Drawn Together: Uncensored! Season Three DVD review

Posted by Jeffrey Harris on 05.16.2008

Sometimes shows are cancelled for a reason.

Drawn Together: Uncensored! Season Three

The Series

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.

Score: 0/10

Video

All 14 episodes are presented in their original TV broadcast, full screen video format. Well, if I can give anything to this set, when the packaging says "Uncensored", it isn't lying. So basically all the bits that would've been blurred or cut out on Comedy Central all appear without editing here. But that's not really a good thing considering some of the grossly, nasty depictions. There's nothing especially impressive about the animation for the series, and at times there's some noticeable frame/movement issue in the animation on the first disc, which you can probably chalk up to corners being cut in the animation, or the animation being rushed from Korea. Overall this is an ugly looking show that doesn't look any better at all unedited.

Score - 4/10

Audio

All sound for the original English language track is in 2.0 stereo onl. No problems or issues with the soundtrack or voices in the series. The voice actors on the show are all seasoned veterans, and very talented. Many of whom have gone on to work on other shows. James Arnold Taylor (Wooldoor) currently plays Harry Osborne on Spectacular Spider-man and Johnny Test in Johnny Test. Tara Strong plays Sari in the new animated Transformers and was formerly Bubbles in Powerpuff Girls along with an endless list of other exceptional credits. Taylor who participates in the commentary for this release hints that most voice actors are incredibly potty-mouthed, and this show was a good outlet for them to vent that side of themselves. While the voicework for the series isn't notably bad, the characters which are mostly crappy stereotypes aren't.

Score - 6/10

Extras

The series is a two disc DVD box set in a slip case box, and the discs are packaged in plastic thin-pack style cases. The inside of the cover inserts of the cases feature summaries for the episodes on each disc. Season Three has the following special features:

• Karaoke Sing-Along
  
• Old Network Promos
  
• Audio Commentary

There are several audio commentary tracks with the cast and crew of the series on select episodes on both discs that can be accessed via the episode selection menu. The commentaries generally don't really stay on track or specific to the episodes, as the creators lament the cancellation of the show and why it was cancelled, as well as some of the troubles they had in the time it took for the animation to get finished for the show in Korea. One problem expressed was that Comedy Central took too long (almost two years) to broadcast the third season, after which the network suits didn't really show any interest in renewing. The creators also talk about how now many of them have gone on to working on another crappy, animated failure of a series on Comedy Central, Lil' Bush, which granted is not as terrible as this show.

The Old Network Promos can be found on disc 2. These feature the Comedy Central broadcast commercials for each season of the series. They can be watched by season or all together. Watching them all together does show how Comedy Central evolves their marketing presentation over time, as well as the marketing for the show itself.

The Karaoke Sing-Along feature is a fairly useless and pointless extra on Disc 1. This feature allows you to sing with the characters for some of the stupid songs for the series, or take the vocals off and sing the lyrics yourself. This adds little to the release at all.

Score: 3/10

The 411: A show that was an interesting little idea on paper, turns into a massive failure in execution in Drawn Together. Thank God this show got the axe. And in its demise, does anyone truly miss it? The seventh episode on the first disc for the series takes a pretty blatant shot at another animated series, King of The Hill, which Drawn Together has no business blasting considering that King of The Hill actually has an audience and managed to go longer than 36 episodes. Oh and King of The Hill is funny. Better luck next time, Drawn Together.

Final Score:  3.0   [ Bad ]