Season Review: Hell Den Season Two

At the start of Adult Swim, the concept for a bunch of the series being ordered were very simple, modern-day updates to Hanna-Barbera catalog that really didn’t get to the lengths of say The Flintstones. The result is a myriad of legendary content like Harvey Birdman, Sealab 2021, and more, where producers would Flash edit full scenes of classic series, overdub the mouth movements/dialog, and the results would be the yellow brick road that would eventually give us Adult Swim.

Hell Den takes this concept and merges it into more of a sketch format whereby there’s a litany of archival footage out there that isn’t protected by Ccpyright claims. Some movies and television series on the cheap (It’s Always Sunny comes to mind) do this to save on costs where they may use music that isn’t copyrighted anymore by scoring their episodes with a bunch of these classical tracks. For Hell Den, the idea is to use archival footage for comedic purposes to lampoon upon.

The result is mixed, depending on how hardcore you are about TZGZ right now. For starters, I know there are hardcore Adult Swimmers out there that do not care for the live-action programming. Likewise, Hell Den is really on that line in between animated/live-action in that most of the footage being used is live-action, so if you’re a hardcore TZGZ-er, you might not be a fan of this take. If you are a fan of Hell Den’s first season, well, I’ve got good news for you. It’s the same show, but a bit longer with six quarter-hour episodes.

Some of the jokes are funny, but I get the sense that these writers are becoming more socially conscious of their material. The cartoon bits are a bit funnier because more edits are made to the material much in the same way as the aforementioned Adult Swim series, but these are few and far between. The live-action stuff is pretty much on par to the type of sordid fare you might see on Youtube, cheap Photoshop edits for funny gags. I think in present-day animated television, Hell Den lacks a bunch of the dirty finesse that a couple of the other TZGZ series are showing.