Review: Hot Streets “Creamy Zeus; The Moon Masters”

New cases, same streets.

Overview

The season begins with Soo Park being fired from the Assistant Director position of Hot Streets. French seems taken aback that Branski feels no remorse for Soo’s firing and starts to worry about how Branski values their friendship. Branski and French’s new boss, Jet Jr., immediately assigns a mission to them: to stop Creamy Zeus the Pirate from plundering America. However, considering the danger of the case, Jet simply sends clones of Branski, French, Jen and Chubbie Webbers to do the job for them. The real French accidentally gets sent in along with the clones, but befriends them, feeling unvalued by his real team. The clones turn on him and befriend Creamy Zeus, who attempts to murder him with “infinite cream.” Chubbie Webbers discovers where French is, kills the pirates, and saves him. Chubbie Webbers honors French as a “true friend,” and he is brought back to the team. Meanwhile, Soo Park thinks Jet Jr. is up to no good.

In “The Moon Masters,” Hot Streets learns that the “rights of the Moon” have expired: leaving it up for grabs. By law, the only way to win the rights back is through a space race, where the gang needs to go up against Crimson Dagger — leader of the Yakuza crime syndicate — a hotdog widow named Leopold, and a nefarious George Washington-looking alien. Jen and French must hide Chubbie Webbers from the Yakuza (who are out to kill him for sniffing their butts) and act as musicians for a disguise. Crimson Dagger sabotages the race and wins, but the runners of the race — the Jardane — rigged it so that they could suck the “bone marrow” from the moon, no matter who won. This winds up sucking the moon’s glow away, so every competitor works with Hot Streets to stop the Jardane. Jen and French’s improvised music winds up being hypnotic to the Jardane, leaving them vulnerable and free to be defeated. The moon returns to normal and all competitors decide to share ownership of the moon.

Our Take

The streets have been taken again. Hot Streets is a show that takes the crime drama genre and places it within a world of the supernatural and super nonsensical. Its second season puts the show under a microscope, seeing as how it’s managed to prove itself worthy of making a comeback on Adult Swim. Given Hot Streets’ demonstrated animation and brand of storytelling, expectations have to be set a little higher when it comes to a new season. The first season of any show can be granted a lot of passes since it basically functions as a “stage setter” for most of its mechanics: its characters, its plot, its humor, and even its animation. Hot Streets appears to be under-laying an overarching story in its first S2 episode, so it appears things have begun to thicken from last season’s drama.

But the question must be asked: did Hot Streets come in hot?

Not really. There were some vague improvements made from last season, but the noteworthy aspects of it are muffled by the same pitfalls that previous episodes fell into.

A lot of its problems stem from the animation. Here’s the thing — the Adult Swim production budget isn’t that great. It’s no secret, and a lot of its shows will try to pick up the slack for this by doing creative things with its art direction and art style. The artistic direction of Hot Streets can be really entertaining — its whole world of the story, for example (it takes a lot of creativity to come up with creatures and antagonists such as the Jardane.) However, the artistic style of the show doesn’t really leave an imprint on the brain. So far, nothing’s been done with its unmemorable, simplistic “pencil” style, and it winds up suffocating the zany creations the show has to offer. There were bits where the animation got vivid for a few short seconds (such as when Creamy Zeus was transforming out of the pool) but the lack of these moments throughout the two episodes left a lot to be desired.

The exciting thing, as mentioned, appears to be its overarching plot with Jet Jr. (a vague J.J. the Jetplane joke? We’ll take it.) For a show that’s proved it has continuity, it’ll be interesting to see where this goes — but script-wise, this seemed to be the only real thing of interest. It felt as though that thread was left hanging as the characters went off to do other things weren’t all that entertaining. The show tends to rely on lowbrow gags (Chubbie Webbers’ in general) and other times, it feels as though jokes are placed which never really have punchlines (the “tip” exchange that Branski had in “The Moon Masters,” for example) but occasionally, there’ll be a laugh (like Leopold’s “dead wife” lines when he’s placing his flag on the moon.) More often than not, though, character dialogue feels bland, and the animation/style doesn’t help. The voice actors do a fantastic job, however, and definitely help the cause.

Whether there will be big character developments this season is up in the air, as it’s hard to tell when something is a gag or if it will hold a lasting effect on a character (such as French’s introspection about his friendship with Branski) but it seems like this new season will be a good place to start. All in all, we still have a ways to go with the rest of the season, and it’s too early to tell what lies in store. Here’s hoping it can pick things up as it goes.