The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Ollie

(NOTE: This was written on December 2nd, 2016, BEFORE "The Copycats properly addressed the voice actor issue. The introduction is now virtually redundant.)

[gasps for 20 seconds.] Whelp, I missed an episode. And not just any episode, mind you, but the one where the voice actors were so unceremoniously swapped, which for the show is a bit of a big deal.

Heck, the last time they made the transaction, there was this huge, amazing episode about it called "The Kids" where Gumball and Darwin struggle to fight off the idea that they're aging only to have their voices change over in the end as they realize they'll never grow up. ("Yay?") And thus, Logan Grove passed his part down to Jacob Hopkins, and Kwesi Bokyae passed his part to Terrell Ransom, Jr.

This swap, however, is quite jarring. There wasn't really a huge episode to explore the concept so much as Nicolas Cantu and Donielle T. Hansley Jr. just kind of stepped in, stole the part, and sent Jacob and Terrell to the curb. At the very least, an altered rerun of "The Kids" would've sufficed just to be timeless.

Still, it's kind of hard to be angry. The last cast was going through puberty pretty hard, and while they still were able to capture the childlike candor of the characters, there was a bit of a mental block that kind of got in the way of parts of it. (Knowing that the person who voices their baby sister, Anais, is a child actor that is a fair bit older than them kind of offsets the connection too.) Also, of all the final episodes, they had a lot of lukewarm, reheated ones. Here's hoping the production code is a bit shuffled, and perhaps a bit too optimistically, Jacob could return for The Copycats later on, because if he can't pull of a counterfeit Gumball, then I don't know who can.

So... the episode. It was good!

The basic premise is that Gumball is angry that his dad Richard mishandled his skateboard as he is, a skateboarder, much to the hilarity of the town because, y'know, he's clearly not. Darwin, regardless, believes him and asks to be taught to skateboard, to which Gumball obliges, seeking to teach Darwin every element of skateboarding aside from how to ollie, which we can surmise he's trying to hold off on as much as possible. In other words, it starts out with more of the same, but there's nothing wrong with that.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Loophole

"Stop it, you are being hysterical!" "Stop it, you are being illogical."

Bobert is an interesting character in that he's stuck in the rut of always having the same joke. He's a robot, so he follows all things as literally as possible with emotional detachment. (When postured with defining love, for instance, he defines it in tennis terms.) Because of that, it seems especially hard to write episodes centered around him as he's entirely static- there's no dynamism to his character, but that only really compliments the design. When the show uses him, most of the originality is in all the things framed around him and the extent to which he doesn't understand human logic.

I mean, conceptually, this is incredibly similar to Season 2's The Bet, wherein Gumball and Darwin take control of Bobert for the day, eventually spiraling into Gumball nearly being terminated. In this case, they try to fix Bobert, eventually spiraling into all of mankind nearly being terminated, so the stakes are a bit higher.

It starts out simple- when having a conversation with Bobert, they realize the danger of talking to him literally, prompting him to perform such acts as attempt to decapitate Darwin's hand ("Give him a hand", so to speak), and seek to make him safe for the rest of the world's good and, y'know, to get out of homework. 

Right out the gate, the episode has some strong moments- the whole sequence of Gumball and Darwin trying to set rules as to prevent any form of harm is a fine example. It starts out obvious- "Never raise your hand against anyone" means a kick in the knee. But then even the most foolproof methods become increasingly more absurd- when asked to not move a muscle, Bobert instead emits concentrated radioactive waste on Gumball, making his tongue crawl out of his mouth. A similar sequence finds Bobert upholding the law- every law regardless of its lunacy, leading to hyperspecific law-breaking being objected to and amended. (Yes, I checked, it is in fact illegal to sing off-key in North Carolina.)

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Slide

"What do you want?" "Love!" "Upstairs, second on the left."

Last week, I wrote that while watching the last season, I was worried about the possibility of creative fatigue. This episode might suggest that we're relapsing. And, for better or for worse, this episode will live on as the "I love cheese and Internet memes!" episode. Hmph.

That's not to say it was completely bad, but it felt like the show in its first season. I'll get back to that in a second. As for right now, the premise is simple - Rocky, the school janitor Muppet, is sad that he lost the girl of his dreams, and Gumball and Darwin seek to help him find her, and honestly, that's the entire plot. It's a barebones effort.

Even so, it still had its moments.

For instance, the process of trying to make Rocky inherently likable to the dating public was admittedly a bit cute, if not overdone. The trope of not looking good for a single photo except for the above angle was nicely subverted by the fact that no, that didn't work either, and yes, "You look like the kind of guy who likes taxidermy and long walks in the dark," is the kind of delightfully surreal line that I watch the show for. Also interesting is the application of flipping up for someone you don't like on a dating up, which sends the rejected characters hurled into the air in real life. Eventually, through using said app, they find the girl, but Rocky accidentally flips up, so they run through town trying to find her, knowing that she'll never pop up on the app again.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Test

"I'm pretty sure these tests are created by pouring seeds on a keyboard and having pigeons peck at it." 

First, let's address Sarah, the yellow ice cream cone who seems to be one of the most hated characters on the show. The basic idea is that in her fruition, she considered Gumball and Darwin to be cool even without knowing them and quickly became clingy and obsessive, as explored in The Fan and The Comic. At the end of the day, the character is a parodical take on obsessive, Internet-dwelling sadsacks (heck, one quick scene had her cuddling a body pillow with J-pop in the background. Gumball's getting real), so her design is to be annoying just by default. In this I don't see any issues- the only character I have issues with is Clayton because he's not designed to be abrasive but, as a compulsive liar unable to reach beyond a shallow viewpoint, there's little ground he can cover.

Her existence in the episode is also aided by the fact that the episode is a kind of Internet culture critique, with Gumball walking away blatantly offended by a Buzzfeed-esque personality test (with shots all around, especially in the nonsensical non-sequiturs Gumball is forced to answer for the test). It's important that the show is able to so deftly tackle such topics as it allows the show to cover more bases and stay topical- episodes like "The Gripes" and "The Points" are definitely hilarious, but they also have a point that they lay brazenly before you.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Code

"I remember something! Something from a time long forgotten, a mystical repository of long-lost knowledge, which the ancient people called... a Byuek." "Are you trying to say book?" "Exactly! A Byuek..."
While unreasonably high expectations might have led to slight disappointment, this was no doubt a fine episode. While many people probably expected this to be an episode to fully commit to a singular theme (a la "The Signal") of Gumball and Darwin hacking into their neighbor's computer, it took a decidedly more standard approach. That's not to say that the episode would've been better had they simply extended the hacking segment, but I digress. We'll get to that.

Why I'm Covering The Amazing World of Gumball

Why the heck am I gonna start covering a cartoon?

Well, there are two shows that I follow religiously: one, of course, being SNL, while the other is a little cartoon called The Amazing World of Gumball.

It has to go down as criminally underrated, one of the few shows on Cartoon Network to not have an established fanbase, and it desperately needs one. It succeeds on every possible level for the kind of show that it is: the visuals are stunning, the characters are a lovely palette, and most importantly, the stories are unique. It's one of the few cartoons to beat the living crap out of the fourth wall without coming across as desperate and it's experimented with the medium more than any other show I can think of. Heck, one episode is built around the episode glitching out while another makes fun of cartoon's consistent resetting and reverting back to normal after every episode by forcing the titular family (The Wattersons, for future reference) to frantically fix everything.

The show's discussed nihilism, the meaning of life, depression, and everything in between perfectly whereas so many others have offered little insight. It even flip-flops genre, covering prison drama, dystopian fiction, zombie thriller, and more. Heck, its most famous scene features their entire world deconstructing, flowing into a computer-generated nightmare, storyboards, and Post-it notes.