CN’s 1st Great Experiment- Dexter’s Laboratory Review (EAM)

when Cartoon Network launched all the way back in 1992 it was to give all sorts of classic animation from the 1930s up to the 70s a home but there's an originality issue with this if you want to do a knick-knack styled retrospective on every single shows web ever aired on Cartoon Network you have a lot of Warner Brothers MGM and hanna-barbera shows to wade through before you get to anything recognizable as a part of the top-of-the-line animation powerhouse you know and love today but your first glimpse of it will come about four years into the network's existence with its very first original animated series Dexter's Laboratory a marvel at the time no doubt but being a gin Zero who's more used to seeing Slater offerings going back to their first real cartoon has always been strange it was a time when this was ish this was carrying how to network and although I've always thought of it as a really good show it's a case where its place in history has always come first in my mind but that's not an informed way of looking at it I should be surveying what it did right how it helped TV animation in the long run and why someone like me can still like it today let's quickly go right back to the beginning with a young collapse graduate giddy Tartakovsky one of his student films in the early 90s was about a little girl missing with her little brothers science experiments loosely based on his sibling rivalry with his brother Alexander then while working at hanna-barbera on two stupid dogs with friends like robber anxiety Paul brutish and craig mccracken cartoon network called upon them and dozens of other animators around the globe to work on a big project to freshen up their output world premiere toons later renamed the water cartoon show while Craig was the first to get his cartoon on the program while have already talked about Jin DS based on his old Calif sword impressed a lot more people February 26 1995 stick stirs laboratory later nicknamed changes to distinguish it from the full show a show that went into the pipeline almost immediately viewers and executives alike was so impressed with the comedic duo of dickster and Edie there was an endless array of failed cartoon duo's throughout the water cartoon show but what's it Dexter deedy apart from them was they came from a very realistic place sibling rivalry and to an extent societal rivalry I think these two would stay enemies well to adulthood because of their outlooks on life le the following year a couple more dicks as lab shorts was shown on what a cartoon being a sampler of what was to come but there are some key differences between these shorts and the main show the big one being the animation con what's a model sheesh Pro what is a predictable color palette these episodes ranged from promising stars to great parody to funnier than I expected it to be to get this out of my life but overall writing I give them however would have to be a promising start out of 10 they clearly knew there were a lot of different places they could take their characters and many possibilities with the science fiction subjects the first half-hour slot of Dexter's Laboratory would be broadcast on April 27th 1996 on TNT another Turner Network the early episodes were usually previewed there the day before they cut a network transmission but no doubt had got more people talking about it and turning it into the PlayStation 2 Disney's Nintendo while Nickelodeon sealed its fate has the Sega but what Dix does glad was about and what made it so popular is feeling well earned dexter is a very young genius who spends most of his time in an underground laboratory where he conduct scientific experiments and builds robots his older sister didi usually goes down there and makes a mess either because of all leading to sci-fi shenanigans Dix is led pretty much codified the modern invention of the week format in animation and spawned direct competitors like Jimmy Neutron and Phineas and Ferb whose concepts predated the start of Dexter's Lab to be factual but the successors wouldn't have been as great if it wasn't for the og boy genius there I go again talking more about the legacy of the show than its contents one thing I'll give Dix's lab over its descendants is that the template had created was more original and so was its cast I really like Dexter as an underdog protagonist who almost never seems to win how he deals with the mayhem and lab and life usually brought on by himself is great enough to carry almost the entire show and I don't think I can praise his voice enough Christine Cavanaugh you were too good for this world I don't think I can hide that my favorite character is Dee Dee though atop the wonderful animation possibilities her lanky body and loved the ballet bring she's just hilarious although I wouldn't say she's at the top of her game in season one or three well she was voiced by Ellison more Kat Cressida who voices her in season two and four pushes her to the extreme and makes her the bee's knees mum and dad are pretty good characters too being old fashioned idealized parents who are blissfully unaware of the lab for most of the series dad in particular has gotten really popular online for his brief but memorable muffin addiction and Saturday worship but in season one he and Mama moralists expectable cartoon parents but expectable isn't bad they get the job done as does man dog Dexter's rival who wants his lab to be the only one in town and DeeDee to be his girlfriend and he's just as unsuccessful as dick stir a lot nerdier to his way of speaking in particular is really good cringe comedy in itself that's not a humongous cast of characters there aren't that many more with secondaries taken into consideration but they try to make up for this by having two middle segments one a spy parody and the other a superhero parody the spy parody is dial M for monkey about Dix's lab monkey being a secret agent for a woman called honeydew and a captain guy in a TV it's fine they could usually tell even craziest stories in these segments but I didn't feel the same passion in them as with Dix's lab my favorite monkey episode was simian because of the backstory and discussing what it means to be a monkey and my least favorite is rasuluh remember Randy Savage this episode is just Randy Savage the other miniseries is the Justice friends based on the shows in universe Avengers parody and it sees major glory valhallen and the infragible krunk living in an apartment and doing stuff I guess I didn't like these segments the characters weren't very interesting or likable in major Glory's case and the jokes are flashier than a drawing of a pancake the closest I got to liking these was with things that go bump in the night which is just nuts enough to be entertaining and fits it's an idea with pain in the mouth one of those episodes where a character gets a sawtooth and for some reason that reason being vain gags going to the dentist is seen as a last resort I want to say stay far away from the justice friends but that wall to your right it's just as interesting as them Dexter's Lab was the main show these guys were working on and is clearly what most of their passion went into making but I don't have an enemy to go until why it's writing was as good as it was it's a very funny show all things considered it doesn't need to have deep character study or social commentary if they want to show why dicks - can't be a DD they can go for it I'm here for a laugh and some atmospheric shots at the most it may seem odd for me to say but I think Dix's lab is an incredibly well animated show the visual designs themselves are no Samurai Jack it's very clearly a co-production with hanna-barbera with the richer geometric aesthetic in known for and some of the limited animation bleeding into the works three decades after it was necessary what Dexter's Lab looks like is okay but how it looks as a strong suit Jin Dee is a very talented director and all the angles emotions parodies looks and tones he and his team crammed into the show from the beginning is nothing short of mesmerizing it's a very inspiring display for anyone wanting to get into TV animation and it's great to see the current generation running the industry grew up on this stuff and most of it is pretty great some of my favorite season 1 episodes are really interesting like the big sister hears attack of the 50-foot woman but with didi using a city like a place hit it's strange it's funny and was a big step in making Dix's labs such a well-known show dick stirs rivaled brilliantly introduces man doc by at first making him seem even more powerful than Dexter but then exposing his one weakness liking didi later on babysitter blues is about dickster having fallen in love with his babysitter trying to get into good graces it's got a really funny outcome that unexpectedly foreshadows what's to come later on I wouldn't pull the big cheese one of my favorite favorites but it has a plot that sticks with you diksa can only say on that du fromage and goes places from there to things I like about Space Case dick stop feeling guilty over letting some aliens take D D and D D missing things up for them sometimes being predictable as the funniest way forward man Daka is the awaited sequel that brings back our neighborly evil geek this time he's into magic the name routine at the end is drawn out but the funny kind that honestly makes it more memorable than Dix's rival lastly inflation DD is my favorite season 1 episode because DD seems savvy of how the show works now while Dixon more annoyed than ever at her antics plus it has a really weird funny invention that lives itself to visual gags and mayhem season 1 was ditched his lab putting its best foot forward but if sometimes felt like it stepped on a nail then what dickster as a product of the 90s in all the worst ways simply focused on being strange shocking and disgusting that has its place in animation but not on a dickster slab episode where he kisses and gooses behind double trouble isn't very funny or dense for a clone episode no matter how crazy they try to make it and it really wasn't a good introduction to legally or Mimi and they kind of struggled to be substantial characters from the stars the only amusing part to me is dick stop being a stand-up for 5 seconds I'm also not a fan of montt story with dick strand DV turn into kaijus I'm not bothered by the battle that's fine but the ending holds it down a bit because it needs to end on too predictable jokes they may not have been predictable for 1997 but still not my favorite but if you thought season 1 was hard to give any sort of criticism to just wait until season 2 Dix's labs second season is impressive in girth alone 39 slots isn't unheard of season 1 of lilo & stitch the series has the same number but counting all the ear discs as lab segments along with what's left of the dial M for monkey and justice French shows and the lost episode route removal we're up to a grand total of 109 episodes all made in the span of a year really gives season 6 of edit and Nydia run for its money it's basically half the show so it might be cheating to call it my fave season I'll do it anyway there weren't many changes made to characters or the dynamics between season 1 & 2 they found a setup that worked and stuck with it desta got a new friend in the form of this new kid called Mordecai but they can't fool me I didn't know dick still was friends with Doug Walker in middle school DeeDee also got a new friend in the Casella goop voiced by Dom DeLuise and he's essentially a parody of the cutesy patronizing movie characters he was playing around this time I've devised a matrix to determine how you would feel about him and I'm assuming most of you will be here the change in writing across season 2 is very gradual you'll hardly notice it until the lighter more experimental ideas near the end but one thing that changed almost immediately was Dexter and Dee Dee's interests were explored Dixon now likes action Hank a parody of boys macho action cartoons like GI Joe and didi now likes pretty pony princesses a parody of girls cutesy funtime cartoons like My Little Pony it's forgivable that they're using 80s cartoons since the 80s and only ended 7 years earlier and this was the peak of the Venus and Mars split between who cartoons appeal to Cartoon Network was always focused on making series that could appeal to female audiences just as much as boys and men and Dix's lab was succeeding at that greatly at this time and it was bitter animated too sure the designs are more streamlined but is that a bad thing the more consistent everything looks the less distracting when it does something wild and Wilder the Seas intended to get parody and tribute with always strengths of disses lab but now that they knew what they were doing they could be a lot closer to the source material and funnier as a result other changes were minimal or too subtle for me to notice Season 2 does look different in more ways than this but you have to look really hard so many good episodes in season 2 so many including d & DD I haven't played Dungeons & Dragons before but this was a parody that hooked me especially after DD became the board master and broke all the rules ham hocks and armlocks is a bar fight episode essentially where the family goes to a gas station and dad gets into trouble and he just Dead's his way through it because season two is the Golden Age of morning stretch is the one where diffs is closed down time so he can get ready for school it has a great idea great animation and jokes and a great twist ending shoo-shoo gnomes gives off the best feeling though where do they come up with this stuff feeling but if you like it for other reasons keep it to yourself lab of the lost shows us a part of the lab that's been abandoned and the different colors and mood really sell it as an emotional adventure you clay confusion has deaths trophy need i say more de code of honor may not be a gripping race against the clock with a childlike treasure hunt twist but it shows how crummy serial toys can be when sometimes this turns into this the decoding stuff is rather funny they get a lot of mileage out of it but it really seems like an old-fashioned iPhone which actually makes it more interesting to me ultra jerk 2000 sees the invention of Dix's most dangerous robot yet a helper that becomes so advanced that it used its creator as a menace I was always wondering what they were going to do next it was such an intense watch the muffin King is the kind of episode that would break most Dada characters beyond compare but for Dix's dad it's only the beginning of his descent into comedy madness and old friendship with squirrels The Laughing is about dick stop being bit by a clown during a party and becoming a wear clown you've seen as in other shows but this take on it managed to be really eerie it's a comedy and tragedy all rolling one Dexter's Lab a story has my vote for the cutest episode dexter adopts a Labrador get it and goes through all the trials and tribulations of a dog owner I love it it's a joy to watch dad is disturbed as another classic daddy episode all he wants to do is watch the big game but a dad's worst enemy life gets in the way I understand if you watch it and I'm unhappy with how crazy he's getting but come on the Betty Rubble cameo is an added bonus libretto is quite a remarkable beast turning Dix's life-story into an opera and the music is just as good as it sounds if this has ever turned into a real production I'll drop everything I'm doing to go ch the parrot trap was bordered by Rocko's Modern Life and spongebob crewmember Marco here and you can tell us as it has a cheeky a sense of humor than usual just an old-fashioned lap songs one of those send-ups that really Shawn with Dexter getting an Elton John ester piano tutor and pretending to slowly warm up to music I don't mind that it's a dickster thing to do and I don't mind another musical showcase at all this will be a bold claim for favorite episode but for me it's the continuum of cartoon fools it treats itself like a very silly formulaic hanna-barbera cartoon for the most part then it hits you with tips to making this big speech about how miserable it is to be a cartoon it's effective and the episode I come back to the most believe it or not a lot of people would point to dickster and computers get Mandark however which is another really cute silly wrong essentially a six year old boy said to his idea for an episode and they played his pitch over an adventure drawn in crayons the story's weird and illogical but a lot of fun I also have to give special credit to last but not beasts which brings all the segments together to fight a monster in Japan and this one where it all ended I would be pretty satisfied even with the memory wipes at the end rendering at yet another self-contained fast season 2 was sick yes but sometimes it was sick like in gym warfare I don't dislike this episode because it's gross but rather because I can't see the appeal in it there's a difference ddb deep is my least favorite episode of the first two seasons because Dee Dee's terrible singing takes up almost the entire thing I know I praised her a sick and voice actress beforehand for pushing it but this was way too far and it also has a cardinal sin that ruins even some of the best except asides it ends right when it gets in accent you hates not bad not good just mediocre nor enough to make you really not like this bully character I know you're not meant to like him but I don't understand him and that's an issue when the point is that he can't understand all the kids funny accents lastly Dexter versus Santa Claus also isn't bad but you can only spend so much of the runtime making Dexter attack Santa before you wonder if there's a far far better way they could have done a disallowed Christmas episode discounting listed 4% of the season that I would struggle to call good season 2 of Dix's lab was a really impressive season it was hard for me to pick what wowed me the most if it ended here that would be nice but I'm glad we got the 1999 movie ego-trip the lab has fallen under attack by a swarm of robots out for the person who saved the future so dickster assuming he's that guy goes into the future to save his upcoming cells the nerdy teenage Dexter from babysitter blues the old man Dexter from old man Dexter and an adult action hero dick still we haven't seen before they all try to save some of the futures from Mandark but in her own silly way didi ends up ruining everything I'll be frank I don't love ego-trip but I think most of its choices paid off the new designs for some of the characters work for what they are even if I prefer the old ones and the storyline is crazy and dark you can tell not everyone from the previous episodes was working on it but those who stuck around were giving their all and making the biggest adventure they could for dickster to go on so why the hell did Cartoon Network pick it up again in 2001 out of nowhere cutting it with ordered two new seasons two years after ego trip and three years after regular episode production had ceased not only was Guinea Tartakovsky busy with Samurai Jack now but valuable crew members like craig mccracken Seth MacFarlane Butch Hartman and Robin City were all working on their own shows now the new showrunner was Chris Savino which doesn't make it easier to accept on top of Dix's place at the top of Cartoon Network's ratings being taken by the Powerpuff Girls and idiot ninny it would seem there was no reason to make more episodes and you know what there wasn't season 3 & 4 have been very negatively received online and I think the ayah is well learned they don't have much going for them I should start off with the most obvious change the animation it stinks some shows survive with the switch to digital ink and paint with a few batches and bruises but these episodes of Dix's lab look unfinished backgrounds are a rarity in season 3 like it takes place in a wasteland and have very garish non cartoony colors in season four like that we made for a different show all together not to mention the directing quality has seen a massive downtick where's the inspiration the drive to make cubes out of squares one particularly bad example is in the very first episode of the revived era streaking clean where dicks is trying not to get his lab coat dirty could you tell he was leaning back I couldn't either because in the original run they'd at least show you the characters have also changed dramatically dicks has become even more self-centered and his voice actors quickly changed from Christine Pavan ought to candy Milo due to the former retiring bless Miley's heart she did her best she even got to accent okay like her performance is too squeaky for my liking a couple with the ego trip design being retained dickster seems younger and we all know how youthful continuations are received DD mum and dad have stayed about the same although DD went through the same voice actress change as before but in the off-chance they're written well they're fine but Mandark suffered significantly his lab has gotten a lot edgier but he doesn't have an evil bone in his body anymore and he's given this awkward backstory where his hippie parents forced him to act like a girl growing up and call them Susan and the most offensive thing about it to me is that it isn't funny this run hardly gets a chuckle out of me the jokes face hell don't have the same nuance as before it's usually the first thing that comes to mind like they make a script of all the rejected or intentionally bad jokes so they wouldn't have to use them but these anti scripts were use instead some of these stories have promised but the execution is really lazy the reason I'm reviewing three and four together is that tonally there's not a lot they do differently three has slightly funnier moments and more annoying episode while four has better thought out but more boring episodes pick your poison but I have to say I slightly prefer three even though it had the shorts some of the worst episodes of the whole franchise it has more tolerable episodes of those starting with a dad cartoon if it weren't for Saturday posting I still think it would be a little entertaining you get what you came here for a dad cartoon and the granddaddy of all inventions is also at least interesting I like how ditched his grandfather is just old man Dexter but he looks different enough against the new art style and the way the story unfolds doesn't make me cringe so that's a bonus a silent cartoon is a very run-of-the-mill Pink Panther send-up and surprisingly they thought of actual visual gags for this one props to them for making a cartoon bar exam is a special case in that it has stakes dicta has to pass gym class and Deedee's now as coach this built upon the foundation and makes for probably the most interesting story of this period used inks a cool idea dick semantics and eventually DeeDee fight over a pin that can make you control anyone you want by writing for them to do it it's a case where a good idea came first and that shows they plan something last of all the good episodes across this whole run is babysitter part of the man ducks laboratory special DeeDee babysits man dot and the power play is amusing for what it is now on to these excuses for cartoons mind over chatter only has one joke dick to screwed up a mind-reading invention so now everyone can read his mind this is a good idea that they didn't even follow with the execution of a quack a cartoon is about monkey and quack are falling in love out of nowhere even if you want to make a love story weird and silly at least they could have given monkey a reason to fall in love that wasn't the fact that quack is a girl and did honey do you mean nothing to him lab on the run turns dicks to run to a robot destroyer so two robots go run off to a pub I think I don't remember anything positive because although the robots are voiced by Fred Willard and Martin mole they are given nothing to work off of except being robots oh brother sees dickster turn DD into a boy a boy that bears practically no resemblance to DD and just exists to make low-hanging jokes about how brutish teenage boys are didn't we get to the infamous third dad cartoon which is just Dix's dad lining up for a putt for three minutes I can't believe this made it to it it's such a waste of time I'll cap off season three with my dad versus your dad where dick sternman ducks dads get into a fight with the politics and I don't expect this show to make a nuanced statement but it turns into a chicken fight because Walton is plotting Dix's library is another one where I can spare no sympathy for Dexter when he creates a totalitarian dictatorship and temporarily placed a librarian great deeds who pretends that Dexter and Dee Dee have never gotten a long before this point and makes them as obnoxious as possible when they decide to help others out I might be bored by these characters but I still want to like them hitman is about boy band viruses infecting the characters ears and off-key singing if you don't like either of those just put on a whim if you have to there's also sore eyes which teases you with some decent CGI after Dixie gives them self corrective eye surgery but then descends into gross-out and wacky sounds it's such a dirty feeling bygone eras is about dickster and dee dee as old people reminiscing about the past if you couldn't tell some of these episodes are so ephemeral that i can't even describe them without feeling numb it's the same way with my least favorite episode Tea Party just when I couldn't hate golf anymore they make an array of jokes that are both really unfunny and make no sense whatsoever I don't know if it's objectively the worst because I had no patience for anything by now but it's a gut feeling if you're deadly curious about the revival seasons I'd suggest the two episodes ginn dee had the time to direct chicken scratch and comedy of feathers they're nothing to write home about and wouldn't have signaled a return to form of they continued but they have what made it stirs lab good ingenuity even if we're just talking the first two seasons I'd have a hard time considering it one of my absolute favorite shows but it's easily one of the five most important cartoons of the 1990s and one of the 20 old-time most important it gave Cartoon Network a strong voice that hasn't been fully silenced in 25 years and as a recommendation from me if you want to look at 90s animation in a historical context it isn't timeless but it is something more useful genius goodbye for now [Music]

Channel: EmployeeAMillion

Views: 14,833

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Id: vU-uosc79oc

Length: 26min 49sec (1609 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 27 2020