Smiling Friends Has Changed Everything

adult animation a genre that has spawned some of the most influential television shows to date in terms of this influence none beat out the grandfather of the genre the simpsons a comedic satire that tells the story of an average american family animated in a simple yet colorful style but with a sense of grit that felt unreal for television at the time the simpsons laid the bedrock for all future adult animations and it shows since its release networks have chased the dream of creating their own simpsons by tweaking this formula and for good reason it has succeeded time and time and time again but this video isn't about the simpsons and its influence it's about this show smiling friends adult swim's newest original series that dropped this january smiling friends has created a new formula for adult animation and if the industry catches on it'll change the genre forever but i'm getting ahead of myself so let's start at the beginning [Music] i have to smile myself because i love you our story starts with the creators of smiling friends these two little queers zacherl and michael cusack you might know zach from his youtube channel psychic pebbles with viral hits such as it said seven get out of my car now sir get out of my car now hey look you're talking tree i could zack is also a returning guest on popular let's play channel oni plays i remember how leslie nielsen's what is it son daddy's busy i went to the michael is a slightly smaller creator but with his own list of viral videos like that's what they're going to call you mate they're going to call you about brag we've got to go to bendigo to get me green cube we're gonna go to bendigo morty zak and michael's public career together seems to have started with the release of their very positive stream a laid-back art stream where they would chat with their audience provide life advice and just draw some fantastic little creatures these streams would always end with one of their iconic show pitches we're talking about some insanely high quality concepts so yeah so they get to the top and then they kind of edit it on a cliffhanger and say oh like hopefully but probably things fell through for season five so who do you think uh we go pitch to that and i think that can compete with things like um black mirror big mouth and bojack horseman i people are saying on twitter this is the new bojack horseman jason's red medallion by the way there's not even a medallion in this i don't think there's something about this i just have a feeling this is like what kills it for us that was a gut few as i was driving it was a gut deep gut feeling i said this is it this is it oh my god these pitches were always improv silly off-the-wall ideas that served as a running gag for the stream audience until it was no longer a gag april 1st 2020 the show announced at the end of the stream was real this time smiling friends and its pilot was about to premiere an adult swim in 15 minutes this was the moment that everything changed oh no and uh this could never be his his comrade slash companion right there oh wait it is and it's gonna be on adult swim in 15 minutes it is called michael you want to say the freaking name of this epic i don't i i i i i i don't want to say the name see adult swim green let the pilot of smiling friends to gauge the interest of production of an entire season spoiler alert there was a lot of interest the fan base that zach and michael had built over the years on youtube had paid off in a big way and the attention smiling friends received got an official adult swim pass for the big league and here we are with season one okay so now that you're caught up the smiling friends lore let's actually talk about the show and now you know my cool backstory the basic premise of the show is a group of colorful characters whose job is to make people smile charlie pym glep allen and mr boss are the main cast with charlie and pin being the focus of most episodes the show runs about 10 minutes in length with eight episodes total in season one what makes the show so special is how it approaches its humor there's a lot i could focus on but i've landed on what i feel like are three of the most important traits so let's start with flow when i first watched the smiling friends pilot what stood out to me most was how long it felt for a 10 minute show the amount of jokes plot points and characters they had fit into one episode was incredible i was also surprised at the structure of an a b plot which were both genuinely funny and then organically wrapped up together in the pilot's plot a we follow charlie and pym on their quest to make their client desmond smile while with plot b we see allen's adventure to get back his cheese and the run-ins he has with the critters infesting the walls dude i don't even think you should be in here to begin with yeah not really your business though is it when you're living in our office walls yeah it kind of is yeah yeah yeah the end of the episode resolves plot a and b at the same time by desmond finding his one true calling in life killing you have to do it man it's okay an absolutely perfect plot wrap up most episodes of smiling friends do this and to great success when they don't do this it seems to be because there was a deliberate decision to only have one plot like the halloween special that wanted to focus on the fear of pym being chased zack and michael seem to have a philosophy that wants to focus on not wasting your time and not all shows are like this an especially egregious example is the [ __ ] conway twitty moments from family guy sure as a one-off short gag it probably works especially if you get the reference but at a certain point it feels like seth macfarlane is letting you know he just has no problem wasting your time if he thinks it's funny smiling friends doesn't need to waste your time to be funny on to nuance smiling friend's humor is best explained by one word nuance in adult animation the sky's the limit with jokes the constraints are removed violence drugs sex they're all on the table and these things are all funny but in moderation the issue is most adult animation wants to squeeze as much of this content their episodes as possible to highlight this issue i chose a random episode of rick and morty to analyze season 5 episode 7 of rick and morty gotron jerry siss rick van gaalion it's a pretty self-contained story about rick obtaining a giant mac and killing space bugs while helping other dimensions ricks obtain their mechs and the politics that entail the concept is pretty cool rifts off a lot of anime tropes and overall is a fine episode however the show won't go more than 30 seconds without letting you know it's adult and explicit don't believe me i counted 34 curse words in this episode 34 in 20 minutes that's almost two curses a minute and i'm not some puritan who hates cursing i do it all the [ __ ] time i just think it needs context if the characters curse all episode then what's the point of even having it i had to go back through the script to find all these words because my brain just started filtering them out because they were so common smiling friends on the other hand very rarely uses curse words and when they do it catches you off guard probably working with all those filthy [Laughter] the same with sex rick and morty loves grossing you out did you know that morty and his sister had a giant incest baby in season five no well don't worry these characters will remind you plenty of times giant incest baby giant incest baby a giant incest baby first 10 seconds boo world bro they love boobs and once again i know i'm dogging on justin roiland in his show but i truly do think rick and morty is better than like 95 of animated shows on but because it's so popular and on the same network i'm just using it as a comparison tool to point out these key differences smiling friends has like one sexually expressive character and she's a [ __ ] mustard packet that gives her boss a human some sloppy top it's funny not too brash and wacky enough to catch the viewer off guard smart violence is a bit more common in smiling friends but unlike other shows that like to introduce side characters that just brutally kill them there are really only two kinds of deaths in smiling friends bad guys and faceless nameless background characters i'll touch on the bad guys a bit later but the faceless character deaths are semi-frequent to be fair if there was one place you could call smiling fronts tasteless it could be here but i personally think the quick gag of a statue or car falling on someone is no different than the split-second scream jokes that zack likes to make or the random creatures running in the background quite possibly the most nuanced part of smiling friend's humor is its ability to make normal everyday conversation funny some of the most iconic moments of the series are these genuine interactions between the characters yeah it's unlocked you can come in just right over there yeah right yeah right over there that's fine yep yeah i didn't know if you were this place or the one next i think it's just something to do with the way the address shows up in the app i mean you know it's not a problem don't even worry about it yeah i just uh i just need to take a picture of the food really quick it's funny because the dialogue is not clean but it also doesn't sound improv there's this concentrated raw almost awkward conversational flow between them it's reminiscent of real life and i think that's why the show connects so well with people the lack of cynicism cynicism is a strong distrust of human behavior social norms and society in general there's an overwhelming amount of adult animations that could be defined solely by this trait but cynicism in general is at the root of most modern comedy cynicism can be really funny but like everything else i've touched on it can get to be too much it's a thin line to walk and i think cynical humor is important and questioning society and commenting on it with media is good however it's nice to have a show that really just doesn't have any interest in all of that smiling friends will sometimes almost make a point but to further the plot not to wag its finger at anyone and the points are almost always ubiquitously agreed on aren't constantly negative people annoying aren't the suits that try changing media to be more brand friendly out of touch isn't it cringe when we hit our vapes and play rust instead of dealing with our problems they all serve as genuine humorous moments with a wink and a nudge not a strong political message or moral message this lack of cynicism is also very apparent in the character designs you would be hard pressed to find the mean character out of the main cast on first watch you might assume alan but really he's just sort of obsessive and neurotic you see that he genuinely likes charlie and pym and everyone else or maybe glep he seems to be dealing with some anger issues and spitting but he's sort of just like a little dancing guy the rest of the time charlie can show a slight attitude but never to the point of being malicious all of the casts are genuinely believable and they all have their own shortcomings but there are no squidwards bojacks or ricks to see a lot of modern animation has sort of normalized abuse and malice going all the way back to the iconic bart neck ringing a good comparison is the pilot of rick and morty and episode 4 of smiling friends rick sends morty on an adventure lets him break his legs get shot at and become temporarily brain dead so he could smuggle some mega seeds up his grandson's [ __ ] this is definitely abuse child abuse on the other hand we see pym volunteer to get firewood for his boss his boss sends him off in the woods but explicitly warns him not to cross the bridge because he might get lost whatever you do don't go beyond the rickety bridge why not because you get lost pym tries to work around this limitation and gets chased by a force demon that almost kills him the negative experience pym went through was because of his own hubris not because he was being manipulated by mr boss compared to morty was being used by his grandfather for financial gain this isn't an argument of the superior way to tell a story but it does feel refreshing to have dynamics that aren't based on manipulation abuse and being an [ __ ] to your friends and family which brings us back to death in smiling friends [ __ ] sort of just get murdered in smiling friends stalkers get impaled through the chest force demons get eviscerated and frowners get shot by the renaissance men cynical [ __ ] don't get rewarded in smiling friends don you've been replaced and here's the contract to prove it [Applause] so yeah those are my three main points of why i think smiling friends is so great and if you haven't seen it yet you can watch an adult swim in hbo max and it is the perfect time to because as i'm editing this video it was just announced that we're getting a season two i truly do think the way zack and michael set their show apart from the competition is special and i'm intrigued to see how their effort will affect the genre as a whole even if it's just adult cartoons being a little less cynical for once i would be happy anyways thanks for watching and stay smiling friends

Channel: NecrotechGaming

Views: 2,237,760

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Id: vLIbwNLSwV4

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 19 2022