Review: The Loud House: Road Trip

Overview

The titular Loud family embarks on a cross-country expedition when Rita (The Loud matriarch) is assigned to write a travel article. Though she prepares an itinerary in an attempt to meet her deadline, the trip suddenly takes a turn in this Loud-centric special event as the family battles an ancient curse, goes wild at a rodeo, runs amok at the White House, a chance encounter at Hollywood, climb rocky mountains and even visit The Casagrandes’ hometown, Great Lakes City!

Our Take

In a nutshell, this is new wave of episodes tied with Season 7 with a somewhat coherent story-arch consisting of 8 episodes. These episodes are: “Bizarritorium”, “Bringing Down the House”, “Mountain Hard Pass”, “From Brad to Worse”, “Doll Day Afternoon”, “Screen Queen”, and finally “Hide and Sneak”. Many of these episodes start out promising but are at best a mixed bag. Often times the pacing is littered with aggressively contrived situations mixed with obnoxiously juvenile jokes that you’d come to expect from the show.

Throughout this special is a series of even wilder chaotic adventures as they begin to encounter many big secrets in The Royal Woods, discovering hidden talents, and investigating a string of mysterious pranks. Often times you’ll even have an episode devoted to one character or several mostly when the narrative demands it. For example, Lola learns the hard way that being a Movie star isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, and we learn the backstory of Luan’s puppet Mr. Coconuts which is slightly interesting in itself, but all of it culimates to a chance encounter with the Casagrandes that almost doesn’t happen due to the ridiculously unrealistic dealines put upon Rita by her boss via her smartphone…

Overall, a decent special that should cater to the longtime fans even if some of the jokes fell flat for me. It’s easy to understand that it was attempting to capture the spirit of the classic National Lampoons Vacation movies, but Rita’s boss only assigned her to write the articles and she didn’t have to get an RV if it was only her that had to go. But then again, the Dad looking after their 11 kids in her absence would’ve been a different kind of chaos if you think about it. Upon research, we can expect more episodes later in September but hopefully they can deliver on some meaningful storytelling mixed with some decent laughs.