Uncle Grandpa, Season 2, Part 1 (Or: "I Haven't Been Lazy, Drinking Excessively, and Posting Half-Finished Material, I'm...Still Researching. Yeah, That's the Ticket.")

A new season of Uncle Grandpa is underway (as of a month and a half ago when I started this article), and it's off to a more than decent start. At five episodes in, there hasn't been a real dud like last season's "Perfect Kid" yet, and there have been some great moments of both comedy and horror. Some segments still show the weaknesses that have plagued the series from the outset (derivative plots and clunky, awkwardly executed pop culture references being the major ones) and an unsettling amount of influence from the excellent but entirely different Regular Show is creeping in, but on the whole Uncle Grandpa is developing into something pretty worthwhile.
The early formula of bumbling Fairy Godfather antics is touched on once in the first five episodes, and then only as a short. Gross-out gags have been relatively uncommon, but the animators are actually showing a commitment to the ones they run, making eyeball takes sufficiently disgusting and creatively (particularly in terms of sound effects) mutilating Pizza Steve. There have also been a couple of genuinely disturbing moments – including the unfortunate revelation of how Tiny Miracle the Robot Boy eats.

Which raises the question "why does a robot need to eat?"
and, more crucially, "why does it need to eat like that?"

Underused characters from the first season have already gotten additional focus, too. Giant Realistic Flying Tiger is disappearing for shorter stretches of time, getting more actual lines outside of Tiger Talk (albeit in Tiger-ese, though the other characters have no trouble parsing them - could this be Pete Browngardt's Chowder pedigree showing through?) and continues to be a hypercompetent steed/best friend/general-ass-out-of-fire-puller.

Hrm, close.

Think I almost got it...

Well, that's one in completely the wrong direction.

Partial credit for direct ancestor.

There we go. As seen above, Tiger is part of a long and proud lineage...
...besides "tigers", I mean.

Episode five (reviewed in the pending Part Two) even sees Beary Nice and Hot Dog Person of “New Experiences” return (finally), along with an unexpectedly recurring character from one of the better episodes of last season.
Vaguely on that note, either I just have terrible taste or there's some theory behind cartoon episode ordering that I don't grasp (or that's not an "or" statement), but it seems like Uncle Grandpa begins the season with the weakest choice of the lot, "1992 Called".

Truth in television: Especially in Canada, the 80s didn't just poof away the
moment Nevermind came out. There was an extended and awkward transition
where everybody still worked for the weekend and indulged in decidedly
non-plaid geometrics (the Tetrominos are a nice touch, although back then we
called them "Tetrads"- anyone cool enough to have a subscription to Nintendo
Power did, anyway) while grooming slowly crept back out of rock and roll
and everyone got really sarcastic. It should be noted that an image search for "90s"
(yes, I hit Enter too soon) calls up images from Saved by the Bell and
Fresh Prince of Bel Air well before Nirvana.

The classic burn is played out literally here - some guy from 1992 is actually on the phone, demanding the return of the borrowed parachute pants shown below.

Well, played out sort of literally. In the same sense that "now called" when you take a phonecall in real-time, but no sensible person would say that...unless they were themselves composing an awesome '90s burn along the lines of "the now called, it said there's a vacancy and you should come live in it", but that's getting kind of circular. Of course, one might say, for example, that "London called" if one had a specific contact there - and a call from another era could arguably follow these rules for a call from another area. There's probably a correct grammatical answer, but I'm already tired of the question.

Naturally, something as simple as sending a pair of pants back in time becomes a complete fiasco in the hands of the Uncle Grandpa Posse. The pants are inadvertently sent to 1492, enraging their owner and forcing a trip there to retrieve them.

Faced with the limitation of a "two-man Time Portal" (Pizza Steve counts, but Belly Bag doesn't) - apparently "all they could afford" despite Uncle Grandpa's ability to generate objects at whim - Uncle Grandpa selects the worst possible companion for the journey in Pizza Steve. From here, things get kind of Time Squad, as the characters play fast and loose with the space-time continuum (called out on such by Mr. Gus), discovering the pants to be in the possession of Christopher Columbus - here a babbling, hyper-aggressive screwball driven (at least by Pizza Steve's theory) power-mad by this mystical artifact.

As I already mentioned, things get...well...very Time Squad. "Get onna you knees, and kiss-a my awesome-a pants!" would really border on inappropriate without the context, which was Squad's stock and trade. In any case, Christopher Columbus' established role in popular history (and with it the timeline) is at risk, and Uncle Grandpa is forced to conceive a plan to re-acquire the pants "without violating Time Law". When Uncle Grandpa declared they would have to "blend into the year 1492 in a one-hundred percent historically accurate way", I was really hoping for a cut to them in space suits or caveman outfits , but I'll take this.

Also, the way the pants are drawn, Columbus looks like he's either
wearing a sassy novelty apron or is actually a small woman in
Mexican-Jewish Cultural Festival regalia and a Mardi Gras mask.

Trying to liberate Columbus from those ridiculous stripe-ed pants proves more challenging than anticipated and quickly escalates to violence, with Pizza Steve making the unfortunate choice to threaten him with Italian Karate...which we then learn Columbus invented. Oh, Pizza Steve, you are inevitably revealed as a fraud (at least to the audience - see "Brain Game") and your vainglorious boasting invariably comes to naught save for chance. Uncle Grandpa and Pizza Steve are mercilessly pummeled - including a thorough demonstration of the mashable, Mr. Potato-Head-like qualities of Uncle Grandpa's face...

...and all seems lost until he realizes he can simply sacrifice someone else - in this case, potentially everyone in the originating timeline - to save his own ass. This is a recurring theme in season two, and by "History of Wrestling" Uncle Grandpa is even making self-aware comments on it. Continuum be damned, Uncle Grandpa (admittedly creatively) rescues himself and Pizza Steve from certain doom, doing more to alter history than Columbus simply having the pants ever would have. Well, he did mention he was more concerned about "spending the night in Time Jail" than any reality-rending ramifications.

While "1992 Called" has its moments - as well as the excellent, MAD-like background characters (as distinct from often over-simple backgrounds) that are becoming an Uncle Grandpa signature - it does very little that specifically requires Uncle Grandpa at all.

Someone on this show aced "Goons, Mooks and Flunkies" in animation school.

Time travel is cheap and readily available in animation, and the plot - with a very standard "wacky" take on Columbus that could easily have been applied to pretty much any historical character - only strays from the textbook in terms of how zany the time-displaced artifact is. The aforementioned "Regular Show Lite" antics also surface - particularly the cosmic consequences of seemingly benign goofing off. The unimpressive main segment is followed by an excellent short, though - apparently named "Uncle Grandpa Shaves Everything", a completely accurate summary of the entire plot - which indulges without restraint in the old-school silent cartoon mayhem that Uncle Grandpa is particularly well-suited to.

Along with perfectly appropriate music, this shot tells you
everything you need to know about this sketch.

The plot, such as it is, is an excuse to unleash Uncle Grandpa on his surroundings; first the RV, then the cityscape, and finally into space (for the flimsiest of reasons, another Uncle Grandpa signature - if you can breathe in space and get there in seconds, what's stopping you from going?).

This is old school right here. The seemingly mundane plot-driving object
that's going to terraform the entire cartoon before it's through.
Felix would be proud.

In a fairly cheeky bit of writing, Uncle Grandpa ultimately ends up shaving the face of god. While referred to in dialogue as "The Universe", said universe is presented as a single consciousness (that happens to look and think like an English-speaking white male) sporting reality as facial hair.

I think saying "The Universe" might be a concession to sensibilities here, but the joke survives okay, and provides a sufficiently bizarre payoff of the escalating weirdness. When shaving the craters off the face of the moon isn't the punchline, you have to count that as a point for.

"1992 Called" shows off the Uncle Grandpa's strengths in the backing short, and its weaknesses in the main story. When the writing embraces the characters and the bizarre world they inhabit, it works exceptionally well. When it aims for snark, it's harder to pull off - part of what makes the characters funny is their strange earnestness, and a miss means a cartoon where everyone just ends up acting like Pizza Steve.

(worbleworbleworble)

Season 2 starts finding its stride with the next episode. "Bezt Frends" treads the familiar sitcom territory - as this show as been known to do - as a crazy misunderstanding ultimately leads to a winner-take-all  "friendship trivia" contest. Unlike "1992 Called", however, events play out in a decidedly Uncle Grandpa fashion.
The story begins with Uncle Grandpa distributing lovingly crafted (if painful and nonsensical) "Bezt Frend" necklaces to his...dare I say...nakama.

One of the aforementioned "geniunely disturbing moments".

In either a rare moment of guilt or an extremely common moment of arrogance, Pizza Steve declines his, reasoning that he's his own best friend and thus cannot accept it. Unfortunately, he chooses to express this in third-person dialogue, and Uncle Grandpa assumes said friend is another instance of Pizza Steve. It's understandable how Uncle Grandpa could have difficulty with this concept, considering that he can generate independently-acting duplicates, which he typically refers to as "Uncle Grandpa". Given his tendency to forget that not everyone has his reality-warping powers, it's a natural mistake. Based on this, Uncle Grandpa makes the frankly horrifying...

...and standing out as such even in an episode that, apropos of nothing, includes THIS...

...decision to "get rid of" Pizza Steve's best friend so he can claim the role himself. In case the euphemism was remotely unclear (it wasn't), this involves repeated murder attempts, including throwing Steve to the literal wolves (well, wolf, at least) and the metaphorical ones in the form of a trainbound, presumably starving, hobo.

We may have confirmation here that Pizza Steve is carnival-grade or lower,
as this penniless vagabond rejects a free meal falling into his lap as "litter".
"Last slice at a tied pizza eating contest" may be indicative of overall edibility
rather than a one-off situation. Conversely, Uncle Grandpa has composed a
song called "Don't Eat Pizza Steve", suggesting someone - most likely himself -
may try, but its relevance here is debatable.

Uncle Grandpa's attempts to explain the situation merit a - thankfully mostly skipped - lecture on the intricacies of narrative perspective from Mr. Gus and Belly Bag. We do hear the non-sequitur conclusion that "sometimes words that are spoken aren't always true" - while not applying a pronoun to yourself is confusing, there's nothing inherently untruthful about it. Also, at some point, Pizza pi was invoked, yar har yar har.

The only logical place this misunderstanding can go is to the moon. This is where Uncle Grandpa eventually "gets rid of" Pizza Steve, and where the posse follows once he realizes that it was the Pizza Steve, not just a Pizza Steve, that he stranded on the freaking moon for the offense of being closer with his friend.

As is often the case, matters are only complicated once the characters reach the Moon, where the fickle Pizza Steve has already made a new best friend, Mooon Man. That's Mooon Man with three O's, so you know to take your time and enjoy saying his name. Ensemble comedy rules demand that disputes over best friend status be resolved with a trivia challenge - something which Uncle Grandpa, apparently having been through this before, has prepared in advance.

Resolution, at least, is reached in an unexpected fashion. Mooon Man, it turns out, has so much in common with his new best friend that the equally abrasive (and entirely oblivious) Steve can't stand him. That works with the characters, and it makes you think - add a callback to the beginning, where all this confusion started, and "Bezt Frendz" wraps up in a much more satisfying manner than "1992 Called".

Everyone: "Here we go again!" (laughter)

This episode's accompanying short is the creatively named "Uncle Grandpa Goes to a Haunted House", most notable for being the only story this season to follow the actual Uncle Grandpa formula, wherein the title character's bizarre reasoning coupled with his extraordinary powers more or less resolves a child's life problem, but results in a lot of ancillary chaos.

This is an actual educational technique, "Immersive Math". It's apparently
really good for dumb kids struggling to master more abstract counting.

I've complained about seemingly flagrant "writing for the tie-in game" before, and I'm not going to spare Uncle Grandpa here. Some of the ghost designs are inspired, but this is yet another "shooter sequence" along the lines of season one's "Fishing With Uncle Grandpa", something I find especially pointless in entertainment you're not even interacting with. It's like Sewer Shark taken to its logical conclusion.

If this wasn't conceived with a touchscreen game in mind, I'll be both surprised and a little disappointed. Now, I'm not usually one to digress, but I can't help but wonder why Sega (and others) aren't cranking out their old light gun games as mobile ports for a buck a piece. That's one credit and two continues on an actual cabinet, going by the prices at the peak of the era, and getting unlimited play for the price would more than make up for not getting to play with an actual toy gun (and justify the fact that only the most obsessive are going to play through a single-path lightgun game more than once, ever).

Specifically called out as "creepy", and still about a hundredth as creepy as that clown.

Fruit Ninja and endless takes on whack-a-mole show there's a market for the basic gameplay - this nostalgia should be tapped into. The creature designs of "Uncle Grandpa Visits a Haunted House" specifically recall Laser Ghost, the game of modestly entertaining monster-shooting but maddening mandatory hits.

It has all the depth and complexity of a redemption game, but holds up well enough on MAME, and according to the admittedly shallow research I did on the subject, hasn't been officially ported to anything other than Master System (in true eight-bit style, as a completely unrelated game with the same title as the arcade version). I'm sure something suspiciously similar like "Laser Ghoul" or "Blaster Ghost" is available (there's apparently an Operation: Wolf clone called Operation: Wow), but that would hardly satisfy for nostalgic purposes.

 

Pictured, as seen approximately 14000 times
in an average game of Laser Ghost:

Despite my skill in taking misleading screenshots, the salad in fact misses Uncle Grandpa. The real Laser Ghost would never permit this blasphemy, and would have seized the opportunity to steal a sixth of his lifebar with absolutely no recourse.

After "solving" the ghost problem, Uncle Grandpa grants his tiger-fart-shooting-duck-rifle its freedom - this may not be as considerate as it initially appears. Uncle Grandpa just released a loaded, semi-sentient firearm into a heavily populated area, which may have unforeseen consequences...

...also, disarming himself presumably leads to something horrendous happening at the spectral hands of the remaining ghosts, cut off by the end of the segment.

"Haunted House" never reaches the level of hilarity of "Uncle Grandpa Shaves Everything", but touches on some of the less common aspects of the show - science-fiction action sequences and Courage-esque horror. Uncle Grandpa can go pretty far in this direction - the characters' capacity for wild takes and their world's surreal, inconsistent nature makes the show surprisingly capable of frightening despite the entirely friendly, goofy exterior.

Pizza Steve is either a true breakout character or being very deliberately pushed as one, as the next episode is also focused on the antics of the animate slice at his abrasive best.

That grey stuff is foreshadow.

"Food Truck" sees Pizza Steve go full on Bloo Mode, when a compelling homemade food (Uncle Grandpa's 'Burger Dog' ) inspires him to enslave his friends for personal gain, while hoarding the credit and profit.

(Disappointingly, the official Uncle Grandpa sandwich is less interesting
than my unlicensed knockoff merchandise)

Arguably, he passes Bloo on the self-centeredness spectrum, pushing closer to a PG-rated Master Shake as he works Uncle Grandpa to and beyond the point of passing out face-down on the grill.

UG doesn't sustain the kind of damage that, say, Stimpy would, but the point is taken. After he exhausts his labour pool, Pizza Steve even takes the required next step of attempting to make a saleable quantity of the item himself, with disastrous results (and a genuinely filthy visual for anyone remotely metaphorically-minded but crushingly immature).

Pizza Steve wears himself out trying to cram a limp wiener
into a tight burger. Yes, seriously.

Normally, when this plot surfaces, it develops until the focal character learns that "fame and fortune mean nothing if you mistreat your friends". For Pizza Steve to ever learn this, though, would contradict his very nature. While events play out very much as they did with Bloo, right down to Pizza Steve's attempt to go into business for himself destroying his business and home - but since this is Uncle Grandpa, this segues into a bizarre battle sequence against the entire city. By taking shortcuts to compensate for alienating his friends (lesson!) Pizza Steve manages to turn the RV into a Burger Dog, with the expected reaction from his hungry would-be patrons. Fortunately, the smell of food revives Uncle Grandpa et al, and we witness another display of the posse's considerable prowess and versatility in combat, demonstrated before in "Locked Out" and "Prank Wars". Mr. Gus improvises weapons and tanks for the party...

...Tiny Miracle morphs into a Tiger cage (although I contend it's doing more to protect the citizens from Giant Realistic Flying Tiger than vice versa), then later rips a graphic shart only suitable for children's television due to his octopus-like anatomy suggesting the faintest possibility of ink.

...Belly Bag (taking over for a stuck-headfirst-in-the-ground Uncle Grandpa) pulls needed items from hammerspace...

...while Tiger and Pizza Steve both weaponize their exhaust, with Pizza Steve still managing to do it more obnoxiously.

This season has been great for cameos - here, "Perfect Kid"s
Suspiciously Nonchalant Trucker returns, looking entirely
non-nonchalant about this RV made of fast food.
Hypothesis: confirmed.

The day is more or less saved, but Pizza Steve ends up lusting after an even greater prize (which, probably not coincidentally, is also the home of his spited ex-bestie Mooon Man). If he learns anything from his friends saving him yet again despite his shabby treatment, it goes unmentioned - and it's highly unlikely he does any such thing, anyway. After all, he was only saved from the realization of one of his greatest fears - losing his home and possessions, see "Uncle Grandpa For a Day" - by the friends he bullied into servitude. That's a little subtle for the Pizza Steve we know to grasp.

"Food Truck" is the outright funniest episode of the first three. The cameos and "hidden" jokes, along with a truly bizarre escalation and resolution right when most takes would be transitioning into the lesson, develop something uniquely Uncle Grandpa from this stock plot. It doesn't hurt that Pizza Steve is practically made to do this story, and just not having him learn to appreciate anything is a considerable subversion. This episode's short-short, "Moments in History with Mr. Gus", does nothing to live up to it, though. There is literally one joke - one it would be a stretch to fill one of the twenty-second bumpers with. Mr. Gus was present when generic-smiley-faced George Washington was crossing the Delaware, and Washington FORGOT HIS PANTS YAR HAR YAR HAR. So Mr. Gus loaned him his. This is the entire joke.

The sketch itself just sort of ends, too, in what feels like an outright admission of "eh, we got nothin'." "Christopher Columbus" at least had "zany" going for him -  when your parody of George Washington pales in comparison to Fairly Oddparents', the entire thing could have been effectively skipped.

Ugh, this looks recurring. We had better get the conclusion
of "Xarna" before another installment of this.

The most appealing thing about Uncle Grandpa is its complete embracing of being a cartoon cartoon. There's no great overarching continuity, no real character development, seldom an actual point to speak of, and nearly everything that occurs is treated, first and foremost, as an excuse for punning and slapstick. This style is risky: trying too hard to be "witty" or overdoing it with the sarcasm makes the physical comedy - the real heart - come off as forced, but going too "wacky" or "random" results in something like Breadwinners, and the entire thing seems lazy. Uncle Grandpa touches on the timeless - as "Uncle Grandpa Shaves Everything" and "Food Truck" demonstrate - but it has yet to find the sweet spot like the true greats of this style (including the Felix the Cat adventures that inspire it). Season two has been more consistently on - "Hide and Seek" and "The History of Wrestling", relegated to my next post in the interest of getting some of this season reviewed before its over - are both comparable to "Food Truck" and season one's strongest. However, misses in either direction ("1992 Called" going overboard with snark and "Moments in History with Mr. Gus"' meager historical "parody" stand out as particularly awkward) still drag down the unique, legitimately funny material. The character art, at least, can carry the weaker jokes - it's hard to beat a good "dumb guy" drawing for a cheap laugh, and a lot of effort obviously goes into the background characters, some of which are now 'regulars' for particularly nerdy viewers to make a game of spotting. It's hard to watch an episode of Uncle Grandpa without laughing at some point, itself an achievement in modern comedy - even if those laughs are often spaced out with groans and "wut?"s

Seriously, that clown was messed up.