Dinotrux
Season 2, Episode 8: "Gluphosaurs" (22 minutes)
USA: Dreamworks
Tiny Pop, Monday 30 October, 12:30
In the past, when I was but a babe, a lot of the cartoons I watched were half-hour toy commercials: He-Man and She-Ra, Transformers, Care Bears, Pound Puppies and Mighty Max to name but a few. The corporate big-wigs in those days even had a buzzword for it: if you wanted your cartoon to be produced, it had to be "toyetic".
I thought we had matured since then. For example, we still have My Little Pony, and yes, it still rakes in a fortune in merchandise sales, but it's actually a half-decent kids' show, not just a moving page from the Argos catalogue.
And then I saw Dinotrux.
Allow me to sum up the plot of the episode: -
- There is a group of dinosaurs.
- They are also trucks.
- There are 22 MATTEL® Dinotrux™to collect, in a variety of colours. Available from all good toy stores. RRP £6.99.
It's absolutely irredeemable, cheaply made, cynical shit. The toy -- I mean character -- designs are unsuitable for animation because they are far too busy: it's impossible to read emotions when the face is hidden in rust and rivets. The setting is non-existent: just a few generic rocks and trees downloaded off the internet and thrown together (if any less effort had been put into the environments, the toys would just be floating on a black screen). Lighting is completely flat. Voice acting and music are...present (that's the best and the worst I can say).
Meaningless noise
The majority of the running time was just the merchandise milling about and never shutting up. It was literally like watching a small child banging toys together and making noises.
At one point, two of the characters (£10 off at Toys R Us when you spend £50!) got glued together. "Oh," thought I, "They're going to do that plot where two characters who don't like each other have to spend time together, and they learn that they're not so different after all."
Nope! They get stuck together, and that's funny because one of them farts a lot. And then they get unstuck at the end of the episode.
What about educational content?
HAHAHAHA.
In summary, even by Dreamworks standards, it's a lazy, ugly, lazy, badly-written, lazy cash-in.
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