Review: MIKE JUDGE PRESENTS: TALES FROM THE TOUR BUS “Morris Day and The Time”

Time after time.

Overview(Spoilers Below)

The penultimate episode of Mike Judge Presents season two follows Morris Day and the Time, the unofficial Prince Rogers spin-off band. The episode follows Morris traveling all over the country at an early age and how he met Prince at an early age which, subsequently, led to a career of his own. Usually seen as the opening act for Prince, eventually, creative and personal differences between Prince and Morris caused the band the Time to split, later, however, reformed and toured for years. Fortunately, Prince and Morris were able to make amends before Prince’s untimely passing.

Our Take

This episode kind of reminds me of my thoughts about the Bootsy Collins/James Brown episodes in that I’m not sure I got that much out of learning about Morris Day and the Time. To start, I thought we were on the right track, learning about Morris’ upbringing and I was having a good time with it. However, I’m not sure we didn’t ultimately make this episode all about Prince at the end. Ordinarily, I would be ok with this if the episode was entitled “Prince”, but that wasn’t the case here. I do enjoy the familiar faces from prior episodes again showing up this week, almost like recurring characters in the lexicon of funk music. I think a good temp-reading on an animated docu-series is the retention of information. Put a gun to my head before this week’s episode, and all I could tell you about Morris Day and the Time is that they were the ending band to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Put a gun to my head after this episode, I can now tell you that they were Prince’s opening act…which is essentially the service they performed for the construction of this episode.