'Toon Reviews 19: OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes Season 1 Episode 19: Face Your Fears

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Face Your Fears

One of the best ways to utilize animation is to give creative interpretations of common virtues.  A big virtue explored in media is facing fears, and this cartoon has a very interesting way of showing it.  In the process it further develops characters and brings an imaginative environment. 

There’s an arcade game where heroes see how good they are at facing their fears. It reflects their status by adjusting the fear resistance on their Pow cards.  The game is a catalyst to the plot which reveals that for all his impressive heroics, Mr. Gar’s fear resistance is not very high. K.O., Rad, and Enid convince him to try the game out to update.  Hooking up to a virtual reality helmet and setting the level to Super Extra Hard, Mr. Gar ends up trapped within his biggest fears.  If that's not enough, the game can’t just be unplugged or he’ll go into a coma.  The best chance K.O. and the others have to help is to go into their boss’ psyche and face his fear for him.  This instance also gives Dendy a chance to shine through making a surprise entrance through the console, and hooking up extra helmets to make it happen. 

The creative aspect to the cartoon comes into full force from here when Rad and Enid get stuck while helping Mr. Gar face his fear. K.O. must help them all, with the challenges he has to face creatively staged as a video game map.  Going into the minds of his friends, there’s lots of potential for imaginative occurrences, for the mind is where literally anything can happen.  Also, everyone’s fears reveal a lot about the characters and their presentations shine with creativity.  Enid’s fear is a shrine of portraits from her “dorky” phases, showing that she’s self-conscious about her appearance as they proceed to attack K.O. when he calls them dorky.  The fear is conquered when K.O. says what’s good about all the phases, which feels like a logical thing for people who go through this fear in real life to do.  Rad’s fear is confusing at first as it leads K.O. and Enid into an enclosed area of Rad faces acting cool.  They have to point out what they already know about Rad, which makes the area an interesting way of showing that he’s acting cool to hide that he’s vulnerable and nice.  It takes getting emotional to get the Rad faces to break and cry K.O. and Enid to the exit.

 

Then comes the big challenge of facing Mr. Gar’s fear.  At first, it feels very standard, appearing to be a single person, a former hero named Laserblast.  It gives an opportunity for K.O. to show his biggest fear, by unleashing a terror from within to face Laserblast. It’s amazing that this kid is so resistant of such a fear.  As for Mr. Gar, his fear turns out to be more complicated than this.  He really cowers over the sight of Carol in her Silver Spark getup, berating him and attacking him with sandwich content.  It brings a lot of references to what we’ve learned so far, indicating that Mr. Gar went to P.O.I.N.T. with Carol and has something to do with that vague sandwich flashback.  These reveals bring bigger reasons why Mr. Gar is so nervous around Carol, as well as mystery about what she was so mad at him for.  K.O. faces the fear by showing the vision of Carol that he loves her, but Mr. Gar still shows growth from the experience through saying a normal sentence to her for once. This gesture means a lot more for happening outside the game. 

This leaves the cartoon as one of the most creatively staged with an interesting atmosphere and world’s to get through, and intriguing ways to conquer fears and develop characters.


A+

The Ranking

1. Face Your Fears
2. Legends of Mr. Gar
3. We’ve Got Pests
4. I Am Dendy
5. You Get Me
6. Let’s Be Heroes
7. You’re Everybody’s Sidekick
8. Jethro’s All Yours
9. Know Your Mom
10. We’re Captured
11. My Dad Can Beat up Your Dad
12. Let’s Be Friends
13. We Messed Up
14. Presenting Joe Cuppa
15. Sibling Rivalry
16. Just Be a Pebble
17. Do You Have Any More in the Back?
18. You’re Level 100
19. You Are Rad

Be sure to stay tuned for the review of the next episode where Rad teaches about the importance of living for your art while experiencing the burden of typecasting.

If you would like to check out other OK K.O.! reviews on this blog, click here for the guide made especially for them.