This past weekend was the 6th season finale for Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the often bizarre and crass animated show on Adult Swim. You may have never watched the show but I’m sure you’ll remember how Boston shut down years ago because of a “bomb” threat that ended up being nothing more than a modified Light Bright for the show. Anyway…
Sunday was the much lauded “live action” season finale for the show – cool concept, horrible execution.
Let’s face it, ATHF is not Shakespeare. Never will be. The humor is very basic, but quite funny, and in no way does the show take itself seriously. So, the concept of a one off, live action, version episode seemed like the prefect chance to continue the humor but they truly missed the mark.
The two things the animated version has that the live action missed are the character voices and the actor flexibility. One of the reasons people tune in are because the actor voices fit the part – they are funny. Having a live person, who is not that voice, try to deliver lines in their normal voice just doesn’t work. It’s like Mike Rowe playing Pee Wee Herman in his normal voice… just not going to work.
The second thing that just didn’t fit was the limitation the actors faced. The character “moves” just cannot be pulled off by a human, and if they were to try it would look worse than a 70’s exploitation film that was attempted to pass itself off as a real movie.
The very basic aside, the show also lacked the very fundamental concept of humor. Actually, most of this season lacked the humor. A number of times this season I felt as if the production crew was simply throwing something down and saying “here you go” and it magically went to air.
No quality check. No testing. Just “here you go”
In many ways, then, the season finale was the perfect way to end a bad season. Why change at this point? Really, think about it. The core mentality that made the show what it was seemed to be lacking all year, why would one have a moment of brilliance if you couldn’t provide that during all other episodes.
I fear this is a sign of things to come for ATHF. Please, [AS], get your act back together. Things have been suffering for some time now and it is getting very obvious that programming is going down.
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