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fly-pow-bye · 5 years

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Powerpuff Girls 2016 - “Small World: Abra-Disaster” (Part 1)

Written by: Haley Mancini, Jake Goldman

Written & Storyboarded by: John West, Angela Zhang

Directed by: Nick Jennings, Bob Boyle

Like this reboot was a world of laughter before...

This special begins with Penguin Pete's, complete with their theme song: "Penguin Pete's, Penguin Pete's, yum yum yum yum yum." It's certainly no Cookie Cat jingle. This special will really focus on each of their personalities, at least early on, and this starts right from the beginning in this scene.

Buttercup has a brownie chocolate fudge that is so extreme, it's banned in six countries. Blossom, on the other hand, has gelato made of wheatgrass and soy. Because only nerds would want to be healthy. Bubbles has all 42 flavors, because, fitting to her character in more than the ways that they intended, she couldn't decide on which one to get.

However, this all gets interrupted by a bunch of minor villains starting crime. The Gnat is also swatting some poor sap with a giant fly swatter. And all of this is happening at the same time.

When the original Puffs had to do something like this, it ended with them getting exhausted to the point where they had to consider creating another sister. The Reboot Puffs can barely take on one crime at a time, so I highly doubt they're just going to beat up all of these villains and then eat their ice cream.

Except, that’s exactly what they do in this episode! In fact, they don’t even let go of their ice cream while they’re easily trouncing these villains. They even beat up some villains that didn't make it into that intro, like Pot-Head, Fuzzy Lumpkins, and even the Amoeba Boys.

Discount Jojo shows up with his Baggy Jeans Bot. Apparently, he's very conscious about being with the latest trends in fashion when he's committing his crimes. He even confirms to some random hipster passing by that it is acid-washed. With real acid, as he almost douses that hipster with it from a hose. At least it's because Jojo missed, and we can't use this as proof that the regular Townsville population have better reaction time than the Reboot Puffs.

With this powerful jeans robot that seems to fit the Fashionistas more than him, nobody can stop Jojo now...

...until Blossom pops him right in the kisser. Another big surprise: we actually see Blossom punch Jojo in the face without a hit flash! They just bash him left and right. Bubbles even takes over the jeans robot, and kicks his butt with its giant butt.

Unfortunately, before the Powerpuff Girls can punch him repeatedly and take him to jail just like the old days, with Buttercup even threatening to actually "lock him up for good", he suddenly disappears in a puff of smoke. The Powerpuff Girls say "huh" at this, but don't seem to pay it any mind. After all, maybe they were just so strong that Jojo ran out of HP!

However, that turns out to not be the case, as we see where Discount Jojo ended up. He has a decent theory just after waking up in this overly fancy place.

Discount Jojo: Oh no! Those Powerpuffs punched Mojo so hard, he landed in another dimension!

Didn't think this reboot would steal from the old Dragon Ball Z dub. Discount Jojo does seem like an infinite loser to me. No, not really, as the owner of this "another dimension" turns out to be a villain of legend! The Archduke of Anarchy! The King of Coiffures!

Lester Van Luster!

Don't worry if you never heard of him before, because it turns out this is his first appearance. However, we're supposed to see this guy as this legendary villain who managed to shrink the Eiffel Tower. I think this guy is supposed to be like some sort of Siegfried and Roy parody, but he looks more like some overly sugary cupcake to me. A Cupcake Shrinky Boy, if you will. I wish I came up with that.

But none of that matters to Discount Jojo, who is this guy's biggest fan. He kept a scrapbook of him, and even asks him to sign his brain when he shows off the shrunken Eiffel Tower. Yeah, in a way far too similar to Gru from Dispicable Me, this guy's gimmick is that he likes to shrink things.

Would the real Mojo Jojo look up to anyone, never mind someone like Cupcake Shrinky Boy here? Even this Jojo was angry over someone being better than him in previous episodes, but now we're supposed to believe he's a total fangirl of someone who we never seen before. That's one of the many reasons why we call him Discount.

Speaking of Not So Secret Service, the Powerpuff Girls are celebrating their victory by playing another violent fighting game. The Professor's strategy from keeping them from those has been replacing One Must Fall 2041 with Brutal: Paws of Fury. Nobody would want to play a fighting game ever again after playing that, but sadly for him, it didn't work.

As they're beating each other up in the game, they talk about how everything is just so easy for them. I understand that it was a general problem that the Reboot Puffs get beaten up, but this is really overcompensating that. In other episodes, they could get beaten by glitter, the Dewey Decimal System, and air, but not this time. Here, they can beat anyone, anywhere...

Bubbles: ...with any hair!

Ah, a running gag that even the other characters are annoyed by, as Buttercup tells her to stop doing that the very first time she does it. This running gag is supposed to be bad, guys! Laugh!

This episode goes in the complete opposite direction of most reboot episodes, which usually sees the Powerpuff Girls getting defeated rather easily so someone else can save them. It does not even try to ease us into it. Do not give us 90+ episodes of Monster Punch, Girls Down, and then tell us “these girls are invincible! Anytime, anywhere, any hair!”

Suddenly, their video game gets interrupted with a message from Discount Jojo. How did he get on the moon? How can he breathe in space without any kind of space suit? How did he hijack a video game like it was a late night Doctor Who rerun? He'll give us the answer in just a minute!

Blossom is, of course, worried. Via a bunch of stock images with some decent amount of work to make them a little more animated. Bubbles adds that if the moon blows up, the cow wouldn't have anything to jump over!

Cow: (scare chord) Mooooo!

Yes, that's a cow. The reboot needed to let us know what a cow is, just in case we didn't know. They were even helpful enough to make it moo. Who said this show wasn't educational for your toddler?

Much like the last beatings they dished out, they’re not even going to focus 100% of their energy on beating him. They bring their video game with them, which manages to still work even though there’s no electricity around. Maybe this is one of their other rare superpowers: the ability to give out electricity to video game consoles.

While speculating on how many seconds it would take to take Jojo down for what is supposed to be the umpteenth time, they’re suddenly whacked in the face with a magician's top hat. Discount Jojo the Not-So-Magnificent shows his face to these Puny-Puffs, and Blossom can't help but point out something I already pointed out.

Blossom: Hey, how can you even breathe in space?

Discount Jojo: MAGIC!

Oh, hush, Discount. Even Buttercup calls this a lame excuse. They rush in, and I'm sure they're going to beat this monkey up again and finish their video game just like they said they would do.

Magic Punch, Girls Down, womp womp. In several different "magic" ways, too. He's really taking his new gimmicks very seriously. He uses playing cards to stick Bubbles to a rock. He bashes down Blossom and Buttercup with a hammer after doing a disappearing trick. Bubbles then gets distracted by the classic "pulling a rabbit out of a hat" trick. Despite what Rocky says, that trick may work after all! The last one's a bit slow, but the others are okay.

It seems like it's another "Powerpuff Girls get beaten up until some magic being shows up to save them in the end" scene. Thankfully, that doesn't happen, as they do manage to get up and do a few parlor tricks of their own. Just like a certain episode of the original, really.

Specifically, Abra-Cadaver. It is one of the episodes they definitely have seen, since they referenced it in Memory Lane of Pain. In that episode, Abra-Cadaver, not Memory Lane of Pain, a magician is thwarted by the Powerpuff Girls learning a few magic tricks of their own. That's essentially what they do here, even combining it with their own aura powers for good measure. Fighting fire with fire, and there's some good gags here, too.

It all ends with Blossom doing a grand finale: putting him in a coffin. Thankfully for Jojo, Blossom decided not to use an iron maiden this time. Jojo gets put in iron chains instead. Probably not as strong as ordinary rope, but that probably terrifies them.

But, uh oh, they spent all of this time beating up Jojo the Not-So-Magnificent, they forgot all about the bomb! The Powerpuff Girls decide to stay in one place and do a big no, knowing that even if they tried, they would just fail anyway.

How do they manage to get rid of this bomb without making that poor cow angry? Turns out, they didn't need to, in a twist that even I couldn't expect. If you read this far, I'm sorry to say I do not do the ellipsis any more because I now assume you read these after you watch the episode. Right?

The bomb "explodes", with confetti and a big sign that says "BOOM". The bomb turned out to be a fake, and it was all just a distraction; an "opening act" for the real act. Besides, with his brains, Discount Jojo knows the dangers of blowing up the moon. I mean, what would the cow jump over?

Cow: (scare chord) Mooooo!

Just in case you missed it, kids. This is a cow. She goes "moo". He then uses his magic hat to show a projection of said "real act": Sparkly Sprinkles is about to do his biggest magic trick yet from his sky-high Secret Lair. Pretty sure you can't really be that secret if you're up in the sky, but that's beyond the point.

Blossom gets a call from the Mayor on her smartphone, which apparently gets really good reception on the moon. She hears the Mayor is adoring this big shiny light in the sky that is getting ever so closer. They fly all the way down to the place they called home for so long, only to find that...

Blossom: It's...it's gone.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Wow. I mean, that's actually a very powerful end for this first part. No unneeded random quips, no farting, no fancy dream catchers, just "oops, Townsville's now a giant crater, and it's all our fault!" It made me anxious to see the next part, and that is something I didn't expect.

Does this part’s title fit?

Yeah, this is the one that really plays up the magic angle.

How does this part stack up?

The “we’re invincible” gag got really old, especially considering this reboot tends to go against that far too often for me to take that seriously. That’s really the only problem with this particular part. The whole special has its own issues, which I’ll detail when I’m done with this.

Some decent magic trick jokes, some good cameos in the beginning, and an ending that actually hooks you in for the rest of the special. All in all, a pretty good opener.

With a relatively good opener, it could only go downhill from here, right? See you tomorrow for Part 2.

← Salamander ☆ Small World: Stone Cold Spider (Part 2) →

#ppg 2016 #fpb ppg 2016 #fpb reviews #powerpuff girls #cartoon network

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entamewitchlulu · 7 years

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Besides the resentment cause by some people, what is your current opinion on Vrains? Personally overall I like it but I just wish Yusaku wasn't so perfect and people would stop staying this is best thing in yugioh ever when we're only 10 eps in.

welllllll okay, at the risk of sounding kinda bitchy….I’m not particularly enjoying it so far.

Don’t get me wrong, I like it! About as much as any other Yu-Gi-Oh series (except for Arc V which is…always going to be on a different level for me for personal reasons. But I digress).

Resentment towards the fanbase and it’s antics aside, the show itself is…just a little lackluster for me. It’s kind of why I stopped doing those episode by episode reviews, because I didn’t want to steal anyone’s thunder with my own lack of enthusiasm.

But…anyway. Let me try to quantify my feelings more specifically; i’ll put it under a cut cause it might be a bit long.

ALSO, please bear in mind that I’m…actually two episodes behind;;;; So some of the things I complain about may or may not have been addressed in those two episodes, I don’t know. (but then, there’s the main problem right there…I haven’t felt an urge to watch them….anyway.)

first…the setting. I just…don’t feel like it’s been utilized to it’s fullest extent. Virtual reality is cool!!! It’s super cool!! But….but VRAINS just looks like….regular space. Regular space with the occasional data stream/storm to hoverboard through. It’s not….very visually interesting. Everything about it is pretty subdued, realistic, and with a darker, duller palette, which are not my favorite aesthetics. Like, it’s virtual reality, man!!! Show me beautiful ridiculously spread out environments like mountain ranges and meadows and forests, not just…the same old cityscapes that we see in the real world. VRAINS and the real world do not look visually distinct, at all. If not for the avatars, I would not know when the characters were in one world or the other, and I fail to see the necessity of the VRAINS system at all. Why is it important? Why is it more important that the duels take place on that stage rather than anywhere else?

The visuals of data storm duels just…aren’t very interesting to me, either. They’re getting repetitive, and I’m already sick of seeing the Link Summon animation because it’s so LONG. and what with the backgrounds being so boring, too, i just…I want them to have to zip around obstacles and shit, instead of just zooming down a freeway and then occasionally getting sucked into a data storm, where Yusaku does the exact same animation for his skill as always. (like man there is so much recycled animation in this series, his transformation sequence, the Link Summon sequences, the Storm Access skill…no wonder the animation is so good and consistence, they only have to animate new footage for about half the episode)

Second, the characters so far. I just…I don’t feel much of a connection to them. As far as Yusaku goes, I do like him, and I’ll get into the parts that I do like about him later in this response, but as far as he goes, I feel like we’re watching him from the outside, rather than actually getting into his head. We’re not getting much, if any, of his internal monologue. I feel as though we’re being told how he feels instead of being shown how he feels. There’s nothing wrong with a stoic character!! Absolutely nothing wrong with that at all, I mean, I adore Yusei. What I don’t like is a stoic character who’s….just stoic. Yusaku is just a little too perfect so far; he never gets tripped up by anything, even when it looked like Blue Angel had him on the ropes, it turned out he had been planning on the entire situation from the beginning. Like…I’m getting BBC Sherlock vibes out of him at the moment, and I…I don’t like it. Let me see Yusaku fail. Let me see Yusaku get upset when he does. Let me see him feeling, let me see his flaws, besides his single-minded focus on revenge.

I found Go somewhat lackluster as well; his aesthetic didn’t appeal to me, and he just………what about him was “”entertainment dueling”” ? Maybe once he joins the crew and interacts I’ll enjoy him more but I really can’t even say much about him because I don’t feel like I learned anything about him.

And as for Aoi…..let me preface this with the fact that she is by and large my favorite character in the series so far. I think she does the subdued personality better than Yusaku does so far, but i think it helps that we have the duality of her Blue Angel persona to really give her some depth to her conflicted personality and nature. But besides that…? She’s been treated very poorly so far. They set her up as a very powerful and important duelist, which is great! ….but then they immediately had her possessed by the bad guys and sent her into a coma.

and….as an aside, i was….uncomfortable with the long, drawn out scene where she was fighting her possession. There was really…no actual reason for that whole scene of her losing her wings and falling, like…what exactly was happening there???? And just the drawn out sequence of her just sitting here, screaming, without seeing her internal struggle–like, was she actually fighting the virus? if so, instead of seeing her losing her wings and falling, I would have liked to see her shouting at the virus in her head and struggling with it. Instead we just got….almost five minutes of her just screaming in pain and it almost felt like torture porn to me. I would have accepted the losing her wings scene if we had seen some kind of internal monologue about her feeling like she was failing her desire/purpose to prove herself to her brother, and that was why she felt like she was losing her wings, but…instead it was just, straight up screaming in pain.

don’t get me wrong, i loooove seeing characters get broken down, i just like to feel like there’s a character point to it instead of just seeing it to see it

and finally……the plot. A lot of people have hailed this as the “first yugioh series to focus on plot” but i would counter with….exposition is not plot. What we have gotten is not plot so much as it is info-dumping. And there’s nothing wrong with that, not at all. I just…it rubs me the wrong way to call it “”plot”” because so far, the plot is still developing. You can’t act like they dumped all of it into the beginning, and you can’t act like a series not doing the same thing is somehow “not plot.” Plot is the overarching storyline; what we have right now is not plot it’s just…….vague info dumping that makes me feel like i know less than if they hadn’t told me anything at all. A lot of that info-dumping has been done in an incredibly stilted manner imo, also. Like Akira talking to Bishop, and he explained things out loud to Bishop that….both of them would have already known. He was just saying it for the sake of the audience. That’s…imo that’s a poor way to explain backstory. It’s telling instead of showing, instead of letting the plot simmer up through the actual story and peek through the cracks, slowly drawing you into the world and slowly getting you involved. Nope just…just dumps it on ya. Here it is. Here’s the back story.

honestly, let me clarify that previous complaint with this: I am 100% a character over plot person. Give me characters that I love and I will ride through any plot, no matter how convoluted or poorly written. I am of the firm belief that if you have well-written characters who interact in interesting ways, the plot will fall into place behind them. My first rule of thumb when writing is, if you have a scene with only one person, do whatever you can to add at least second person for them to play off against.

So far….? VRAINS has not wowed me with its characters interactions. And I think the plot is suffering for it. I don’t know these characters. I don’t know how they feel about each other. The majority of interaction comes from them zipping around from a distance on the field, and they don’t really talk…they mostly talk to themselves about what the other person is doing, and then do some loud trash talking that isn’t real interaction. The closest VRAINS has gotten so far to getting the kind of interaction I want to see is in the intro ep for Blue Angel, where Yusaku had some good interaction with Ignis and Kusanagi, and then with Naoki and Aoi.

I think it’s telling that the only parts of the show that I’ve really, really enjoyed so far are the above mentioned instances. Not the duels, not the backstory, not the evil dudes plotting, not the new cards or summoning types, not even the fucking virtual reality gimmick. The only parts I’ve actually really, really loved watching are the parts where Yusaku is put on the spot and expected to awkwardly interact with things that have nothing to do with his overall mission.

And i think that’s a good segway into what I do like about VRAINS so far. First, what little we DO have of Yusaku, I do like more than i dislike. I think he’s cute, and like I said before, during those brief moments of awkwardness he had with Ignis/Kusanagi’s teasing and with Naoki strongarming him into the duel club, i loved a lot. That is what i want to see more out of him. I want to see him put on the spot, dragged out of his comfort zone, forced to see things from outside his tunnel vision. I do love his ticks, like his “three reasons” thing, I think that’s actually a very interesting master gesture for him that implies an extra depth that i hope will be explored later.

I like Ignis, and I like his relationship with Yusaku. I like that it’s almost a reverse Yuma/Astral thing. I love how expressive Ignis is even though he’s just an eye.

The animation is good! My complaint about recycled animation aside, the animation actually is v good, the CGI bits aren’t too bad, definitely improved since their first usage in BBT. The characters are nicely articulated and expressive in their movements. My complaints about the backgrounds and sameness aside, this is a style that would become more than just beautiful if and when it decides to expand from it’s current repertoire of backgrounds.

And the parts of the plot that they haven’t explained? I am fascinated by that. TBH I could care less about the AI subplot, but the flashback of tiny Yusaku getting dragged out of a house in a blanket as though there was some kind of fire? That is interesting to me, because they left questions unanswered, and didn’t throw any exposition at me for it yet. That i am looking forward to seeing explored and explained and threaded through the story.

And as for what I’m looking forward to: I’m looking forward to Yusaku getting a squad. That’s basically it. I think my opinion of the show will increase tenfold once Yusaku has his friend group. Like I said, I’m a character person. I want characters over plot. Once Yusaku has his team put together, I think I’ll be much more engaged.

So my overall thoughts, if somehow you read through that entire monstrosity of a response? I don’t hate it, but I’m not currently very engaged. This isn’t meant to be a comparison, but coming off of the high of Arc V, which is very important to me for personal reasons, it’s harder for me to become engaged in the new story when it doesn’t hit my buttons for the things I generally like in media.

I’m still definitely in it for the long haul, I’ll be watching the entire series no matter what, and I expect to enjoy it, but I don’t expect it to overtake any of the other yugioh series in terms of my overall love and interest in it.

And I apologize sincerely if this wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to hear…I really do wish that I enjoyed it more, and I’m glad for all the people who are enjoying it. Please don’t let my own disengagement take the wind out of your sails.

#yugioh vrains #vrains discussion #homura talks about vrains #lulu answers #anonymous

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