YMMV / Superbook (2011)

• Actor Allusion:
  • This isn't the first time Shannon Chan-Kent has voiced a character that was in love with a bad boy.
  • Nor is it the first time Paul Dobson has voiced a demonic antagonist who corrupts others to do his bidding.
  • Nor is it the first time Richard Newman has voiced a character who wore red and was leader of a large organized group (although this one's a lot more benevolent and a lot less memetic).
• Base-Breaking Character: Gizmo is either loved by fans as the show's Adorkable Plucky Comic Relief or despised for his shrill, annoying voice, constant interjectory quips that rarely land, and lengthy whining that many find extremely grating. This version of Gizmo tends to be The Scrappy for fans of the original anime in particular due to how drastically different the portrayal is to the original series.
• Broken Base: A lot of the original series' fans dislike the CGI reboot for a number of reasons, mainly the 3D animation's perceived lifelessness and lack of charm over the anime's hand-drawn traditional animation, the more straightforward and self-contained writing approach, Gizmo's shift to loud Plucky Comic Relief as mentioned above, and general simplification. Other fans appreciate the series adapting the core premise in a way more congruent with modern young audiences, however.
• Cant Unhear It: Fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Death Note, Dragon Ball (the Ocean dub), and Black Lagoon won't be the same after hearing that many of the cast voice characters in this series.
• Complete Monster:
  • In the series, Satan is depicted as the cruel, manipulative devil who rules over Hell and wants to taint all of God's creation, with any potential redeeming qualities expunged from his portrayal. After leading a failed coup in Heaven where he murdered many angels, Satan corrupts Adam and Eve, unleashing his influence onto the Earth and allowing him to spread death and chaos. Satan causes natural disasters for fun, orders his demons to drive people insane, and personally ruins the life of Job, killing many of his servants and sons in the process just to try to prove a point. Satan's final plan is to destroy most of humanity and enslave the rest, a plan which he personally tries to start by murdering two children while mocking them.
  • Haman is the despicable advisor to King Xerxes who, after feeling personally insulted when the Jew Mordecai won't bow to him, decides to exterminate every Jew in Xerxes's kingdom. Haman tricks Xerxes into believing the Jews are a violent and treacherous people and sends out the order to kill every Jew young and old in the kingdom, personally constructing a gallows in his own home so he can watch with glee at Mordecai's death by hanging.
• Fandom Rivalry: With fans of the original series, as detailed in Broken Base above.
• Fanfic Fuel: Yes, there is fanfiction of this franchise out there, both this version and the original. Specific to this remake, the fanfics tend to focus on the possibility of a relationship between Chris and Joy, but the series has many other instances of Canon Fodder for fic authors explore:
  • How did Chris, Joy and Gizmo first meet Superbook? Which Bible story was the focus of that first adventure?
  • There's also the reveal that Jia Wei has been having Superbook adventures independent of the main characters. A few that are briefly mentioned in summary include Cain and Abel and the baptism of Jesus, and we do get to see a snippet of the person in question being imprisoned with Peter and the apostles for preaching about Jesus. How did that particular trip start out, and what were the other adventures like? And related to this, will Ellie have future Superbook adventures, either solo or with the others?
  • Superbook has shown itself to characters other than the main trio on more than one occasion. What would happen if it revealed itself to recurring characters like Todd, Jason, or Pastor Aaron, or one-shot classmate characters like Samantha or Becky? There's also the adult one-shot antagonistic atheist astronaut, Commander Duke Conrad, who's skeptical about anything religious or faith-based; what would happen if Superbook ever appeared to take him on an adventure?
  • The Bible itself is a treasure trove of potential stories that aren't portrayed in this series, though perhaps for good reason—many of those stories are dark, even compared to the ones the show does depict: the Book of Joshua, for instance, is dedicated pretty much entirely to heroically portraying the Israelites' brutal conquest of the Promised Land and complete extermination of all its prior inhabitants for their perceived inferiority. It's a major Values Dissonance no matter how one slices it (especially when applied to the kids' modern world), which is likely why only the Battle of Jericho is depicted in this series and with much of the genocide part swept under the rug. However, a fanfic writer looking to go Darker and Edgier could tackle how the kids respond to some of those stories with a Perspective Flip and use the format of Superbook to deconstruct some of the more odious parts of the Bible.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • You can find many fans of this series being fans of anime in general; it helps that the original series was an anime, as well as many voice actors in the series voicing many anime characters (as outlined on the Trivia page).
  • Same thing with My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic due to many voice actors in the series voicing characters in MLP.
• Growing the Beard: Since the beginning of the series, the voice acting has improved quite a bit and become much more believable (particularly with Shannon Chan-Kent, who voices Joy like a very young child in Season One but has subsequently given the character a more mature-sounding voice from the Season Two premiere "Jonah" onward).
• Harsher in Hindsight: In "Naaman and the Servant Girl," Naaman bitterly speaks about how his leprosy, being as contagious and deadly as it is, has robbed him of the simple pleasure of being able to just touch his wife, and that for all the wealth and power he has, it's all worthless in the face of this disease, which he describes as an unseen enemy. In light of the COVID-19 Pandemic, it's really hard not to sympathize with Naaman's epiphany.
• Inferred Holocaust:
  • In "Noah and the Ark", God literally kills the whole of Earth's population in the Great Deluge, only sparing Noah, his family, and the creatures aboard his Ark (as well as Chris, Joy, and Gizmo, of course). The narrative does attempt to justify this by showing a throng of violent bandits raping and pillaging a town in the In Medias Res opening (with even the kids being chased down) to show how brutal and violent the world has become, but even then we can clearly see that there are plenty of innocent victims of the marauders (like the women they carry off) who are never shown doing anything wrong themselves, and that even if humanity has somehow become purely evil save for one single family, every other animal who wasn't brought onto the Ark doesn't deserve to die for it. Chris does at one point ask Noah if God is really angry enough at everyone to drown them, but Noah more or less brushes him off. To be fair, these issues largely stem from the implications of the original Biblical story itself and are not entirely the show's fault, but the way the narrative morally frames it is still very much this trope.
  • "Rahab and the Walls of Jericho" depicts the Fall of Jericho from the Book of Joshua up to and including the actual crumbling of the city's walls before the shofars, with Superbook subsequently whisking the kids and Gizmo away. This conveniently omits what happened after the Israelites brought the walls down from the episode, which was not too pretty; in the Biblical account, they butchered literally every single man, woman, child, and animal in Jericho, only sparing Rahab and her family in exchange for quartering their spies. To add insult to injury, Joshua then cursed anyone who might dare to rebuild with the deaths of their children.^note To be fair, the potential psychological ramifications of the kids realizing they helped enable a genocide may've been why Superbook sent them back to the present at that very moment.
  • The rest of the Conquest of the Promised Land in the Book of Joshua and the Book of Numbers is also completely skipped over by this series (nothing between Moses Passing the Torch to Joshua and King Solomon's time is depicted, save for the fall of Jericho's walls), and it similarly features the Israelites mercilessly exterminating the land's native inhabitants. This actually was depicted by the original anime in the episode "Snakes and a Donkey", albeit still in a heavily sanitized and glossed-over fashion.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A lot of the original series' fans dislike the changes in the CGI reboot. See Broken Base above.
• Unconvincingly Unpopular Character: Chris's portrayal in this show. You would think that a kid who has a Do-Anything Robot, whose father is a famous inventor and scientist, who heads his own Garage Band, and who is an avid soccer player, basketballer, skateboarder, and video-gamer (good enough to make it into local and regional tournaments, at that!) would be significantly high up on the social totem pole. Well, not so with Chris; while he's certainly shown as being a favorite among his intimate peer-group, he's not considered one of the in-kids at Valleyview Middle School, as "Noah and the Ark" has him wanting to join the supposedly-cool Skateboard Maniacs group, "Peter's Denial" has him trying to curry the favor of a couple of boys who are purportedly among the school's coolest kids, and "The Sermon on the Mount" shows that he's not immune to being a target for bullying.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The character models always tend to look a bit off with their strange blend of Animesque features and quasi-realistic proportions when coupled with the simplistic CGI. Their movement was often rather janky in earlier episodes too, but it's improved since then.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Despite the series being aimed at kids, this being the Bible, it wrestles with some pretty mature and traumatic themes. The appearance of Satan and demons (and other instances of nightmare fuel) may also frighten younger viewers as well.