Overclocked On Caffeine v.1.1

Drawn Together Uncensored S1-3

36 30-minute episodes

It's an interesting fact of television that, when someone thinks a show isn't going far enough, someone eill come along to push things that little bit further. So when sitcoms aren't biting enough, someone makes The Simpsons. When The Simpsons is becoming too complacent, along comes South Park. When South Park isn't being entirely offensive enough... well, Mat Stone and Trey Parker tend to do something about that themselves. They have a reputation to uphold y'know. So when someone decides that both South Park and Family Guy just aren't quite crude or twisted enough... then you have Drawn Together.

The central concept is of an animated reality TV show, and that gets abandoned as soon as they run out of jokes to make at the expense of Big Brother and Survivor (about 13 or 14 episodes in if you're interested). The characters are all broad parodies of cartoon archetypes - Princess Clara is a racist, homophobic Disney Princess, Xandir is Link from The Legend of Zelda if he was screamingly gay, Toot Braunstein is every fat joke you've ever heard rolled into the body of Betty Boop, and so on. The cast starts off broadly-defined, before quickly settling into their niches. It happens a little too quickly though: could they not have got a little more milage out of Xandir being a closet case before outing him? Isn't Princess Clara's unknowing racism a little more humourous than her being perfectly aware of what she's doing and reveling in it? Does Captain Hero have to have a storyline revolve around him in every last episode from the second season onwards? Really?

The uncensored tag, a major selling point for the DVDs certainly lives up to its name. Was it bleeped in the first run on TV? Then you get to hear it in all it's glory. Was it blurred or obscured in any way? Then it's there for all to see. While it's nice to hear what they think FCC stands for (hint: not Federal Communications Commission) half the humour is in the bleeping itself. The jokes just aren't as funny when you can hear every last 'fuck'. A few scenes are extended or altered as well, such as Captain Hero's line in "Xandir and Tim, Sitting in a Tree", changing from "...and I was leaking like a sieve" to "...and I was getting fucked in the ass more often", and in "The Other Cousin", when Blah's ride arrives at the end of the episode, rather than just being 'generic' retards, the bus is filled with likenesses of the rest of the DT cast. It doesn't add too much to the series, but it's a nice bonus for those who've seen the show a dozen times or more. And those who really want to see Toot naked. Which is a surprising number of people if the 'fanart' is anything to go by.

If the show has a problem, then it's not with the nudity, the swearing or even the racial slurs - give the guys their due, they manage to avoid the really, really obvious ones. Y'know, the kind that you have to be rocking HBO to get away with saying. No, it's the overlong jokes that are clearly there for timewasting purposes. You know the ones I mean, where a character sits and umms and ahhs for a solid 30 seconds, or repeats the same action for about a minute. If you've seen Family Guy, then you'll know and most likely have fast-forwarded your way through them more than once. It's trying to copy the "funny-not funny-funny" pattern you'll remember from the 'Lisa Needs Braces/Dental Plan' scene from The Simpsons, only instead of doing it sparingly, it's in every episode. It becomes really tiresome really quickly, and manages to grate even more than Captain Hero screen-hogging - at least that manages to be funny every so often.

If you've never seen the show or you're a fan who wants to know exactly what the balls of Captain Hero's nemesis look like in Charlotte's Web of Lies (and if you're a fan, you'll know exactly the scene I mean) this is the place to go. Otherwise it's still the same subtle-as-a-dead-whale show we all know and love with a few (questionably) nice extras