Friday, May 28, 2010

Ryan Watches a Motion Picture #33: Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire - Season 1 (2009)


For a fantasy junkie such as myself, the prospect of a heroic fantasy-inspired TV comedy is very, very enticing. So enticing that I've been working on my own web series for about two years. Here's a shameless plug. I thought I might have been the first to offer such a thing to people, but it turns out that at the exact same time, in some dank Comedy Central dungeon, a show entitled Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire was being produced, which, jealousy aside, only manages, sadly, to hit the 'OK' mark.

While there are some good and clever gags, the show's humour relies far too much on penis jokes and homophobia. Sometimes both hitting you at once for a dual-tech of stupid. There's also a lot of the show's sole female character showing skin and having frequent sex. The show is very clearly written by men, and, more importantly, men into the kind of male wish fulfillment you can find in the most boring fantasy writing. The characters on a whole aren't terribly likable, save for the bad guys. Indeed, the most entertaining stuff is found when you can watch the fickle and evil Chancellor Dongalor (chancellor's always seem to be evil) and his painfully more competent and wonderfully polite attendant Barnabus. They're a real treat, and in Dongalor the series eventually comes to present a character that calls for some genuine emotional investment. So kudos to the writing there.

So: I suspect that as the series goes on and the writers abandon their more basic strategies for the stuff that really works best it'll really become something worth watching.

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