Review: Mike Judge Presents: Tales From The Tour Bus “James Brown (Part 2)”

Should there be a part three?

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The second part of James Browns’ story is a bit more all over the place, as we get insight into James’ struggles with angel dust that lead to some of his controversial off-field issues, some of his upbringings, and his death.

Our Take

It’s a sad story, but I think the last three episodes should have been completely redone. Again, I don’t see the value of the “Bootsy Collins” episode still because we even got more Bootsy this week that wasn’t all too dissimilar to the initial story. Furthermore, the episode was a bit all over the place in terms of its organization. For my money, I would’ve liked to have seen either no Bootsy, and save that for his episode, or all of the Bootsy episode, and make the James Brown story a three-parter that would’ve focused more on his troubled upbringing and how his big “break” came about as well as delving deep into his personal issues later in life which, I know for a fact, we only really scratched the surface of. I mean, there are whole chapters of domestic violence we didn’t even get into, we touched on it, but the real stories of his domestic violence past are way more affluent than what we were presented with this week.

I do wish the producers would mess a little more with drug trips from an animated context because right now I don’t always see the animated value of the series. I do when we’re talking about his upbringing and a few of the stories, but I would hope that some of the “chances” that could be had with animation would be used more to really get some girth from the art form and help present more expansive series. With the “George Clinton” episodes it made sense to just make sure you get the costumes and whatnot because they were so outlandish, but given chapters like James Brown, I need to see a bit more because just animating the stories is one thing, but USING animation is another, and that’s what I’d like to see more of, probably for next season.

 

 

Score
6/10