Review: Big City Greens “Shortsgiving”

OVERVIEW

A compilation of existing shorts framed as something shown in the Greens’ backyard.

OUR TAKE

There really isn’t a whole lot of critical things to say about these shorts. If you have 30 minutes to kill and are familiar with at least some of these Disney shows, you will probably have an alright time watching shorts of them presented as a single playlist. It’s a pretty good mix of modern Disney shows; Phineas and Ferb, Amphibia, The Owl House, and obviously some Big City Greens stuff, so it’s got a lot to pull from in their recent catalogue. It is interesting to me that the wiki for this series bothers to say this is non-canon, however, since I was not really aware such a seemingly episodic series like this would even have a canon they needed to preserve. I’ve only really caught glimpses of Big City Greens waiting for Amphibia and Owl House to come on and it seems like a decent show in its own right, just not something I would willingly seek out. But yeah, clearly if this did have a canon, it would be impossible for all of these shorts to crossover and make sense, so it would be outside of that. Not sure that really needed the clarification but here we are.

As Amphibia is my favorite out of the group, I definitely enjoyed those shorts the most, though watching the short that redid the intro as a 16-bit video game did have me raising some questions, mainly in that video games aren’t really portrayed as this except in deliberately “retro” styles. So it kinda makes me wonder how long that will seem like the way to show a video game in media when less and less actual kids have probably played games that look like that. I mean, I guess having something like a Minecraft parody would be a tad more expensive if they went 3D with it, but it would be just a bit more clever. Although I guess it would ironically make it a bit more dated too, since 80’s video game aesthetic is oddly enough more timeless than something like a more recent release like Minecraft. Maybe make it look like a Nintendo 64 game? Either way, in case it wasn’t clear, I’m looking desperately for something say because these are a bunch to shorts with not a whole lot else to them. Now I will get back to waiting for the second half of Amphibia Season 2, which still has yet to gain a release date.