Tuesday, May 27, 2014

CARTOON REVIEW: Clarence “Clarence’s Millions / Clarence Gets a Girlfriend”


                While these two episodes first aired on back-to-back Mondays, I’ve decided to put them together to keep my reviews to half hour blocks.  (Although there is one stray episode coming after this, so I might have to take this all back sooner than later)

                The first of these two new episodes has Clarence create his own money in school.   As you can expect, this comes with its heights of popularity and then lows of, well, wishing he had never made his own currency.    It’s pretty much what would happen if anyone tried to start distributing their own money, only it’s being done by Clarence and he is also introducing us to some new characters on his show.

                My favorite part of this episode- which might so far be taking its grandest stand yet- is that in making Clarence’s money system seem invalid, it also kind of goes forth and nulls the system of stars the teacher actually gives out for good behavior or whatever.

                I’m not one to ever really say much good about the schooling system in general, but really, when you have a system in place designed to grade children (A to F, no E for some reason) anything on top of that to reward those who are better at sucking up is just plain ridiculous. 

                In what would officially be the sixth episode of “Clarence”, we hit a sort of down patch.  I did enjoy this episode, but it just wasn’t as funny as the previous episodes have been.    Clarence pretty much gets peer pressured into taking a girl out as his girlfriend and as you can imagine it goes quite awkwardly until they both realize they don’t know what they’re doing and call the whole thing off.

                Once again though, it proves to be the little details leading up to the otherwise simplistic plot which helps to make this show stand out.   When Clarence needs help with how to go on a date, who does he turn to?  Why, to Sumo of course!   On top of that, they take a trip to a local thrift store to get Clarence for the date which is pretty funny as well.

                I’m only saying that this was the worst episode of “Clarence” thus far because it has such tough competition and because I do expect so much more from this show.   There are only three cartoon shows currently airing new episodes that I still watch, and “Clarence” is one of them.   

               So this might not be my favorite episode but it still stacks up there as being better than a lot of other animated series I’d really rather not watch.   (Oh, and when I say “three”, I mean airing in real time, as I still watch that Fox Animation Domination Block on Netflix and I totally think “Bob’s Burgers” is boss, though not in my three)

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