Bunsen

I watched all the episodes of Butch Hartman's new show, "Bunsen Is a Beast" this morning. It's about a young monster boy who is the first and only "beast" to attend a human school. He's befriended a human boy named Mikey Munroe (head of the school's welcoming committee), and to sum it up, the entire future of whether man and beast will be able to coexist is riding on his shoulders.

Not everyone is happy about his existence/looks/culture/etc., and the main antagonist is a bratty rich girl named Amanda who wants to chase him and his family out of the town (Butch Hartman loves playing with the "fantastic racism" trope, can you tell?) My favorite quote so far is Mikey enthusing to Bunsen that his beastly parents are so cool, and then saying "My parents sell home security and track my every move with a drone. PLEASE LET ME GROW UP!!!"

Butch designed the characters and some story elements back in 2009 and considered publishing a picture book about them, but never went through with the idea. One of the Nickelodeon execs saw one of his drawings awhile ago and suggested he develop the concept into a show, and here we are now! That must be pretty cool for him that eight years later, they're finally coming to life.

Anyway, I knew that today's episode was a special crossover episode with "Fairly OddParents" and I wanted to see that while having all the context for it. I sketched while I watched, so that was fun!

Official human buddy TM, savage spittle queen, 

and fluffy blue transfer student

It's a running gag that Mikey keeps food on hand that Amanda can't eat 

and he offers it to her when she gets annoying and she trusts him because

she has a crush on him but then she always regrets it because this happens

Unfortunately, the crossover episode aired this morning, not in the evening like I had expected it too, so I missed it and now I have to wait for the Internet to get a hold of it. Ah, well.

I can't tell what age range the show is aimed at, because it comes off as rather simple and childish story-wise, but the characters speak with advanced vocabulary (Ex: Amanda says "Nepotism rules!" at one point). It seems like a pretty daring choice, but somehow it seems to work. These kids are middle-schoolers- I'm just used to watching Butch's elementary kids (in "Fairly OddParents") and casual friend group of fourteen-year-olds ("Danny Phantom"), so it just caught me by surprise. Confusing the (presumable) target audience is probably not the way you'd want to go if launching a cartoon as a novice, but Butch is well-established so I guess Nick has faith in him.

And so I'm not entirely sure what age the target audience is supposed to be, considering that one of the early scenes in the first episode involved Bunsen watching Mikey pine after his crush, to which he leaned forward and said, "That's a beautiful human female..."

"Do you want to spawn with her~?" 

-and Mikey jumped and sputtered, "What? Yes! I mean, no! ... Do you think she would?" 

Also there's an episode where Bunsen gets asked out to the school dance and so of course he begins his courtship ritual, and that had me shaking my head and chuckling. I just really like ridiculous fantasy courtship behaviors and stuff like that. It was a nice worldbuilding touch.

There's not really an ongoing plot, but it's cute and silly and it makes me laugh, and since I've polished off Season 10 of "Fairly OddParents" and gone through all the "ChalkZone" episodes again, it was nice to watch some new characters for a change. And I forgot to mention that Amanda is voiced by Chloe's voice actor (from FOP), and the two have very opposite personalities, so that's neat.

Nick ordered twenty episodes so far, and then they're waiting to see how well it does before they decide if they're going to order more. I can't see this show going far in today's world without an overarching plot ("Steven Universe", "Gravity Falls", and "Star" are kind of the major players, and while I haven't seen the first one, I've heard good things about it), but I'd like to at least see a second season so that the poor thing has a chance to stand on its own legs. I mean, I didn't start liking "Fairly OddParents" until mid to late Season 2. Actually, Seasons 4 and 8 were my favorite, though 6, 7, and 3 were very good too, but I just did not like Season 1 at all (or for that matter, Season 0).

I'm glad to know that there will be at least twenty episodes of "Bunsen" (which possibly means there will be about 40? I don't know if they ordered separate episodes or doubles), since it would be very rude if the show only had like seven and then was cancelled. I just... want it to have a fighting chance, though, as I said, I won't be surprised if it ends at Season 1. We'll just have to see what happens. Personally, while I do find the show lacking in some of its plot areas, the characters come off as very strong, well-rounded, and full of personality, and there's a lot of worldbuilding that I enjoy. 

My one character complaint would be that Bunsen seems to have too many strengths and not enough weaknesses (although I've noticed he appears to be "kind to a fault" and seems to follow a very strict beast code of honor, which he hates), but I've only seen eleven episodes so far. I really like Mikey, which is curious since he's a normal human kid. I just think he's really well done, and I'm picking up clues that he wants to go into psychology when he's older, and maybe be a counselor or something. He also seems to be quietly superstitious, and he's very well balanced in terms of positive and negative qualities. I'd like to see a nicer side of Amanda, but Butch's antagonists usually tend to be closer to morally black than morally gray (which is probably why I love his pixies so much, since they embody neutrality). Come to think of it, I think Bunsen is one of his only main characters that lies in the morally white field instead of moral gray- even Chloe went downhill fast.

It's kind of my theory that "Fairly OddParents" will be drawing to a close soon due to how poorly received the last two seasons have been, which would then leave "Bunsen" as Butch's only active show. I can't imagine they would cut him off from all four, so they'll probably drop one and keep the other. Or keep both, but I don't think they'd drop both. He's been with them for about sixteen years. If "Bunsen" didn't do well, they'd probably ask him to try something else. He mentioned he was playing with a dimensional hotel concept about a week ago, but I don't know if he'll go through with that given "Star"'s popularity. He's been dropping lots of hints too that there might be a "Danny Phantom" movie or something, but then he released a podcast with all the old voice actors (which I still need to listen to at some point), so it's possible that that was the big surprise. I don't know exactly what his plans are. Anyway.

So that's the rundown on that. I don't expect to talk much more about "Bunsen" on this blog, but if I do, now you have some background.

Yep! My day was mostly made up of watching cartoons and drawing, but I did a bit of writing too. I wanted to take some time to myself these first couple days of break, but soon enough I'll get to work doing things that need to be done. Halfway through the semester! Not much longer now!