Bubble SG Review: Heartland Hubby ‘Pilot’

Posted on January 8, 2015April 20, 2017 by Chacha Chan

Spoilers Below

Heralded as Channel 5’s first prime time animated series, Heartland Hubby’s graphics are very similar to that of Family Guy, but with major Singaporean flavour. And with a nickname like Teh Peng (Hokkien for iced tea) for the main character, I expected some dialects. But being shown in censorship-happy Singapore, I could understand why lar. At least they used quite a lot of Singlish!

For someone used to English-speaking animations voiced mainly by Westerners, the strong Singaporean accents were a bit strange at first. But I got over that fast enough.

The pilot episode focused mainly on the main character Encik losing money at his minimart. Instead of confessing to his family, he tries to cover it up, leading to a hilarious misunderstanding with two of his kids! His wife is the trying-to-be-hip mum, and keeps up with all the teenage lingo. She sets up a blogshop and apparently gets an average of 10 orders every two hours after just one day. If that could be true, I’d be setting up my own blogshop right now! They have three kids, to try and get more Singaporean personalities into the show I guess. The oldest daughter is tough and athletic, and the middle son is a geeky guy who probably watches too many movies. The youngest daughter being a child prodigy gets to speak in an odd British-tinted accent, because Brits sound smarter?

I have to say that the first episode really reminded me of ‘Under One Roof’, one of Singapore’s old well-loved dramas. It had the same warmth and humour that locals love without trying too hard to be something other than entertaining. And it’s actually one of the better locally-produced shows that Channel 5 has shown for a long time, animation or not. Now, if only there were some dialects thrown in…