Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-Review by Professor Popinjay

Ironic that I would watch this right after watching Recess. The Replacements (the animated series not to be confused with the y2k football movie starring Keanu Reeves and Gene Hackman) is a stark contrast to Recess. In fact it’s a stark contrast to most quality shows.

Humor is great and all but when it comes from a place of humor purely for the sake of humor, it had better be smart and dang funny. If there is a lack of passion and sincerity even remotely detectable behind the writing, it kills the humor and dead humor often evokes anger. As if to say “how dare you expect me to laugh at THIS!?!”

The Replacements was trying to be a lot of things. It felt like it was trying to be funny, trying to have morals, trying to have creativity, trying to compete with Fairly Odd Parents. But there is no try. There is Do or Do not. If you do not have the confidence to be your own thing then at the very least be forthcoming with the source to which you are paying homage. That, at least, would feel sincere.

By the way, that was an homage to Star Wars up there.

I think I genuinely snickered maybe twice throughout this entire show. Not a chuckle, mind you, only snicker. To its credit I did guffaw once.

A couple things I appreciated. The main characters’ pet donkey, named Prince Cinnamon Boots, who was apparently very talented and starved for acknowledgement would occasionally show up and do something amazing which no one would notice, much to the donkey’s dismay. This was genuinely funny and merited my guffaw.

To my amazement, when the girl character started getting jealous and paranoid with her dream guy boyfriend whom she was amazingly able to snag several episodes earlier, he actually breaks up with her! This blew my mind. Most of the time the cartoon trope of “hopeless girl fawning over out-of-her-league guy” is a perpetuated cat and mouse formula with no resolution. Likewise, the jealous girlfriend trope is often repeatedly played out for humor but never resolved. In The Replacements, not only was Riley able to spark guy’s interest in her, but when she started being crappy to him because of her own insecurities, guy refused to stand for it. Outstanding! In the midst of kind of a dumb show was a very powerful lesson. If only it had been entertaining to watch.

God, I hope this article is entertaining.

I also became annoyed with what seemed to me like the show doing a lot of backpedaling so they didn’t seem racially insensitive. This came in the form of giving characters legitimate reasons for acting like stereotypes. The Japanese girl (voiced by Lauren Tom) who wears a power ranger costume at all times eventually gets a legitimate explanation about why she wears it. She eventually even explains the best place for her to hide was their culturally ignorant town. Perfect! Now the whole show has an “out”. It’s not the show’s creators who are culturally ignorant, it’s the fictional town they made up. Whatever.

The very last episode was a two parter and was actually kind of interesting. It was almost like they knew it was their last hurrah so they put some effort into it. Oh well. Day late and a dollar short.