Review: Hot Streets “Tip to the Lip; Camp Hot Streets”

Digitized styles and camper smiles.

Overview

In “Tip to the Lip,” Jet Jr. tasks Hot Streets with redirecting a renegade missile from blowing up Mars. French is in charge of leading the mission — however, he doesn’t heed the warning not to carry electronics with him while they are being transported into the missile’s security mainframe, and his electronic thermos is fused into his skull. Because of this, French turns into a heat-focused super-villain — bent on making the Earth “hot.” He redirects the missile’s coordinates to Earth, but the day is saved by Jen’s Jason phone — which developed nearly human intelligence during the transport. He uses his technological abilities to save Hot Streets and sacrifice himself to redirect the missile into the sun.

In “Camp Hot Streets,” the gang is sent to train a bunch of potential, future Hot Streets operatives — who are all children. During this retreat, however, a witch starts to steal people’s appendages, causing a panic. They later discover, however, that the witch had been home-growing plant children “for her diet,” but that they’d gotten too smart and started building more children from stolen body parts. Jen and a snotty kid named Nostril discover that the campers are all plant children, and must destroy them by using Chubbie Webbers’ mystery stew. The kids are destroyed, the day is saved, and Nostril remains an orphan.

Our Take

Immediately, there’s a pretty great stylistic difference from most Hot Streets episodes in “Tip to the Lip” — the “digital style” is a welcome change of pace from the usual flat designs of the characters, and the animation also wasn’t afraid to get a little bonkers in the cyber-spacey atmosphere of the missile interior. There wasn’t anything like that in “Camp Hot Streets,” but at least there was something to shake things up a bit.

“Tip to the Lip” had a pretty great emotional jab that definitely made it enjoyable. However, there’s a lot to be said when a minor, one-off character is more likable than most of the main cast members. It’s sad that we won’t get to see Jason again, but ’tis better to have loved and lost. On the topic of characters, it’s really hard to enjoy Jen when the writing constantly keeps throwing the “haha look, it’s a girl” joke out there (like in the entirety of “Camp Hot Streets.”) There’s already a sea of shows that feature the “singular girl character” as a springboard for sexual jokes; we don’t need another one.

That being said, it’s still hard to find a lot of comedy in this show. Deadpan humor can be an amazing tool, or it can go right over an audience member’s head. In more cases than not, it feels as though Hot Streets wants to use this comedic style in its dialogue, but doesn’t always have the visual — or even straight up writing — means to make it successfully funny. Branski’s one-liners and French’s personal asides are a great example. They’re hit or miss, but mostly just miss.

On a lighter note…the diary camper was scarily reminiscent of Bridget Fitzsimmons from F is for Family. Intentional? Not intentional? Either way, the voice got a laugh.