WesternAnimation A hilarious satire.
I'm not the best at expressing opinions, but I'll try to.
The Boondocks is one of the best comedy cartoons I've seen. The satirical humor lampoons a lot of social issues, usually managing to turn what should be heated controversies into something very amusing and ridiculous. The action scenes are also very awesome to watch. The animesque art style and animation, especially in Season 3, also looks great. Most of the episodes usually don't get too boring.
The downside though is that the show does gradually decline, particularly in Season 4. The humor loses quite a bit of its edge, character development is stunted painfully, and of course the short life span: In 9 years, there's only 4 seasons and 55 episodes, with the story ending inconclusively (and not in a great way either). As I watched the entirety of this series online after its TV run ended, I've been wanting something more that was lacking.
WesternAnimation Excellent show, but...
Ah, Boondocks. There's nothing else quite like it. The satire is biting, the characters are hilarious, and the animation is gorgeous. And yet, I often felt like it could've been more than it was.
I'm one of the fans who feel that the first season was the peak of the show. It was funny while still able to deliever strong messages. It had numerous episodes showing a softer side to the Freeman family, as well as a couple showing a little of their lives before they moved to Woodcrest. I feel that not only did future seasons stray from the social commentary, but the main characters became more shallow.
I'm all for black comedy, but sometimes I think the show makes the characters more unlikeable than they need to be. With a few exceptions, nobody learns anything or grows as a character. I was disappointed that Riley's art skills never came up again, or that Cristal never had another episode. I found the ending to "Kung Fu Wolf" irritating, not because it was sad, but because it showed how almost no one was allowed to have character development, even one shot characters. It's true that some adult comedy shows don't lend themselves well to nuanced characters, but The Boondocks never felt to me like a show that needed to be that way. Tom got development. Ruckus got development. Why couldn't the Freemans?
As funny as the show is, a few of its messages are a bit too direct, and I feel that the show revels in sterotypes more than it fights them, which can hurt some of the show's overall themes.
To sum it up, Boondocks is a funny and overall very entertaining show. But most of the time, it has no heart.
WesternAnimation A Great Show & Comic
The Boondocks was a great comic that debuted in 1999. When the animated series debuted in 2005, it was just as awesome if not more awesome. I love Huey, Riley, and Robert for their defying qualities, especially Huey. The only issue I have for this show is season four. If I had known season four was going to be as bad as it was, especially since even Huey got put to the side, I would have accepted season three as the series finale. Yes, season four had a couple of good episodes, but season four as a whole seemed forced. Its a shame that an amazing show like The Boondocks had to end the way it did. Such a shame.
WesternAnimation A surprisingly entertaining show
Hey guys, here for my second review. Thanks for reading. =)
To bring in something positive compared to my last review, I'm going to do a review Boondocks, a show I never expected to like. When first seeing pictures and stuff about it, I thought it was some stupid show. But I somehow ended up watching it one day, and I'm pretty surprised on how awesome the show is.
First off, the action scenes of the show is just amazing, they are so well animated and entertaining, that it's even better than most western animation and animes can present. In Season 1, it was a little awkward, but as most shows do, it got way better in the later seasons.
The humor of the show is great. The humor is a good mixture of "gangster" humor and just general humor. A good example of this is "The Fundraiser", which is one of my personal favorites. Sure, some jokes can be considered immature, but another thing that surprises me is that it doesn't feel immature or cruel mostly all the time, which is good for an Adult Swim show.
Another good thing this show has for being an Adult Swim show is great writing. The episodes are almost always interesting, with little plot holes and contrived stuff. The best part of the writing is that you can tell the writers had put some good thought into this, instead of throwing out lazy writing like others do.
And lastly, the animation. People have compared the animation to anime, which I can somewhat agree on. It's similar to ATLA's influence from anime, but it does show at times things that are from western animation. Back to my main point, I think the animation is great. Like I said earlier, Season 1 was a bit stiff, but it got way better as the second season started, as expected with shows.
UPDATE: So my thoughts on Season 4: It's not horrible, it's not the best either, but it still feels like Boondocks. Most of the episodes are really funny, and still had it's crazy satireish feel like in the episodes with Ed Wuncler Jr. I honestly think people just don't like it because the main writer left, because it personally feels like any other episode in the past seasons. Although this season felt like the writers were experimenting what they could write, I still liked the season for what it was.
So overall, I think this is an entertaining and funny people should watch. Thanks for reading. =D
WesternAnimation An Amazing Cartoon... At First...
I've always been a huge fan of Adult Swim, and The Boondocks was among the best the network had to offer. The first three seasons had breathtaking animation, hilariously off-color jokes, biting social commentary, a colorful cast of characters, a killer soundtrack, and snappy dialogue that spawned more memes than you could shake a stick at. I only had few complaints: the messages, while definitely worth considering, were sometimes too heavily reliant on broad generalizations that take away much of the nuance behind what would otherwise be a solid moral. Moreover, I always found that the protagonist, Huey, wasn't as interesting or likable as any of the other characters, though I could definitely see where he's coming from (and it helps that, according to creator Aaron McGruder, we're not supposed to agree with everything Huey says and he's really just as messed up as the other characters.)
Then Season 4 came along and gave me a whole lot more to harp on. The season's drastic drop in quality, I think, can be blamed on the fact that Aaron McGruder had no involvement in it, and I say this because the final season barely resembles the first three. Most of the plots were just watered-down rehashes of previous episodes; the jokes became more crass and juvenile; the satire became annoyingly topical, with ham-handed parodies of Apple products, the Kardashians, and Breaking Bad that seemed out-of-place for a show that never struggled this much to stay relevant before; many of the more interesting side characters dropped off the face of the earth without any explanation; the season featured an ongoing, overarching plot line that was just dropped with no resolution; and the morals became much more poorly thought-out (one entire episode was devoted to comparing comfortable middle-class life to literal slavery; the series finale tried to satirize political correctness but did so in a way that it came across like they were promoting explicit homophobia and ableism.)
In short, The Boondocks was one of the best animated series out there. Just stick with the first three seasons and pretend the fourth one never happened.