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STUDIO: Paramount Home Video
MSRP: $26.99
RATED: Unrated
RUNNING TIME: 330 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Commentaries on selected episodes
• Commentary on one of the commentaries
• Interviews with the voice actors and crew
• Uncensored episodes
The Pitch
Eight cartoon characters from different shows are forced to live in a house together where their crude antics will be recorded as part of a reality show.
The Humans
Adam Carolla, Abbey McBride, Tara Strong, Cree Summer and Jess Harnell.
The Nutshell
Spanky Ham is a crude Internet cartoon, Captain Hero is a chauvinistic superhero, Ling-Ling is a Pokemon ripoff, Xandir is a closeted homosexual video game hero, Princess Clara is an ultra Christian monarch in waiting, Foxxy Love is a sultry singer from a Josie and the Pussycats imitator, Wooldoor Sockbat is a Spongebob Squarepants lookalike and Toot is an over the hill ‘20s cartoon sex symbol. Together they represent clichés and stereotypes from almost every type of cartoon and provide ample fodder for crude humor that has almost nothing to do with cartoons.
Drawn Together: the one show that spares creepy fans the trouble of making erotic fanart.
The Lowdown
There’s no problem with vulgar jokes. Cringe type humor is equal parts hilarious and uncomfortable. The problem with some of Drawn Together’s jokes are that the writers seem to be trying way too hard to be shocking and tasteless. It’s not funny; it’s just annoying in a little brother “look at me! I’m being offensive!” type way. The show’s jokes work much better when they’re not so in your face with the offensiveness, such as when Captain Hero, the Superman lookalike, falls off a horse directly into a motorized wheelchair. That’s just plain classy.
Fortunately, the pace of the show is so fast that it can get by on sheer quantity of jokes instead of quality. The bad taste left in your mouth by a particularly bad or forced gag is quickly removed by an onslaught of subsequent jokes in the next five seconds. The show assaults you with gags so quickly that you don’t even have time to process them.
I’d personally prefer Bonzai Buddy to help me with my suicide.
By the second season, the writers are obviously tiring of the whole reality show premise and find frequent excuses to get the characters out of the house and into new locations. The change in scenery is a welcome addition to the show and allows the writers to broaden their horizons in terms of jokes – poop and sex jokes in entirely new locales!
Drawn Together was really put up to an impossible standard by being paired with South Park during its initial run. The styles of the shows seem almost completely incompatible, with South Park focusing on plot derived gags and current events while Drawn Together is a more random assortment of gags. Think of Drawn Together as South Park’s ADD afflicted retard cousin. There’s nothing wrong with that style of humor, but when your show comes on right after South Park it’s hard for people not to compare the two.
The real reason Cartoon Network won’t show Speedy cartoons anymore.
Some people aren’t too fond of the show, but none of them could argue that Drawn Together isn’t superior to some of the unholy animated dreck Comedy Central has tried to replace it with like Lil’ Bush and Freakshow. Drawn Together will most likely get cancelled at the end of its third season, as season three seems to be the cutoff point for any decent show on Comedy Central that isn’t South Park or Carlos fucking Mencia. It’s not a show that’s good enough for anyone to start a letter writing campaign over, but it’s still a shame that an entertaining bit of fluff like Drawn Together got the shaft from a network that clearly didn’t care about it.
The Package
When the package says the episodes on this set are uncensored, it isn’t lying. Prepare to see your fair share of full frontal nudity that was blurred and black barred on television. If you’ve ever wanted to see a tribe of islanders worship Jeff Probst’s gigantic dick, this is the show for you.
Ah. Glorious Nippon.
To call the commentaries laid back would be an understatement. It’s not typical to listen to a commentary track where the participants make fun of each other’s recently deceased parents, talk so candidly about their cancellation and network politics, force the voice actors to perform sexually explicit scenarios and basically doom themselves to hell over the course of twenty minutes. The only shame is that more of the actors couldn’t show up for the fun.
The only tidbit from the commentaries that’s hard to believe is one crew members continued insistence that a newspaper article declared Drawn Together to be the most popular cartoon on college campuses in America. It’s difficult to find someone who’s even seen the show, let alone someone who actually likes it. The idea of Drawn Together being more popular with the college set than Family Guy and Futurama is laughable and very farfetched. Whoever wrote that article might want to re-check their sample data.
Old King Cole was a merry old soul. Additionally, he loved strippers. Coincidence?
If regular commentaries with the cast members aren’t enough for you, the set also comes complete with a “commentary on the commentary.” For one episode, the cast and crew pick apart their commentary track for an episode and rag on each other for falling into such typical commentary clichés as describing directly what’s on the screen and failing to talk about the episode. It’s a nice little gag that’s funny for a few minutes and is helped by the fact that the people involved know it’s just a throw away joke and loses its luster after a bit. They were wise enough to only do it for one episode and leave it at that.