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STUDIO: NEW VIDEO GROUP
MSRP: $29.99
RATED: Unrated
RUNNING TIME: 311 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:

  • Commentaries
  • PSA
  • Bloopers
  • Deleted Scenes

The Pitch

Terrible jokes are told by sarcastic man children in a world marginally related to a video game a bunch of people play.

The Humans

Burnie Burns, Jason Saldana, Gustavo Sorola

The Nutshell

I haven’t played Halo for four years, and even then for no more than ten minutes. I don’t have a reason for not playing, besides the general excuse that I don’t play a lot of video games. I’ve never seen a single episode of Red vs Blue prior to watching this set, either. But I do have an excuse for that, Red vs Blue is fucking stupid. Flat out, Simple Jack dumb. Everyone tells me I need to play Halo to really ‘get’ Red vs Blue, but I don’t think a few hours with a controller will give it an actual sense of humor or a hint of wit. Red vs Blue is a vapid wasteland of sub-Adult Swim characters that fart out every easy joke in sight as fast as they can. And all that is ignoring its dull, convoluted meta-fiction, which puts the show on par with fanfic written by a drunk fourteen year old. It’s some incredibly lame world building, but at least it doesn’t get in the way of an easy retard joke.

"Holy shit! All those stimpacks we stole from Fallout 3 are exploding."

The Lowdown

A twenty minute episode of Family Guy is akin to two hours of getting face punched by a random 80‘s TV star, that’s a scientific fact, so the math would make twenty minutes of Red vs Blue like eight hours of talking to a six year old on a sugar high. They have algorithms for this kind of thing, trust me. In watching this set I sat through over four hours of Red vs Blue, so following that math the hyper six year old had enough to stuff me full of Yugioh cards, beat me senseless with a Xbox controller, and make me his personal pinata. I feel like I have the bruises to prove it. This fucking show, it hurt me. I came out of the other side a little dumber, and angry for it. Its ADD sense of timing is offensive, hell the whole goddamn show is offensive to anyone who enjoys the art of actually telling a joke. The show is so stupid, and assumes we are too, that it doesn’t even take the time to setup a single joke. It’s all rapid fire one liners, and they are so, so terrible. Hurt yourself to make them stop bad. Even worse, it’s a straight man/funny man gig the whole time, except the straight man is just whatever random sarcastic character is on screen and the entire rest of the world is the gag. This is the type of writing that thinks not using contractions makes someone sound mentally retarded. It’s not only lazy, it actually misses the mark it’s aiming for.

I have fond memories of Sega's Tower of Power.

I know a lot of people spent a lot of time making this, and that’s exactly the point. People sat down, talked, and came up with these ideas. They had meetings and lunches, and they thought what they are doing is worth all that time. I liked to think of that as the Dadaist joke waiting for me at the end. As improbable as it is, I really wish that was the case. There are undoubtedly some technically talented people behind the show, but that doesn’t excuse the terrible writing. The fact that the show is produced in a relatively new and painstaking manor means absolutely nothing. Machinima is an interesting medium, but they do nothing interesting within it and the novelty has long worn off. Red vs Blue could be hand drawn, it could be a radio drama, it doesn’t matter. It’s a bullhorn for a string of lame jokes and non-characters. I’m straining myself trying to think of a joke that felt like it had any craft in, or even a joke that actually landed. Nothing about this show left any hint of itself in my memory. I can remember Caboose’s name, one character. The others I had to IMDB and just wonder if they were in what I just watched. I’m not complaining about the inconsequential nature of the humor, but the fact that I couldn’t repeat a single line from the show is the biggest insult you can give a comedy.

In the future refrigerator repairmen are really, really badass.

I’m being mean, I know. I’m personally attacking the creators and swearing a lot, pretty dickish behavior. It’s not I like a have a moral problem with the show, this isn’t Forest Gump. It’s a deeper, angrier hate than that, actually. It’s the same type of hate I get when I see Dane Cook or watch Jersey Shore, I’m offended on the deepest elitist prick level of my brain. I believe there is a time to be an elitist dick, and that time is when something so incredibly horrible on so many levels bubbles up to the surface of pop culture and is accepted. I can’t express how sad I am that this shit is still actually watched and made, wasting hours of peoples lives on both sides.

Let me just set a scene, though. Excuse a quick, sloppy narrative so I can illustrate just how bad this show really is, it helps to see what kind of affect on the human body four hours of Red vs Blue can actually have. The story starts around disc two of this three disc assault on good taste; it’s a nondescript sunny afternoon, so bright I had to move the chair to keep the sun out of my eyes, and I’m getting ready to sit down to watch more Red vs Blue. I’m three cups of coffee into the day already, but the little of the show I watched the night before had been pretty hard to slog through awake so I filled the biggest mug I had before sitting down. I grabbed my notebook and got ready to be supremely annoyed and sit atop a self-made high horse for an hour and half. It was about ten minutes before I passed out. With the half full mug still in my hand. Amazingly, I waited for twenty minutes in my sleep to pour the coffee on my balls. But I did it. I fell asleep and assaulted my own groin with lukewarm coffee. Not the show’s fault, but I was still a little irrationally pissed at it nonetheless. My pants were all gross now, after all. Even ruined my notes, most of which was just a drawing of the bloody stain I wanted to make on the wall while I was watching the show. But, I cleaned up and I even skipped back on the disc to before I fell asleep, dutiful reviewer that I am. I made sure not to get comfortable and started the show back up again. It was probably three minutes before I fell asleep. This time for three hours. By the time I woke up, the menu was looping and haunting my dreams with it’s repeating fart joke. I had to fight the urge to throw my remote at the TV. I woke up hyper and oddly angry already, probably from the three and a half cups of coffee I drank. Three and half cups of coffee that couldn’t counteract the complete engulfing boredom of Red vs Blue. I eventually won my epic battle against the sleep rays of terrible comedy, though. I powered through all of it that night; not quite resorting to tricks I learned from Argento’s Opera, but the thought crossed my mind. Not a lot of shows out there that are so boring that I have to fight with myself to stay awake watching them. I don’t think I can say much worse about Red vs Blue. Or anything else really.

A scene from the alternate 'rescued by super soldiers from the future' ending to 127 Hours.

The Package

It looks good, I think. It looks like Halo. I don’t know. It’s probably the best it’ll look, but it looks like a first generation 360 game over RCA cables. The disc is full of commentaries, hours worth of them. I didn’t watch all of them, another four hours of the show and I might have just poured hot coffee on my groin to feel something. I did skim them, and it was self-congratulatory and filled with information you couldn’t pay me to retain. The video features are just as useless.

Rating:
½☆☆☆☆

Out of a Possible 5 Stars