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With the retro music, neon bright colors, mini-skits and dance breaks between the Abbott and Costello like riffs between Mr. Grumpy and Mr. Scatterbrain, at first glance, Eryk Casemiro and Kate Boutilier’s Emmy Award nominated Mr. Men Show feels like an animated update of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.
Using Roger Hargreaves bestselling collection of books about brightly colored characters who embody a certain personality trait (Mr. Happy, Little Miss Whoops, Mr. Nervous etc.) as fodder for this delightful series that airs on the Cartoon Network here in the United States, Casemiro and Boutilier were able to employ the lessons learned working for Nickelodeon’s popular shows Rugrats and The Wild Thornberrys to outstanding effect as one can witness in this infectious six episode DVD.
Containing “Car Wash,” “Flying,” “Trains,” “Cars,” “Boats,” and “Inventions,” the Mr. Men and Little Miss characters prove that much like The Beach Boys, they too get around whether it’s poor Mr. Persnickety having to share a room with both Mr. Rude and Mr. Messy when they board The Dillydale Express, Mr. Grumpy working as a flight attendant for Dillydale Air, or Little Miss Sunshine who admits she isn’t mechanical before asking the stalled Mr. Grumpy, “Is there something wrong with your car or is your engine getting a suntan?”
And while the show is primarily geared at children and succeeds on that level alone, as an adult, I was surprised by just how clever the award-nominated writing team could be in the way they work jokes where classic cartoon gags would’ve just used accompanying music as Mr. Bump jumps out of a plane sans parachute (Whoops again!) and whilst in the air, phones the “falling out of a plane hotline.”
It’s the subtle humor of anything goes that finds the roughly 70 minute running time of the series fly right by, faster than Little Miss Chatterbox can say her new favorite word “backgammon” even if she’s never played the game before. And like Chatterbox, as a reviewer who isn’t much of a backgammon player either nor one who’d ever seen The Mr. Men Show, I must say that I’m just as hooked on the series as she is for odd words that roll off the tongue… including one of my new favorites, “Persnickety.”
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FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.