Review: King Star King !/!/!/

Overview:

After a decade lost in the Normal Zone, everyone’s favorite macho stereotype, King Star King, is back for more skull-bashing and spine-ripping bliss. King Star King finds himself back on his standard warpath against God Star God, but his story begins in a very different place–the Normal Zone–with new priorities in place. King Star King !/!/!/ may look similar, but time apart has pushed this galactic deity warrior behind the pale and forced him to face his greatest challenge yet: middle-age and a loving family.

Our Take:

JJ Villard’s King Star King is one of the wildest series that Adult Swim has ever produced, both in terms of graphic violence and exaggerated visuals, but it largely fell through the cracks due to its original status as an online-exclusive six-episode series. JJ Villard has had several series and opportunities at Adult Swim, which has left fans all but convinced that they’d seen the last of Villard’s heightened He-Man stereotype. When Adult Swim recently announced one-off specials to two former properties, it came as a major shock that King Star King was included in this chaos. Now, a decade since the release of the show’s original 2013 pilot, King Star King is back, and he’s more middleagier than ever!

King Star King got a lot of mileage out of punk rock takes on fairy tale archetypes, which makes even more sense when taking the rest of Villard’s career into consideration. That being said, this King Star King!/!/!/ special feels more indebted to The Matrix or Twin Peaks: The Return than any nursery rhyme. King Star King, now known as Greg MacNelson, has taken on a considerably more grounded and domesticated form that’s reached the point that he’s even built a family during the years that he spent in the Normal Zone. This family, for all intents and purposes is a frivolous fabrication, but King Star King can’t help but fall in love with them before he needs to abandon it all. The viewer isn’t necessarily invested in this new paradigm, but King Star King/Greg’s inability to abandon this artifice really speaks to the growth of his character.

The start of King Star King!/!/!/ wallows in this mundanity before King Star King plugs back into the Matrix, so to speak. The special engages in scathing corporate commercialism satire where Jeff Bezos reigns supreme and every home has a Bing security system installed. The names of corporations get shouted and praised every few minutes and it’s a very aggressive look into the state of the world that arguably makes Normal Zone look more bizarre and hellish than Waffle Zone. Jeff Bezos is forced to cut out his own kidney with the severed bone shard of a drumstick of Popeye’s chicken, which really functions as the ultimate attack on society. King Star King !/!/!/ screams with an intense rage that’s the biggest change here since the original King Star King. Villard tells a story with one of his most beloved and abandoned characters that’s mean, angry, and yet simultaneously silly. There’s just enough time spent in the Normal Zone in order to get a sense of this deranged take on reality before Villard salts the Earth and “Greg” returns to chaotic normalcy. 

There are many directions that a return of this nature can take and so King Star King !/!/!/’s decision to turn this roid raging hero’s journey into a pitiful mid-life crisis parable deserves some credit. It’s an unexpected turn, but one that actually adds some emotional weight to what’s always been a ridiculous exercise in nonsense. It’s genuinely touching that the major crux of this special is that King Star King doesn’t want to remain in the Waffle Zone in his strongest state, but that he actively misses his “fake family,” which he learns are just as real as anything. 

Unexpected narrative turns were par for the course in King Star King, but detailed and extravagant visuals were always the series’ greatest weapon. King Star King !/!/!/ is more visually in line with Villard’s later animated series, but there is still no shortage of sublime animated spectacles. There are some gorgeous sequences that adopt splash panel-like approaches that function as beautifully framed visuals in their own right. They all wonderfully contextualize the emotion at hand, whether it’s through a web of aortic valves, a myriad of skulls, or dripping brains that fester and function as memory-fueled transitions. These fancy visuals clash with the more simplistic character designs in an anarchic manner that’s fitting of the series’ cynical mission statement and masquerade mentality. The same is true for the diverse styles of creatures that populate the waffle house, many of which feel like they belong in completely different series.

Staying true to the original’s form, King Star King !/!/!/ also doesn’t shy away from gratuitous gore. There are some extremely violent and bloody massacres in these 22 minutes, particularly through the use of firearms. Guns are freely used as intimidating weapons that slaughter mass innocents in aggressive images that echo the fractured and depressing state of the real world. Later on, an electric toothbrush that’s delivered by Same-Day Amazon Prime shipping gets viciously jammed into Bezos’ brain while explosive visuals shoot grey matter and electric bolts of pain at the audience.The animation does a lot of the heavy lifting here, but there’s also exceptional music that underscores all of this carnage that’s stylized, atmospheric, and particularly effective for this brand of chaos.

JJ Villard’s King Star King !/!/!/ is an angry, cynical, but also oddly beautiful and accepting 22 minutes of television. Projects that return after extended periods are frequently destined to fail and can never match the impossible expectations and inflated memories that exist within their fans. King Star King !/!/!/ is faithful to the original, but wisely understands when it’s appropriate to play fast and loose with its lore. This return to Waffle Zone and beyond isn’t identical to the original and it’s hardly just an extra episode, but what instead gets delivered here is far more interesting and paints toward a viable future for King Star King, even if it’s through sporadic, punctuation-laden specials.