Review: 9 Years to Neptune “Feast or Famine”

Overview

Due to the gross incompetence of their conspiracy theorist Janitor named “RJ”, the crew of a 9-year trip to the planet Neptune is completely without a food supply and their only hope is to seek out a French robot that could potentially help them…


Our Take

In one of the most bizarre concepts, I’ve seen in a while. We now have a sci-fi adult comedy utilizing the use of Puppetry. If that wasn’t enough, It’s almost structured in a documentary-style similar to shows like “The Office” where it often cuts to characters sharing their thought process on camera when nobody else is looking in combination with live-action actors at random thrown into the mix. Arguably the crew members despite how colorful and dysfunctional they can be, tend to cause more problems than they solve for themselves. While understandably giving the characters individual clothing gives them a personality, I’m surprised they aren’t in Star-Trek style space uniforms like most space crew members would often wear. Heck, even the U-Nasa Astronauts from the TerraFormars anime wore all-white uniforms on their space missions. 

Much of the humor comes from situational comedy. From the exaggerated and ethnically diverse to the broad-borderline and cartoonishly grotesque with the stereotypical personalities you’d expect satire to conjure up, with your vain Aussie captain who likes to flaunt his bare-chested muscles, your hypochondriac doctor, Indian social media influencer, the egocentric British noblewoman, the token elderly person who doesn’t even know his own age, the single African American Mom with her two sons who blindly believes that all the problems in the world can be solved with singing and the aforementioned conspiracy theorist janitor/mechanic, etc. with the exception of ship tech-expert Stuart who seems to be the logical “straight man” of the group and he’s one of the two live-action actors of the show while the other is a secretary named Natalie who’s puppet boss funded the space flight, to begin with.

Overall, this is a welcoming surprise and a good start to a new series with a concept that I’m surprised hasn’t been done before given that many of the adult comedies with puppets often relied on dark humor that’s grounded in reality with movies such as “Meet the Feebles” and The Happytime Murders. But much like with animation, it’s open to a world of imaginative possibilities and laughs to be had despite some of the weirdness of the proceedings, and I’ll happily be along for the ride to see how this turns out.