Always looking to broaden my reviewing horizons, I chose this week to review the DVD of the internet cartoon "Happy Tree Friends." The cover showed a goofy looking blue moose, sticking a knife into a toaster. Hilarious ... or so I thought.
"Happy Tree Friends" is basically a collection of brightly-colored, cute little animals that die gruesome and unusual deaths in each episode, each clocking in at about a minute long.
Now, this type of cartoon violence can be quite humorous and has been done before with much success, most notably in the "Itchy and Scratchy Show" segments on "The Simpsons." For those of you who do not watch "The Simpsons," "Itchy and Scratchy Show" is a popular children's cartoon show where in each episode Scratchy, a cat, dies a violent death at the hands of Itchy, a mouse. The "Itchy and Scratchy" segments are quite entertaining, and I expected the same from "Happy Tree Friends." How foolish of me to compare "The Simpsons" with a sub-par internet cartoon.
"Happy Tree Friends" may be an adequate diversion, a one-episode break from writing a paper, but a DVD with a continuous stream of episodes is overkill (pun intended). In one episode, an eggbeater flies across the room, into the eyes of a squirrel girl scout, drilling her eyes out accompanied by gushing blood. Charming. Imagine that repeated for two hours. It begins to lose its humor (of which there is little to start) and novelty.
The DVD is chock-full of extras that are funnier than the actual episodes. The episodes aren't funny at all, so that shows you the level of humor of the extras. One is a mock documentary of the story of the creators of the cartoon.
The mock documentary starts off with shots of Paris, as the narrator proclaims "San Francisco, California." The documentary then continues in classic "VH1 Behind the Music" style, a story of success and then a substance driven downfall. As the narrator describes the downfall of the creators, the camera tracks across an assortment of purple and white pills. The camera then shows a box of Good n' Plenty, the source of the "pills." The story goes on to describe how the creators, fueled by an addiction to candy, lost all sense of reality. "We even ate Twix and Skittles at the same time," one creator confesses.
Parodying the crash of the "dot coms" in the late 1990s, the narrator infers that the internet cartoons industry went through a similar crash. But the "Happy Tree Friends" creators, too strung out on candy, never realized it and continued to make episodes. The narrator closes by saying, "There will still be 'Happy Tree Friends,' even if no one cares." Newsflash, no one cares now (at least this reviewer doesn't).
The DVD has a lot of extra features, more than some movie DVDs. There is creator commentary with storyboard comparison to the finished episode. The commentary is as vapid as the episodes. There just isn't much to talk about.
An earlier comparison was made between "Happy Tree Friends" and "Itchy and Scratchy." Although both involve violent deaths of cartoon animals, "Itchy and Scratchy" is infinitely more entertaining. Perhaps it could be that the "Itchy and Scratchy" segments are surrounded by a hilarious "Simpsons" episode, whereas, with the "Happy Tree Friends" DVD, each episode is surrounded by more similarly dull episodes.
But also as important is that Itchy and Scratchy actually have souls (in the secular sense); they have distinct personalities and hilarious squeaky voices. Additionally, the titles of "Itchy and Scratchy" are much more creative. Compare "Esophagus Now" to a "Happy Tree Friends" title, "You're Baking Me Crazy." Enough said.
The "Itchy and Scratchy" episodes are simply more creative, such as in the one where Quentin Tarantino gets decapitated while giving commentary on the set of "Reservoir Dogs." Hilarious.
The DVD also distorts the purpose of the internet cartoon. The internet cartoon is a diversion. On a whim, to take a break from studying, we turn to such cartoons as Mario Twins or Homestarrunner.com. After a quick laugh, we return to whatever we were doing before. Perhaps "Happy Tree Friends" works better watching a single episode to break the monotony of a previous task than to watch a whole DVD.
Still, "Happy Tree Friends" isn't nearly as entertaining as Mario Twins and Homestarrunner.com, which provide revelry to many each day with their delightful randomness and interesting characters.
For anyone to get in their cars, drive to the store, consciously choose "Happy Tree Friends" from other DVDs and spend money on it is more baffling then solving Fermat's Last Theorem. Buying "Happy Tree Friends" isn't going to make you a happy person.
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