Monday, July 30, 2018

'Toon Reviews 19: OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes Season 1 Episode 7: Sibling Rivalry


If you like this review and want to stay updated for what else I have in store, become a follower of this blog, click here to like the official Facebook page, and click here to follow me on Twitter. Now on with today's review:
Sibling Rivalry

Being a team doesn’t always mean that everyone who’s a part of it gets along all the time, sometimes for big legit reasons and other times for petty reasons.  This cartoon looks into both types of reasons for tension. 
The petty reasons come from the heroes’ side of the conflict with a lot of their scenes devoted to Rad and Enid fighting over who did the most work during the usual fight with the Boxmore robots.  Being fueled by a disagreement that doesn’t even matter much isn’t very engaging to the audience, and it can get concerning when they just brush off K.O.’s insistence that the most important thing is that they worked as a team.  It does gain appeal points for being hilariously over-the-top though. 
Regarding the villains, the tensions between them are much more legit, which is impressive since it becomes easier to feel sympathy for characters we’re not supposed to like, going for a great angle to flesh out all of the cast no matter what their morality is.  Darrell and Shannon have so far been portrayed as very charismatic and eccentric when it comes to attacking Lakewood Plaza Turbo, but they’re somewhat sympathetic when their father and creator, Lord Boxman, berates and disowns them whenever they're defeated.  He’s ashamed of their failures so much that he creates a new robot named Raymond, who’s charismatic like the other two robots, but also the most competent of the three as he does his assigned acts of villainy with a flair.  Even acts as small as stealing a letter from the Gar’s Bodega sign are ones he treats with utmost importance and enthusiasm, and it pays off because he turns out to be the robot the gang at Gar’s Bodega can’t easily defeat. 
Darrell and Shannon’s feelings on the matter go far beyond simple jealousy and blaming each other for Raymond’s existence.  It’s a really tough thing to deal with a parent flat-out disowning their children and not exaggerating when they love another one more just because the other children failed at something.  This makes their conflict more engaging than the other conflict, and develops Darrell and Shannon past more than just eccentric fighting characters.  The abuse they have to deal with becomes especially prominent when K.O. takes notice of it after they capture him.  He decides to help the regular plaza attackers sabotage Raymond’s success in hopes of making them realize that winning as a team makes everyone a winner. 
They have it look like they captured K.O. as a team, leading to even more Boxman abuse when this one victory leads him to disown Raymond like he did with his other robot children.  However, Darrell and Shannon’s typical robot tactics are still on display when they still won’t let K.O. get the bodega sign back and intend to actually hold him prisoner.  From here, the message on the importance of teamwork becomes botched a bit when K.O. makes Darrell and Shannon fight over who did the most work to escape and get the sign back. 
As for Rad and Enid’s conflict, their conflict stops unnaturally just because they see a beautiful sunset which makes them decide that who did the most work in the fights didn’t matter.  Maybe if we actually saw it happen this concluding point would be stronger.  The ending is still nice at least.  Even if it’s not perfect in execution message-wise, this cartoon is still an interesting comparison between petty conflicts and legit conflicts while also fleshing out the characters, especially the villains.
A-



The Ranking
  1. Let’s Be Heroes
  2. You’re Everybody’s Sidekick
  3. Jethro’s All Yours
  4. Let’s Be Friends
  5. We Messed Up
  6. Sibling Rivalry
  7. You’re Level 100
Be sure to stay tuned for the review of the next OK K.O.! episode where we meet K.O.'s best friend Dendy for the first time.
If you would like to check out other OK K.O.! reviews on this blog, click here for the guide made especially for them.

No comments:

Post a Comment