Drawn Together: Uncensored! Season Three

Drawn Together was an animated series that first made its debut in 2004 on Comedy Central, piggybacking on the success of South Park. Drawn Together in concept is about putting eight different animated genre characters together in the same house, in order to riff the saturation and conventions of reality TV. The characters would be an RPG video game character (Xandir), a super hero character (Captain Hero), a Disney-like princess character (Princess Clara), an anime mascot/Pokémon type character (Ling-Ling), a Nickelodeon/SpongeBob type character (Wooldoor Sockbat), an old black and white Betty Boop riff (Toot), a raunchy internet toon character (Spanky Ham), and a blaxploitation female (Foxxy Love). The idea itself could've had potential, but instead the creators just used the show as a platform to try and push the limits of TV-MA even further and try to raise the bar for grossly yucky animation even higher than South Park or Family Guy . . . and it fails miserably.

The Uncensored!: Season Three of the series is now available in DVD box set format from Comedy Central. This features the third and final season of the series, which was 14 episodes and aired from 2007 - 2008. The show which doesn't really have any kind of plot besides the characters living in the house and generally causing idiotic mayhem tries to be more gross than ever before what with depictions of every kind of depraved thing you can think of. Disliking garbage like this shouldn't make you a conservative, naive prude because its just garbage animation.

South Park as a series does use a lot of low-brow toilet humor. But that's not the only reason the show works, nor is it the only reason why the show has been consistently hilarious for over a decade. It's that the show has hilarious characters that have grown, changed, and developed over the years. The characters their are genuinely funny without the low-brow toilet humor or situations. Such is Randy Marsh. The point is, South Park no longer, or rather it really doesn't need to use potty language, low-brow situations or humor in order to be funny. In contrast, the creators of this show seem to feel the more offensive it is on paper, the funnier it is in execution.

The ironic thing is, the reality TV genre is a genre that is rife for parody and satire. It's a genre that should be poked at and maligned. And not just that, but also the genres the lead characters of the show are taken out of. But this really only happens in disappointing ways, including in the third season with an American Idol parody finale. The series finale makes fun of pop-up video subtitles sometimes used in shows like on VH1 or elsewhere. But they just aren't funny, and the show cuts corners by repeating scenes over and over again . . . and they still aren't funny. A pop-up video makes a joke about their animation budget, and using the scene over again to make things cheaper which is both the truth as well as a joke about the truth. Either way it does not induce laughter. Nor does a single episode of this terribly, awful show.

With Captain Hero there's nothing there that makes fun of the conventions or problems with perhaps mainstream super hero comics, comic book super hero movies, or anything like that. Instead in one of the Captain Hero episodes for the season, Captain Hero finds that there's a monster with a brain of a kid running around that Captain Hero thinks is a mutant retard, but has the same vestigial chest arms as he has. It turns out the child is Captain Hero's. He was made after Captain Hero's own sister unknowingly got Captain Hero's sperm from a sperm bank and knocked herself up. OK . . . yeah . . . gross, but not funny.

In a two part episode for the season, Xandir taking on the role of Troupe Leader, takes the group on a field trip to the mall, but their car gets stuck in a compact spot in the parking lot. The gang is trapped in their own van. Clara is at home and assumes since everyone is gone that the Rapture came, but she didn't get to go to Heaven, and believes a UPS guy is Satan (after a blatantly bad Home Alone riff). Foxxy leaves the van and goes into a Hot Topic store, which is followed by a parody of torture porn and Hostel, depicting actual classic cartoon characters being eviscerated and tortured to death. Unfortunately seeing Scrappy Doo getting his intestines ripped out is not funny either.

source: www.411mania.com