So apparently Spongebob has begun its 10th season (despite STILL not having released some of the season 9 episodes), and decided to start it off with the Whirly Brains episode.
Let me just sum up the premise: Spongebob and Patrick buy a toy consisting of remote-controlled propellers, which are designed to be attached to one'sbrainto make itfly around outside of the user's body.
Yes, you read that right.
Granted, Spongebob has never followed any sort of logic, but this is just... what?
The premise is already hard to even comprehend, but what makes it worse is just how creepy the animators decided to make it. Take a look at this screenshot. Every character who uses this... toy... is depicted with dead, empty eyes, and the brains themselves have very pronounced dangling stems with smaller roots sticking out of them, which just makes you feel like Spongebob and Patrick should be dead right now. It certainly doesn't help that the brains are put through all sorts of abuse in an attempt at creating comedy.
I can definitely admire them trying their darndest to make the concept work, but I'm sorry, it doesn't. There are, admittedly, various jokes that are kinda funny, like the part with Mr. Krabs and Ms. Puff, or the part where SB and Patrick try to find their brains when they get lost, and I certainly enjoyed that one guy chastising his kid and saying that "the brain is your body's most important organ, not a toy". However, all of this is undermined by how creepy the whole brain business is, since I'm constantly being disturbed by the dangling stems and SB and Patrick looking like walking corpses.
And the sad part is, this episode could have easily been rewritten into them using just normal, remote-controlled drones - and pretty much nothing about this plot would change. The part with them scaring Squidward would remain the same (as long as the drones had a sufficiently weird design), and the conflict with the drones being lost would also remain the same, as long the toy came with some kind of goggles that let you see through the eyes of the drone, but which SB and Patrick later find themselves being unable to take off, making them effectively blind. Therefore, it's clear that the whole brain thing is just a gimmick for the sake of bringing more viewers, by tricking them into watching the episode just to see how WTF-ish it's going to be.
To the episode's credit, at no point does it get boring, the comedy does shine through sometimes, and the characters do remain in-character. The animation is certainly pretty impressive as well, and the characters are noticeably more expressive than usual.
However, the gimmicky and rather creepy premise certainly makes it a highly dividing episode that some people will like, and some people will hate.
Whirly Brains - What the actual f...
So apparently Spongebob has begun its 10th season (despite STILL not having released some of the season 9 episodes), and decided to start it off with the Whirly Brains episode.
Let me just sum up the premise: Spongebob and Patrick buy a toy consisting of remote-controlled propellers, which are designed to be attached to one's brain to make it fly around outside of the user's body.
Yes, you read that right.
Granted, Spongebob has never followed any sort of logic, but this is just... what?
The premise is already hard to even comprehend, but what makes it worse is just how creepy the animators decided to make it. Take a look at this screenshot.
Every character who uses this... toy... is depicted with dead, empty eyes, and the brains themselves have very pronounced dangling stems with smaller roots sticking out of them, which just makes you feel like Spongebob and Patrick should be dead right now. It certainly doesn't help that the brains are put through all sorts of abuse in an attempt at creating comedy.
I can definitely admire them trying their darndest to make the concept work, but I'm sorry, it doesn't. There are, admittedly, various jokes that are kinda funny, like the part with Mr. Krabs and Ms. Puff, or the part where SB and Patrick try to find their brains when they get lost, and I certainly enjoyed that one guy chastising his kid and saying that "the brain is your body's most important organ, not a toy". However, all of this is undermined by how creepy the whole brain business is, since I'm constantly being disturbed by the dangling stems and SB and Patrick looking like walking corpses.
And the sad part is, this episode could have easily been rewritten into them using just normal, remote-controlled drones - and pretty much nothing about this plot would change. The part with them scaring Squidward would remain the same (as long as the drones had a sufficiently weird design), and the conflict with the drones being lost would also remain the same, as long the toy came with some kind of goggles that let you see through the eyes of the drone, but which SB and Patrick later find themselves being unable to take off, making them effectively blind. Therefore, it's clear that the whole brain thing is just a gimmick for the sake of bringing more viewers, by tricking them into watching the episode just to see how WTF-ish it's going to be.
To the episode's credit, at no point does it get boring, the comedy does shine through sometimes, and the characters do remain in-character. The animation is certainly pretty impressive as well, and the characters are noticeably more expressive than usual.
However, the gimmicky and rather creepy premise certainly makes it a highly dividing episode that some people will like, and some people will hate.