Review: Red vs Blue – Family Shatters “Beach Episode”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Shatter Squad talk about a neat episode idea that they’re not going to actually do.

OUR TAKE

Okay, yeah, the second episode was just a lucky accident. That empty disappointment feeling I got from the first short is back with a vengeance because now we’re back to avoiding actual comedy plots and instead substituting them with the vague gesturing towards the idea of a potential joke. This week, it’s all about the writers showing off how they are…aware of tropes. You know, maybe having a character describing how the typical plot skeleton of a beach episode and complaining about a lack of budget would have passed for a solid joke back in, say, 2006, but I’d like to think we have long passed the days where Deadpool being self aware was the cutting edge of comedy. Nothing against Deadpool, mind you, but even he had more going for him than simply being meta. And I know that the word “Meta” means a few different things here in RVB, but we’ve also had a character whose entire schtick was just basically saying “wow, this is like that one movie” and he is not fondly remembered. Plus, we know that they can very easily make a premise work within five minutes, so it’s not that they’re incapable, they just aren’t bothering.

But okay, they’re clearly feeling the limitations of this small amount of time to fit a script in and a lack of funding to do very much with it anyway. Now, I’m just a viewer, so I don’t know the process of putting these episodes together, but if it costs a lot of money to animate these then…why not just use Machinima? You know, the thing you said that this show would be ANYWAY? I know that the Zero bit of RVB stuff is known for being fully animated, but it would be a pretty cool return to basics to actually see these characters in the same engine as the old Blood Gulch gang. And with Halo Infinite on the way, you have a brand new game you can play around with and make ACTUAL PROPER META JOKES ABOUT. And all it would cost is however much it is to record video game footage, just like how it all started. Plus, it’s all non-canonical anyway, so why not put throw in some older characters or even some new ones who are never going to show up in the main show anyway! Wouldn’t that be cool? Wouldn’t that be fun? Wouldn’t that be FUNNY? Or we can keep doing this nonsense, I guess.