02.06
Heh, kind of difficult to be objective about something like Problem Solverz, since you’ve got a 95/5 split for a fandom…and what a small, isolated fandom they are.
Anyway…Problem Solverz started airing on Cartoon Network earlier this year, coming off the heels and in the heat of the big reform they’ve been making over the past few years. Folks had just started migrating back to CN to partake of its new smashing successes (namely, the bizarre and imaginative Adventure Time and the surreal work-com, Regular Show).
On opening night, the well-advertised show was instantly decried by the cartoon-consuming masses and decreed an epileptic plotless mess (not a quote). The ever-vigilant /co/mrades of 4chan’s esoteric cartoon circle were quick to rip it to shreds, as they often tend to. Toonzone, TVTropes, you name it, they hated it. This was possibly a bigger hate than that generated by Nickelodeon’s CG series “Fanboy & Chum-Chum”.
And this seems to be fully expected from the writers’ standpoint. From the ground up, the show seems intentionally built for people to hate it. The rudimentary animation (think about as advanced as Aqua Teen Hunger Force), plus the obnoxiously clashing colors and the MS paint-blatant use of gradients make for a truly rainbow-vomiting visual experience (hey, some people like that kind of thing, I guess). The main characters’ personalities are excruciatingly exaggerated and their voices are grating (save for Horace, the Only Sane Man, and Tux Dog, the playboy millionaire slash omniscient secret agent). Every episode is built on a slapdash, impossibly weird plot that starts nowhere and inevitably ends up nowhere, after first going everywhere. Naturally, this show seems tailor-made for fans of YouTube poop and those spastic, colorful things Japan seems to like so much. However, most of them seem quick to dislike the Problem Solverz as well.
But, as with everything they’ve contracted, CN has stuck it out for the duration of the 11-episode first season and even continues to do so now with a second season (running on Thursday nights instead of its hallowed Monday night slot). Commercials for the show are less frequent now, though it’s still better advertised than the ill-fated Robotomy that came before it.
So why continue to air a series that garners so much hate? A few theories…first of all, probably most importantly: low budget. Since Problem Solverz is made entirely in that cheapest of animation mediums (Flash), animation is incredibly cheap and quick to produce. This leaves extra room in the show’s budget for special guest voice-overs (George Takei, Mark Hamill, Jaleel White, Vincent Martella to name a few), advertisement spots, and even a small panel at Comic-Con. The low budget may also be helping to cushion the blow CN sustained from wasting money on CN Live a few years back. Spending less on new material to fill in the empty spaces was a smart move for the company.
Another plus for Problem Solverz is its quick turn around time in production. Normally, one episode of an animated show takes (roughly) 9 months from conception in the writing room to storyboarding to animation to voice acting to music and foley mix down to cleanup to post-production to airing. With Problem Solverz, most of that can be done in a matter of a few weeks. This ensures that new episodes arrive on time, and that any cultural references (or even meta-references among the hatedom – yes, these exist) aren’t already 9 months old by the time they hit the air. The in-jokes are fresher, longer.
Finally, perhaps the most optimistic theory: CN has been doing everything they can to experiment with new shows, and new types of shows. While sometimes similar in content, all of CN’s latest ventures employ a slightly different method to their collective madness. Where Adventure Time brings childhood fantasy and heroics, Regular Show brings 20-something humor that younger crowds can still laugh at. MAD provides the pop culture parody, where Gumball combines different film styles (2D animation, live-action, CGI, puppetry and MORE) for its presentation. Problem Solverz takes the “Flash videos on the Internet in the early aughts” combined with a sort of “urban pothead” approach. This experimentation thing (whether successful or not) may be the key to and the driving force of Cartoon Network’s revival as the go-to network for animation.
Bottom line? Few people like the new show The Problem Solverz, but it does serve a few unique purposes for the still-evolving, ever-revolving, problem-solving Cartoon Network. It certainly doesn’t appear to be going anywhere for a little while, neither in terms of dropping off the network or gaining many new followers. Only time will tell if it becomes another odd footnote in CN’s long-running saga of short-lived cartoons or if it goes down in the Animation Book of World Records as the statistically most hated cartoon on broadcast television.
Either way, you can always change the channel on Thursday night. Problem Solved!
Originally posted on Thursday, September 1, 2011.