Season Review: Explosion Jones Season One

Find out if this series makes us explode in our pants with excitement.

I miss the days where being a dude was OK. A time when eating meat didn’t get you stink eyes from vegan friends. A time when heavy metal music was on the Billboard charts with regularity. A time when muscle-bound action movie stars were all over the place instead of the artsy fartsy shit like La La Land that we’re stuck with now.

Explosion Jones is just that. It’s an animated series featuring 12 shorts at about four minutes each that follows the titular hero (voiced by Michael Madsen) mowing through bad guys all in the name of saving the United States and making sure his daughter, “Jenny” is safe. And for those thinking that Explosion Jones is a one-note offering of crazy kill scenes and eighties inspired one-liners, you may be surprised to learn whilst watching that the show has a rather fun tale of debauchery, espionage, and plot twists galore.

As advertised, the voice acting for the franchise is right on. Michael Madsen’s raspy voice is a perfect fit for “Explosion Jones”, an Arnold Schwarzenegger lookin’ good guy that uses all sorts of tools at his disposal for endless destruction whether it’s great white sharks, American flags, and lots and lots of artillery. Along the way, we get to meet Jones’ best friend “Duke” voiced by Carl Weathers, Jones’ father “Combustion” voiced by Ron Perlman, and a slew of bad guys hell-bent on trying to build an empire that stretches the globe. Yes Vivica A. Fox is in this series, but she’s literally in it for like, two scenes (yes that includes her voice-only scenes), which makes me question why the hell she was at New York Comic Con to promote it.

The animated production quality of the series is fair, though there were definitely scenes that led me to question some of the choreography which at times were quite a bit “skip happy”, but in terms of sheer volume of violence, this series isn’t that far off from say a Mr. Pickles or a Superjail in terms of the frenetic pace of the fight scenes. The actual direction of the series is safe and seldom featured anything that was out of the ordinary of what Low Brow studios does on say WWE Storytime. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t completely convinced that Explosion Jones wasn’t really Jake “The Snake” Roberts in both voice and character design until I saw the end credits of each episode.

Overall, Explosion Jones is a solid series that would definitely be better afforded with longer run times and possibly more character variation. But the elements of the show are there and are buoyed quite nicely with rock-solid writing, ample amounts of silliness, and lots and lots of grenades.