Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A non-Review by Prof. Popinjay

I’ve talked about Lego home video stuff before. The theatrical releases are great. The straight to video stuff is just the worst!

This is no exception and it doesn’t even have the draw of recognizable licensed properties. Not that that ever helped. It’s still the same writers cranking out the most terrible jokes if jokes they can be so called.

One thing I found fascinating in Clutch Powers however was the characters’ readiness to break the toyetic wall. This is different from breaking the fourth wall when a character talks to the audience. And I don’t mean the characters are toys and know they are toys and there’s a human kid character who plays with the toys and when the kid enters the room the toys have to go limp. What I mean is this is a story about something other than toys, re-enacted by toys, who occasionally function like the toys they are, thus breaking the logic of the world they live in. Ugh, this explanation is not adequate.

Okay, example: A character gets exploded in half. That would be horrific in anything but a Lego movie. In Clutch Powers however, they laugh it off while another character happily retrieves the dismembered character’s lower half for easy reattachment. No big deal. After that they just resume the story of villains and super spy stuff.

It’s a little jarring. Like, what are the rules of this world? Are you super spies or toys?

I gotta say I’m kind of tired of the “I work… alone” character trope. I realize this feature is fairly old now and maybe kids had a hard time being a team player back in the day but it seems like every other kids show had some character arc like that and then they eventually learn the power of teamwork. Even the theatrical Lego Batman movie had this theme. I get overcoming inner turmoil and all but make the character likable at least. Batman in the Lego Batman movie was humorously pathetic in his arrogance and we knew the sentimental and genuinely tragic place that callousness came from. We cared about Batman and he was funny. Clutch Powers was just a dick and no one knows or cares why.