Review: Tigtone “Tigtone and the Seven-Headed Serpent of Kloom”

Overview(Spoilers Below):

Tigtone proves that nefarious multi-headed serpentine behemoths are no match for his ultimate questing skills as he and Helpy make swift work of the legendary monster. Since an episode of television can’t be only thirty seconds long, Tigtone and his partner find the rest of their time consumed with the retrieval of the ingredients to forge a mighty…soup. As supper is summoned, two new villains make a play for power within Propecia and promise to complicate matters for Tigtone.

Our Take:

Tigtone is like a solar eclipse or a cruel act of nature where instincts and common sense try to will your body to look away, yet you just can’t bring yourself to do it. Tigtone’s extremely unique use of motion capture technology, but purely for facial gestures, is responsible for the show’s bizarre and off-putting look. By design, Andrew Koehler and Benjamin Martian wanted to create a show that can look amazing and picturesque from a still frame, but when the series is in motion it resembles a walking nightmare. It’s an ambitious decision that’s largely emblematic of Tigtone’s chaotic atmosphere, yet I also know people who simply can’t watch this show because of its jarring appearance, so they accomplish this goal a little too well.

In addition to the series’ aggressive art style, the energy that fuels Tigtone is also often unbelievable. Tigtone himself is like if a Dungeons & Dragons character rolls the dice and has their bath salts stat maxed out. And that every single one of their stats also happens to be “bath salts.” Tigtone has no room for Tigtone doesn’t just scoff in the faces of things like “Dexterity” and “Constitution,” he outright bites off their ears and then tries to use the severed appendage as a key to solve some quest.

In less skillful hands this extremely gung ho nature from Tigtone would feel repetitive or grow thin, but instead it comes across more as frightening, at times. It feels like Tigtone is consistently on the cusp of slaughtering everyone to pieces or just vibrating right out of existence. His actions are usually in service of moving the story forward in an effort for Tigtone to get closer to completing his quest, but he’s a character that actively makes me uncomfortable because I don’t know how he’ll respond. Adult Swim has featured hundreds of eccentric and unstable characters since its debut, but Tigtone might actually be the character that I’d be the most worried to be alone with in a room.

“Tigtone and the Seven-Headed Serpent of Kloom” is surprisingly focused, but it still features many visuals that speak to a larger unpredictable madness. Highlights include Helpy getting set on fire and used as a flaming projectile against a humungous moth as well as giant floating eyeballs and plenty of other creatures that feel like disposable enemies from a stage in Castlevania. The final “souprise” of the episode that Spaceress is really some kind of space maggot that uses this body as some kind of protective host shell is actually horrifying, but also one of the strongest moments of this premiere. With the way Tigtone operates, the true nature of Spaceresss may lead to her undoing or it might be a detail that’s never addressed again in the series.

“Tigtone and the Seven-Headed Serpent of Kloom” is a fantastic season premiere and reintroduction to this absurd and exaggerated world. It’s an episode that works well for newcomers, but is also able to add to the formula and come up with a heightened premise that can still grab the attention of seasoned Tigtone viewers. Tigtone is not a series that’s worried about character development or a seasonal arc, but “Tigtone and the Seven-Headed Serpent of Kloom” sets up a lot of new ideas for the coming season. Tigtone is absolutely the kind of series to burn everything down and ignore things like canon, but this premiere begins in an exciting place in terms of the larger scope of the season. At the very least, thee are still plenty of new and ridiculous monsters out there to slay.