'Toon Reviews 20: Star vs the Forces of Evil Season 2 Episode 11: Hungry Larry/Spider with a Top Hat

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Hungry Larry

Halloween episodes help exercise a show’s imagination through scaring the audience.  Coming from a show with magic spells, alternate dimensions, and strange creatures, you’d think this episode delivers in that regard, and you’d be right.  This Halloween episode reminds the audience that real frights can come from the simplest beings. 

The main character is a surprising one to be developed, Marco’s dad Rafael.  He sets up a haunted house every year to scare trick-or-treaters.  However, with Marco only able to bring a few kids, and Rafael not having the acting for true horror, no one finds his house scary.  After many years of this kind of failure, he’s depressed. 

Star tries to help the haunted house be scarier by summoning a creature called Hungry Larry.  Even with a moody incantation introducing the creature, Hungry Larry himself doesn’t seem threatening at all.  He’s a really small creature with a sheet over his body and sticklike arms and legs, and casually walks in to enhance the haunted house.  There’s nothing monstrous about him and he feels more like a nerdy business client than anything else.  You’re led to believe that he’s not the answer to the haunted house problem.  However, that’s when the idea of fear coming from simple creatures comes into play. 

When Janna, dressed as a monster businesswoman, goes to fire Hungry Larry, she gives a loud scream and mysteriously doesn’t return.  Then a crowd of little kids rush to the Diaz house, believing they’re in for a real haunted house experience. They run up, give bloodcurdling screams, and everything goes silent.  The frightening mystery is solved upon investigating a darkly lit room.  Abandoned candy and black saliva all over the floor suggests something is not quite right and Hungry Larry is scarier than he first let on.  The suggestion proves true when Star finds herself all alone at the mercy of Hungry Larry now turned into a demonic blob, dropping down to eat her. He brings quite a jump scare that stands out more coming from a previously conceived waste of a fright. 

Then when Rafael notices black saliva from the ceiling, suspicious of what it means, he rushes up to the room and is the only one to see Hungry Larry's true form.  After eating so many kids, he’s an overgrown blob with the sheet covering his body as his full stomach.  The screaming children inside his mouth add to the horror factor.  The greatest thing about this final encounter is that after Rafael failed to be scary many times, he saves the day with much love for his family. He forces the now stuffed Hungry Larry into eating him, and Larry throws up everyone he ate.  This way, we end the episode with a strong satisfaction that Rafael turned out to be scary and a good laugh as Hungry Larry leaves casually despite turning out to be so dangerous. 

With a great buildup to genuine scares, and development from characters you wouldn’t expect to see this episode is successful Halloween material.

A+

Spider with a Top Hat

This is an interesting episode that builds a story around a creative concept.  We see what goes on inside Star’s wand, and how the magical objects of her spells are created.  They intermingle in a big open area, and when Star saying the name of a spell is heard, the respective object goes out into the real world to play a part.  Their major source of entertainment is the Spider with a Top Hat who provides them with refreshments and jokes. 

It’s a creative way to show the inner workings of the wand and all, but the question is soon begged why there’s a whole episode about this.  The concept is all right for a short scene in between action, but isn’t enough to carry a whole episode. The story makes a huge deal of how Spider is used for comedy while all the other spells are used for fighting.  As a result, Spider keeps trying to prove he’s as good at fighting.  All his attempts fail and everyone around him hammers in that he’s simply funny and nothing more. 

We’re expected to take this seriously, but an idea this absurd and the fact that the character going through all this trouble is a little spider is hard to see as more than a joke.  There’s little sympathy when Spider laments about not being good for fighting and unable to do intense exercises.  Plus, everyone else’s reactions to Spider’s feeble attempts feel very repetitive. They always amount to how serious fighting is, how he could get hurt trying, and how he’s better off being funny.  It doesn’t make for the most interesting or entertaining of plots. 

Even so, when Spider pouts over not being serious and doesn't wake everyone up with comedy, the thing he’s supposed to do, it is nice that no one’s too hard on him.  The payoff is also decent when Star goes on a spree of firing many spells at once, even ones that aren’t fighting-related, and Spider is the last one to be called.  There’s a random werewolf creature attacking Star and Marco, which is very different from normal. When all the other spells can’t beat it, Spider is the last resort.  He takes an earlier malapropism of having a “hat of a warrior” too seriously and brings out a machine gun that saves the day.  While it’s somewhat nice to see Spider find his inner fighting power, it feels forced that his hat can become a machine gun.  It doesn’t tie into the exercises he tried throughout the episode, and the earlier statement doesn’t work because the phrase was supposed to be “heart of a warrior.” 

As you can see, this episode has good intensions through building itself around world-building, but is sloppy with storytelling and shows that some ideas are best left as short jokes.  However, it’s a harmless watch with a few goodhearted moments, so you can enjoy it.  There just really isn't any need to devote a whole episode to the inside of Star’s wand, at least not until next episode...

C

The Ranking

1. Ludo in the Wild
2. Hungry Larry
3. Game of Flags
4. On the Job
5. Sleepover
6. Is Mystery
7. Mr. Candle Cares
8. Wand to Wand
9. Starstruck
10. Girls’ Day Out
11. By the Book
12. Friendenemies
13. Gift of the Card
14. Starsitting
15. Star on Wheels
16. Camping Trip
17. My New Wand
18. Red Belt
19. Spider with a Top Hat
20. Star vs Echo Creek
21. Fetch
22. Goblin Dogs

The next Star vs the Forces of Evil review covers a much more interesting look inside Star's wand, and another adventure featuring some of the worst of Pony Head.

Next time on MC Toon Reviews is the OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes episode, "We're Captured."

If you would like to check out other Star vs the Forces of Evil reviews on this blog, click here for the guide made especially for them.

'Toon Reviews 20: Star vs the Forces of Evil Season 2 Episode 7: Goblin Dogs/By the Book

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:

Goblin Dogs

Interdimensional travel episodes often thrive on imaginative worlds and the characters.  While there is imagination in some areas here, what the major characters are in the dimension for isn’t all that engaging. 

It is nice that we see what became of Star’s old friend, Pony Head, since her last appearance.  She’s free to do as she pleases now that the reform school she was sent to is overthrown and has really gotten around many dimensions, including getting a special snack called a goblin dog.  She convinces Star and Marco to come with her to get goblin dogs too.  For the most part, this is basically it.  They wait in line for goblin dogs, and very little of it is interesting or pleasing. 

Regarding Pony Head, her know-it-all attitude and unappealing valley girl voice always worked against her, but she was enjoyable enough in her two other appearances which were sparse.  Here, she’s prominently seen and shows little to no growth, making her flaws stand out more which lowers her likability.  She’s not fully unlikable yet, but her unappealing traits work against her. 

As for waiting on line, since the major characters are only doing this to get a snack, moments don’t feel like they’re worth your time.  They basically stand around while the vendor advertises how great goblin dogs are, buy stuff they don’t want after getting snuck onto the VIP line, and to top it all, they have to wait in many more lines after making it to the truck.  The latter point is just as ridiculous to the audience as it is to the characters.  I know that every big place often has a lot of waiting in line, but waiting in another line when you make it?  That’s a suspension of disbelief I can’t go along with. 

Fortunately, the wait in line isn’t all bad since we do get an exciting retaliation when our main players chase the vendor and fend off blasts from his T-shirt cannon.  Granted there are some uncalled for mind games played when the vendor says goblin dogs don’t exist but then saying they are later, begging the question: why did he say they weren’t real in the first place?  The payoff to the waiting is also exciting and creative. The vendor takes everyone to a dimension where he prepares the goblin dogs like regular hotdogs, and the actual taste sensation is a thrilling visual sequence with creative distortions of the characters visualizing how good the goblin dog tastes. 

One last good thing about the waiting is the debut of Pony Head’s friend, Kelly, the person on line who gets the most focus apart from the main characters.  She has a creative design of being engulfed in hair, some of which is actually her boyfriend, and amusingly stays quiet for the whole episode before finally breaking her silence and saying that goblin dogs are worth it.  Given the cool visual sequence we already discussed, Kelly was certainly right to do so. 

Even if it does have its good moments, you still have to sit through a lot of mundane, ridiculous, and unentertaining moments to get to them.  It’s true that the journey matters as much as the destination, but very little makes the journey stand out, and most likely isn’t one you’ll want to take continuously.

D+

By the Book

One confusing element to this season is that a big deal is made of Star’s wand having half its power, yet while there have been times where it’s much weaker than it was, other times it works as well as it always did.  A good move made from this is that either way, Star still needs a lot of training with her wand, and that’s where Glossaryck comes in as her mentor. 

However, this episode features a particularly unpleasant training session with Star being particularly undisciplined when learning how to work certain spells, not even trying to listen to Glossaryck.  She’s even inconsiderate when she decides to ditch training to hang with her friends which offends Glossaryck, and she only makes things worse through a feeble attempt at saying she didn’t mean it. 

As for Glossaryck, while it is understandable that he’s upset, the lengths he takes with these feelings are borderline overblown.  He hides in a donut box refusing to come out no matter how many times Star tries to apologize, so now it’s him who’s being stubborn and in turn makes life difficult.  From ruining the simple fun Star and Marco are trying to have with his inconsiderate remarks to failing to see how desperate they are to bring him back with staged fights, it’s concerning that Glossaryck is taking this long to accept Star’s apology.  He’s a kind of character holding a grudge no one should aspire to be like, yet it’s a problem because he’s one of the protagonists. 

Fortunately, all this animosity reaches a good concluding point when Ludo gets involved.  The opening to the episode features a strange occurrence when his piece of the wand appears to talk to him, begging a lot of questions as to how this can be.  Ludo and his bird and spider are prompted to cross dimensions to go after Star, resulting in a confrontation where they’re both surprised that they each have wands, giving a good opportunity to see how well they are with working them.  As it turns out, for all their training, neither of them cast spells that are strong enough to make a big attack.  Suspense builds when Star has to save Glossaryck’s donut box from getting crushed by a garbage truck while fighting.  During which, there’s a big emotional scene where the box ends up crushed, though it would have been more impactful if Glossaryck was more likable. 

Then, in his trickster ways, he turns out fine and even helps Star by manipulating the box to temporarily knock out Ludo and bring over Star’s spell book resulting in a grand conclusion to the battle where she finally masters the spell that initiated the conflict and beats Ludo.  If that’s not enough, Glossaryck’s claim that acting hurt was all part of the plan to get Star to successfully pull off the spell.  Personally, this is one of the better use of Glossaryck using trickery as a teaching tool.  It plays with expectations and actually leads to a greater good, so even if he is somewhat of an enigma, he can still enjoyable as he is. 

As a result, the episode is a good example of how good conclusions can make up for any prior flaws even if certain negative points still leave a sting, and with Ludo now aware of Star’s wand and spell book, it also brings promise for the bigger conflict to come.

A-

The Ranking

1. Ludo in the Wild
2. On the Job
3. Mr. Candle Cares
4. Wand to Wand
5. Starstruck
6. By the Book
7. Starsitting
8. Star on Wheels
9. Camping Trip
10. My New Wand
11. Red Belt
12. Star vs Echo Creek
13. Fetch
14. Goblin Dogs

The next Star vs the Forces of Evil review brings us to Star's home, Mewni for a Game of Flags, and during detention, Star finds a friend in former background character, Janna.

Next time on MC Toon Reviews is an OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes episode that claims "You Are Rad."

If you would like to check out other Star vs the Forces of Evil reviews on this blog, click here for the guide made especially for them.