re: Matt Groening's Disenchantment on Netflix

The story is strong and it is definitely a departure from his other work.

I can't find it now but I read an interview with Groening saying he came up with this show's concept early on around the 2-3 season of Futurama and it just took him 20 years to get it out there. So he's been working on this and wanting to make this show for a long time. That shows in the cartoon.

He also mentioned how he feels weird about years worth of work being dropped all at once on Netflix as opposed to the traditional television method, but prefers it anyway because "on TV, we are interrupted every 7 minutes to sell you a series of breakfast cereal. With Netflix we can tell a coherent story from the beginning.

He also mentioned that the writing process for Disenchantment is different in that they actually wrote an actual drama first, and then came back and added the jokes rather than the show being joke/gag centric. That shows IMO and it makes the show stronger.

I still have 2 episodes left, but it reminds me of Game of Thrones meets Futurama meets Monty Python meets Rick and Morty (the latter mainly due to the always drinking/drunk protagonist)

I love Luci (he's always 2D, you never see another angle of him) and Eric Andre is great, you can tell they lean on his improv skills and leave that stuff in.

Elfo is another nice surprise.

Billy West again voices at least 3-4 characters I've heard so far, he is GOAT.

Joe Dimaggio as King Bender is icing on the cake.

All that said, I think this was a great foundation for a show that will last at least as long as Futurama did. You can go a lot of places with the setting and having GOT about to go off the air IMO sets this up to last a while.

I haven't seen the last 2-3 episodes but by all accounts I've heard is that is when the show kicks in to high gear and gets to that next level.

It's funny because the reviews were bad mostly, then I read critics only got the fist 7 episodes, and the last 3 are the standouts of the season. I'm sure that was done on purpose.

found the interview: LINK

I thought this was interesting from it:

quote:

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"It's a challenge to go for things that aren't funny," Groening says. "And we just riffed off each other and came up with an overarching epic tale and we know where we're going with this. We're going to take this thing really crazy places." And that's the biggest difference between this show and the rest of Groening's work. During our conversation, he alludes more than once to the existence of a big narrative riddle that lies behind Disenchantment and will eventually be revealed.

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quote:

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The nature of the history of fantasy ... is, it's always: Things are not what they seem to be," he says. And like a good magician, he ups the intrigue without giving too much away. "I issue this challenge to the viewers," Groening says. "The very first thing you see in animation on Disenchantment ... gives a big clue as to what the nature of this universe is ... there's lots of secret clues and puzzles and even treasures. No monetary value, but they're in there."

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