The following is a repost of my July 10, 2012 discussion of "Isolated," an episode of Disney XD's short-lived Tron: Uprising. I hate the listicle structure, and his piece could have easily gone without that structure, but over at Blastr, Ernie Estrella nicely discussed why the animated Uprising did a much better job at world-building than the live-action Tron movies did.
Green Lantern: The Animated Series and Transformers Prime have been more satisfying than their much-maligned live-action counterparts, and Tron: Uprising has joined them as another example of an animated show that's superior to its live-action counterpart, thanks to its best episode yet, "Isolated." The story puts the spotlight on the animated Tron: Legacy prequel's most compelling creation so far: Paige, a lieutenant in evil General Tesler's army whom Tesler has assigned the task of hunting down Beck, a.k.a. the masked Renegade.
The straight-arrow Beck's evolution from mechanic to hero has been a less interesting arc than Paige's desperate bid for her ruthless general's respect, which has put her in competition with Tesler's supercilious right-hand man Pavel (Paul Reubens) ("Isolated"'s "previously on" segment amusingly counterpoints narrator Tricia Helfer's recap--"Tesler rewards Paige's hard work with praise"--with a montage of clips of Tesler and Pavel both belittling Paige). "Isolated" reveals why Paige chose to work for Tesler and ties her backstory to Quorra (Olivia Wilde, reprising the most interesting character from Tron: Legacy).
Emmanuelle Chriqui voiced Paige during Tron: Uprising's one-season run.
Trapped on a slowly disintegrating island with Beck and forced to work with her enemy (and if Tron: Uprising lasts past a season, inevitable love interest) to find a way out before the rock sinks into the sea, Paige flashes back to her time as a hospital medic. Back then, Paige dabbled in composing instrumental music, even though as another character told her, she's not "programmed" to be a musician.
Her instrument reminds me of the Tenori-on used by electro artist Little Boots in the viral video for her track "Stuck on Repeat":
(Someone on the Tron-Sector fansite forums noted that Paige's instrument is a variation on the Tonematrix, a sweet music-making tool that will prevent you from getting anything else done for a couple of hours.)
"You ever been in a fight?," wonders Joe Manganiello--who stars as himself in the new Netflix original movie Pee-wee's Big Holiday--to Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens), the Magic Mike star's new best friend, as Joe realizes Pee-wee has never left his hometown of Fairville and has basically lived an uneventful life.
"No," replies Pee-wee.
"You ever broken a rule?"
"No."
"You ever had two women fight over you?"
But this time Pee-wee has to pause for a couple of beats to try to remember. If you've been down with Pee-wee since the classic 1985 Tim Burton movie Pee-wee's Big Adventure (or maybe even as far back as The Pee-wee Herman Show, Reubens' early '80s L.A. stage show at the Roxy, which the Groundlings alum revived on Broadway to much success in 2010), you might recall that the bow-tied man-child had to choose between the affections of a really hot Italian trapeze artist played by Valeria Golino--her hotness is the most rewatchable part of 1988's poorly received Big Top Pee-wee, the last Pee-wee flick--and a schoolteacher played by Penelope Ann Miller during Big Top. In this age of meta-humor permeating everything from Rick and Morty to Deadpool, you'd expect Pee-wee to break the fourth wall, wink at the audience and make a reference to that love triangle from 28 years ago.
But Pee-wee doesn't do so. He instead replies with "Have I? No." Or maybe Reubens is indeed referencing the last movie, and the brief pause is his way of saying, "Yeah, the public was right: Big Top Pee-wee was kind of a mistake. But enough about that movie!"
Whatever the case, Pee-wee movies aren't known for being constantly self-aware and meta like the Muppet movies. Pee-wee's Big Holiday, which centers on Pee-wee's cross-country odyssey to attend Joe's star-studded birthday party at his Manhattan penthouse, doesn't really acknowledge any of the events from the prior Pee-wee movies because it actually takes place in its own separate continuity, just like how the Randal Kleiser-directed Big Top doesn't take place in the same continuity as Pee-wee's Big Adventure's. Certain traits of Pee-wee's will always remain constant--the red bow tie, the too-small gray suit, the white shoes, the mischievous giggling, the Rube Goldberg gadgets, the weird animal sidekicks (whether they're puppets or actual animals)--but Reubens has interestingly always rebooted his own character in each Pee-wee project, including the beloved and timeless Pee-wee's Playhouse. Even after 38 years of man-child antics, Pee-wee's basically still a work-in-progress.
You know the amiable Pee-wee who hosted a Saturday morning kids' show that was meant for all ages--aside from an occasional double entendre related to Miss Yvonne, the most beautiful woman in Puppetland, or an L.A. Law-era Jimmy Smits cameoing as a repairman who catches Miss Yvonne's eye and suggestively talks about his "tools" and knowing how to use them? That Pee-wee was quite different from the more devilish Pee-wee who attached mirrors to his shoes to peek at girls' panties in the not-for-kids Pee-wee Herman Show, which was a parody of the type of old-fashioned, Howdy Doody-ish kids' show Pee-wee's Playhouse would later channel in a much less parodic fashion that was also still somehow subversive, due mostly to the presence of then-unprecedented-on-American-TV characters like a black cowboy and an animated Latino superhero who speaks only in unsubtitled Spanish.
One of the funniest running jokes in Pee-wee's Big Adventure centers on Pee-wee's obliviousness to how much Dottie (future legendary voice actor E.G. Daily), the pretty bike shop employee who tries to cajole him into taking her out to the drive-in, is in love with him. He's more in love with his bike. It's a riff on the weird behavior of little boys who think the opposite sex is yucky and haven't quite figured out yet that the opposite sex--or whatever sex they'll later become attracted to--isn't really so yucky. In another bit of soft rebooting way before the term existed, Big Top rebooted the "Ew, girls are gross" Pee-wee as a slightly more mature Pee-wee who juggles two women and gets laid off-screen.
Big Top turned Pee-wee into yet another conventional rom-com lead, and it wasn't what the public wanted from Reubens at the time. They weren't interested in a more sensitive and lovey-dovey Pee-wee (they also clearly wanted to see the playhouse itself make the jump to the big screen, not Pee-wee in some '50s circus movie). The public was right: Big Top's elimination of one of Big Adventure's best running jokes ended up sapping Pee-wee of a lot of the comic anarchy that made Big Adventure so enjoyable and endlessly rewatchable.
But Reubens' refusal to repeat himself in Big Top, even when it results in artistic failure, is also one of the most admirable things about the Pee-wee movies as a comedy franchise in a world of comedy franchises that misguidedly believe that constantly rehashing jokes is a wise creative move. When the audience wanted Pee-wee to remain asexual, Reubens pushed against that. Or when the audience was itching for the immensely popular likes of Chairy, Pterri and Conky 2000 to share the big screen with Pee-wee, Reubens gave them a talking pig instead.
Chuck finally finds his niche in life as a competitive eater, especially in cherry pie-eating contests.
Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner"--or in this case, late late Wednesday--I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.
In "The Reward," the first new Tron: Uprising episode in decades, General Tesler (Lance Henriksen) intensifies his hunt for the wanted Renegade (Elijah Wood), a.k.a. Beck, after experiencing a nightmare in which the Renegade derezzes him. Tesler decides to involve the Argon City citizens in hunting down the Renegade and even throws in a prized VL-1 roadster as a reward to the citizen who turns him in. Tesler's supercilious right-hand man Pavel (Paul Reubens), who usually kisses up to Tesler, gets pissed off by the general's recruitment of regular folks to do the task that was given to him by Tesler because it undermines his power, so Pavel comes up with a scheme to humiliate his own boss, with the hopes that Grid dictator Clu will oust Tesler and give Pavel the general's job.
Tesler, Pavel and his rival Paige (Emmanuelle Chriqui)--a woman of integrity who's working for the wrong side--are a more interesting pack of characters than Beck and his mechanic friends Mara (Mandy Moore) and Zed (Nate Corddry), simply because of the ongoing discord between the irritable general and his aides, one of whom will backstab anybody at the drop of a hat, even his own boss. Meanwhile, what are Beck, Mara and Zed stuck with in the A-story of "The Reward"? "You never hang out with us anymore, Beck!" That's not as entertaining. Zed's constant whining about Beck (who can never win with Zed, whether he's himself or in hero mode as the masked Renegade) has started to grate since "Identity," a.k.a. the Lake Bell episode. It's nice to see the weekly visual spectacle that is Tron: Uprising back on the air after months of no first-run episodes, but I'm also starting to realize why I didn't completely miss the show, and one of those reasons is Zed.
***
Chuck experiences a personality change and Dutch finds love in Motorcity's long-delayed "Fearless" episode, which finally aired in America last Friday when the show resumed airing first-run episodes after a way-too-long hiatus. There were rumors that Disney XD shelved "Fearless" for so long because its drug addiction plot was too dark for the channel (cowardly Chuck gets hooked on a KaneCo "booster" that purges him of his fear but turns him into a rage-filled asshole), which, if true, is strange because "Fearless" is the kind of story the channel's younger viewers need to see these days instead of being shielded from it, at a time when so many of their peers or maybe even their parents are heavily medicated like Chuck in this episode.
It's also the kind of ripped-from-the-headlines sci-fi story Star Trek used to frequently tackle, often successfully and sometimes not-so-successfully (see the original Trek's third season for the cheesiest and most heavy-handed examples). The scene where Mike has to snap Chuck out of his asshole state and ends up getting into a scuffle with him is even reminiscent of the scene in Star Trek's "This Side of Paradise" episode where Kirk frees Spock from his alien spores-induced blissful state. "Fearless" is, fortunately, a non-preachy, "Just say no" bullshit-free story about the negative side of relying on medication to try to improve your life. Instead of lecturing Chuck with an unnatural-sounding "Boosters are bad, mmm-kay?" speech or going all A&E on his ass and staging an intervention with the help of the other Burners, Mike gets through to Chuck by admitting that he experiences fear too in a rare serious moment that this lighthearted action cartoon executes quite well when it needs to.
Meanwhile, Texas competes with Dutch for the attention of Tennie (Aimee Garcia, the leggy and hot nanny on Dexter), a teen mechanic in the "Cabler" village who's a whiz with machines like Dutch, and of course, an Asian guy once again gets the shaft. Somebody at the Burners' garage should point Texas in the direction of the more athletic Julie, whom several Motorcity fans have been "shipping"--God, I hate that word--Texas with ever since he lifted her up during a celebratory moment at the end of "Off the Rack." But if you do that stupid merging-the-names-of-a-guy-and-his-boo thing with Texas and Julie, you end up with "Tulie," which sounds exactly like the name of one of the show's villains, Kane's idiot assistant Tooley, so that's a bad sign, just like how it would be wrong for Liz and Jack to hook up on 30 Rock because the result of the merging of their names is "Jizz."
