will say this was a good opportunity to deride a show for trying to be hip, but that came in small doses. He handled it better here than in Da Boom Crew though, even if that review had more anger and screaming than the average Spax3 review.

A majority of his other criticisms here are actually legit, such as how the lack of prominent character outlines causes things to blend together, and while I don't notice it as much, it still looks kinda messy. If anything I consider it an unfortunate marriage between Jackie Chan Adventures and Generator Rex.

He is also on point with the constant use of sound-effects, they're almost as common as he implied them to be. I'd say he was also on point with his Johnny Test analogy, but I question if the season that introduced the whip-cracks came out after this show hit the scene. In terms of actors, a lot of them are based in the United Kingdom and are otherwise not very well known.

However, at least for me they are in places that were in plain sight. One actor, Alan Marriott, lent his voice to Victor Volt in The Secret Show and the main characters in A Town Called Panic, which both appeared on Nicktoons Network in the late-2000s, something I was there for. Also he played Scoop in Bob the Builder's American dub. There was also the British voice of Thomas the Tank Engine, Ben Small, who also not only had a lot of roles in preschool shows, but appeared in Zorro: Generation Z, more on the connection later.

Lastly there's Gary Martin, who appeared in quite a lot, including Corpse Bride, which I actually remember seeing in theaters, and also played the Rock Biter in the perennial classic The Neverending Story III, which was also a German co-production.

He claims the actors are unable to emote much, but to be fair I think some are just trying to cover their accents.

One personal complaint I have is how most voices don't match the character, until I remembered Edgar the Bug from Men in Black and realize this is to demonstrate they aren't human. But hang on, wouldn't that be a better sign to identify than their stench? I'll give it this, for a show to use the term dork so ironically, I'm glad that, well at least by the first episode, they do not portray the dorks as literal ones.

Still have that trying too hard to he hip vibe, but whatever.

And that's about it. I felt it was hard to suspend my sense of disbelief with the review, but before we go, I just feel like addressing one more aspect of the show's production.

The show was produced by BKN International, a former syndication company and block that was active in the 90s. It brought us Inspector Gadget, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Turbocharged Thunderbirds, Sonic Underground, Extreme Ghostbusters, Monster Rancher, at least most of these deserve coverage at some point. That Zorro thing was also part of it.

What I'm trying to say is that syndicated cartoons are a whole other breed, and had you done further research you would potentially find new obscure shows to gawk at. And I will give it this, I never heard of Dork Hunters from Outer Space until now.