Review: Corner Gas Animated “Drone and Dumber”

Brent has a new drone.  What could go wrong?

Overview:

Brent has bought a new drone, but he doesn’t really know what to do with it.  With Oscar convinced that the drone he saw flying was a UFO, Brent has a new target for torment.  He convinces his father that he has been abducted by aliens and replaced by a robot.

Also, the annual Turkey Shoot is coming up in Dog River.  Karen is struggling with the fact that she choked the year before.  But, with her new laser eye surgery, she may be a shoo-in to win this year.  Davis decides to use this information to scam the town into betting against her.  Meanwhile, Wanda and Emma are trying to figure out just how intelligent turkeys are, but the bird might outsmart them.

Our Take:

Already this season looks and feels drastically different from the first.  Besides the improved animation, there is a lot of small details that help to improve this show.  The most noticeable difference is the amount of content that is squeezed into these new episodes.  With season one, each episode featured two congruent plots that would sometimes align.  In the first two episodes of the second season, we have already seen twice the amount of story, with significantly more jokes, and it all working together to create the energy of Dog River that we love.  There is so much happening in the new season that it makes last year’s shows looking slow and boring in comparison.

Brent purchasing himself a new drone is enough to carry an episode on its own.  There is a lot that could have been done with his new toy, but instead, they utilized the idea to branch off in a couple of directions including Hank getting jealous and getting a less impressive version and Oscar being convinced his family has been abducted with aliens.  Allowing the story to branch out like this keeps the show moving and allows for more humour throughout.

There is also a big difference in the way that characters are utilized.  Often during the first season, it felt as if characters were being crammed into an episode just so that they could have some screen time.  In this episode, each character was used to their strength like Wanda’s conspiracy on turkey’s or Davis’s plan to scam the town.  All of the main characters have a part to play, and none of them feel out of place.  This is strong storytelling, and you can tell that these scripts have gone through more than a couple of rewrites.

Suddenly, Corner Gas Animated has gone from being a great adaptation of a live-action series to being a solid sitcom in its own rights.  Where everything felt like a continuation of the daily trials of the citizens of Dog River in season one, now the show has taken a life of its own, developing a fresh formula that is more fitting to the animated genre.  We were looking forward to new Corner Gas content, but nobody could have guessed at the difference one year could make.  Now we just have to wait a week to see where else this series can go.

Score

8/10

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