Sunday, May 21, 2006

Who let the bunnies out?

It must be at least a few days since I last devoted a blog entry to wittering on about a cartoon rather than anything my devoted readers might be interested in reading about, so let's talk about Loonatics Unleashed, shall we?

It's a futuristic superhero action-comedy series featuring heroes based on the Looney Tunes characters, and it's not as good as that makes it sound. It has its moments, but with that kind of premise it should be really quite cool. It also should be funny occasionally, but it really isn't. It bugs me that the Daffy Duck analogue is used almost entirely for comic relief while the others are the cool, useful heroes. Actually, in today's episode he did pitch in in the big fight scenes and pull his weight, but that's a rarity. The plots are generic superhero stuff, which I'm fine with, but there's no character interaction between the heroes, so you can't really connect with the stories.

And the voice acting could be a lot better, particularly Charlie Schlatter as Ace Bunny. I'd never heard of him before this, although looking him up on IMDB, he's done additional voices on quite a few series I've watched in the past. But he really doesn't get this voice right, and I'm not sure whether that's his fault or the director's - he's not trying to sound like Bugs, but the script has him saying 'oi' instead of 'er' sounds, and that just doesn't go with the accent he delivers every other word in. It sounds really weird. And Jason Marsden, who's really quite a good voice actor, doesn't really impress me as Danger Duck. They should have got Joe Alaskey. Rob Paulsen's as good as usual, though.

I always worry about saying bad things about people on here in case they read it. So nobody show this to the cast or producers of Loonatics, please.

On the other hand, the latest batch of Codename: Kids Next Door episodes is brilliant. When I saw the first couple without Mo Willems credited as writer I thought it had lost its touch, but then they came out with a couple of all-time classics (Caked-Five, Daddy) so I'm not worried. And this weekend's Doctor Who was really cool too, one of the best yet.

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