Review: The Patrick Star Show “Bunny the Barbarian”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

While cleaning the house before Family Movie Night, Bunny ends up in a crazy barbaric world where she must face a dust demon.

OUR TAKE

Huh, alright, I guess some of these episodes are gonna be focused on one character, in this case, Patrick’s newly canon mother, Bunny Star. I didn’t get a good sense of her as a character in the last episode or the Halloween special, mainly because there was a lot going on there in both of those, and now I finally get to see one that is just squarely centered on this one character. So, what am I picking up here? Well, I guess both she and Patrick’s dad are pulling from a lot of mom and dad stereotypes for comedy. Stop me if I’m saying something that is blindingly obvious, as I am very much trying to get blood from a stone by continuing to attempt to view The Patrick Star Show in any sort of critical perspective. But yeah, Patrick’s dad is a dad and Patrick’s mom is a mom, meaning in this case that she is very obsessed with cleaning and vacuums and has a concerningly upbeat attitude about all things, though that just might be the stupid part of her that she shares with her son and husband. And so putting her in a Conan the Barbarian style hellscape to fight a big monster that’s made of dust is a naturally funny premise that could easily fill ten minutes.

The Spongebob series has long since been known for having surreal comedic horror…or horrific comedy, or both, so this approach is absolutely up a spin-off’s alley. Seeing Bunny being laughably unphased by entering this horrific barbaric world, winning over just about everyone there and easily defeating a giant dust monster ogre thing with some sort of magic vacuum attachment is pretty much comedy that writes itself. The joke is that she is very much not a typical sort of person you’d see in this sort of setting, but ends up walking through everyone and everything with ease and feeling no worse for wear. And to make things even zanier, her big adventure is the thing that the rest of the family have been watching on the TV, which makes…absolutely no sense but I’m not going to question it. This is a perfectly fine episode to follow and I guess I wouldn’t mind seeing more of these as the season goes on. Though I am happy to say that there seems to be a break as the next new episode is in a couple weeks, giving some time to possibly go back and watch the previous five or six episodes I haven’t seen.