It’s been a really long day today. Had a workout with my trainer, wrestling class where I worked on going over the top rope to the floor backwards, and then a shift at work.
It’s PBR time!
And what goes best with PBR?
If you said religious themed cartoon shows then you get an A!!!
God Rocks
Originally aired on Saturday, 7/26/08 at 9am on Channel 17, TBN.
This animated show teaches children Biblical lessons via the adventures of cartoon characters. (Religion).
You know, I think that this one is going to hurt as much as Bibleman did. At least Bibleman is unintentionally hilarious. Perhaps I will be as lucky this time. Let’s fire it up and get this over with…
God Rocks is apparently part of the ‘Bibletoons’ series. Didn’t know there was a Bibletoons series? Join the club Bucko!
Ok, so they are a band comprised of guys who look like they would be in a Christian rock band, and they morph into crappy looking below flash animated cartoon characters. Got it!!! So we got Chip, Gem, Splinter, and Carb. Oh my gosh seriously??? I am in awe of that set of names.
Let’s meet the band! Chip wants me to know that God has a special gift for me. Oh my, they are trying to act as rock and roll as possible, but as we all know, when you try to sound cool while talking about God, you typically just sound 3 times as lame. I mean, maybe I could take their metal attitudes seriously if they were not all wearing black ‘God Rocks’ T-shirts WITH THEIR OWN NAMES ON THE FRONT!
This talk of gifts leads us to the story of Cindi. Cindi was not able to sing, but she did have another gift she could offer. Awwww yeaaaaaaah.
Hmm, I don’t think they mean what I thought they meant. Darn Christian themed shows. I bet they are leading into a crappy cartoon.
SCORE!
Holy doodoo, this could be the cheapest, worst animation of any show I have done far, and that my friends is saying something. It’s clearly done with Flash, by someone who doesn’t know much about Flash. The characters are the same people as we saw in the live action short a moment ago, but they have all been morphed into brightly colored, um, things. I swear I am going to need to find a pic because I cannot do justice to what these things are supposed to be;
Splinter appears to be a blue monster made out of a bunch of blue stones. Kinda like that giant boulder beast that Tim Allen fought in Galaxy Quest. Except this one looks like a prototype slacker complete with a bloomin’ onion for hair, and a Shaggy from Scooby Doo beard. It should also be added that his arms do not even come close to being attached to his ‘body’. Creepy.
Gem is pink cause she’s a chick of course! She also has Phantom Limb syndrome cause her arms and legs do not exist as well. Hmm, must be cheaper to animate without having to attach the limbs I guess. Gem looks like what would happen if you took 4 hits of acid and stared at a picture of Judy Jetson.
Chip, like the others, is also missing his limbs, gotta be for cheapness sake, gotta be. Chip wear futuristic space age boots and is more of a teal colored assortment of random shapes which consist of his body. To make sure we can tell the difference between Chip and Splinter, Chip has obnoxiously red hair like the Hawaiian Punch guy. No seriously, that is the color of red hair that you normally see only on fat melancholy punk chicks who look sad on the subway.
And finally we have Carb, yeah his name is Carb. Carb is what would happen if you spilled toxic waste on the Lemonheads candy frontman. Unlike most other drummers, he wears boots instead of sneakers for some reason. He also mixes his bright yellow lemon body with bright green eyebrows. In fact having him on screen for too long is making me dizzy and nautious.
Anyways, that is the band! Let’s get to our story!
Oh, my bad, her name is Kitney, not Cindi. How silly of me to think it was something normal when she hangs out with people named Gem and Carb. In what is perhaps the creepiest thing I’ve seen yet, Kitney the female is voiced by a little boy. . .no seriously.
And as alluded, Kitney cannot sing. Her voice is too masculine. At least Kitney knows that she is horrible. Kitney is also a moron as she starts sweating and turns on a poorly placed fan. The fan proceeds to start blowing a huge stack of show fliers around. Rather than first turning off the fan so that the other 90% of fliers do not blow away, she decides that it would be best to try and retrieve the few that have blown away so far. Genius! If I were in the God Rocks band, I’d stop worrying about Kitney’s feelings at about this point in the episode.
Of course this being the cartoon world, the fan magically turned itself off and Kitney used high flying gymnastics moves to get all the papers, thusly impressing the band.
Sadly, Kitney wants to sing instead of gymnastics aka what she’s good at. Typical female.
Now some black and white guy who looks like, Holy Crap! He looks like the evil twin of Snoozy the Talking pillow from My Bedbugs!!! YES! I will cheer for him, especially cause he walks around with a bright ray gun.
Evil Snoozy shrinks a frog into well, a smaller, squarer frog. Apparently somehow it is called a ‘mini conform gun’ and it will make the band into his pawns. It is time for Evil Snoozy to tear up some stuff, so off he goes!!!
Oh I get it now, the characters look like junky piles of rocks because they ARE junky piles of rocks. Thusly, the ‘God Rocks’. Oh man I’m so smart. Wait, remind me again why exactly that makes sense?
Apparently the animated flamboyantly gay cousin of comedian Matt Champagne is the host of the rock show tonight. Huzzah!
Kitney and Gem have a moment where they discuss how Kitney isn’t special. But maybe there might be something good that she can do someday, cause of God or something. Eh, anyways, meanwhile a giant flying sharkshaped airship flies above the school where the concert is going on! And it’s Evil Snoozy on the scene!!!
Evil Snoozy, it is now revealed, is about 1/3 the size of the other characters. That and he has no aim at all because he takes a bunch of shots at the band and misses all of them. Kitney uses her powers to jump up and save the day and uses a mirror to deflect the ray gun back at Evil Snoozy, who the others refer to as a ‘Nugget’. Glad to see the spirit of Owen Hart is still alive somewhere.
Gem has something God related to say now, as Kitney’s special gift is…the way she cares about her friends. um, really? That’s it huh? Gem gets singing and she gets caring about her friends? LAME!
They then give Kitney tambourine duty as they play it out. Man, poor Kitney.
Let’s go back to live action, as the God Rocks live action team refer to Kitney’s moves as ‘Spikin’. I must not at all be cool because I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. The band now does a wrap up of what we have just seen. And dollars to doughnuts I bet ya that there will be a bible verse quoted here;
And there it is. ‘The Bible says that we should use our own gifts to help others’. No passage or chapter to look it up though, I think they made that one up.
Now they lip sync a Christian rock ballad in front of a blue screen! Well, at least they are moving their hands to imitate actually playing, I’ll give it up for that detail. Oh man, this song might actually have a chance if it was about trolls or snakes or daggers or something cool, but it is not. And it ends with a sung ‘Amen’ to really hammer it home.
It is now I realize that I’m only 11 minutes in, so I probably have 2 more cartoons to endure here. God might rock but he clearly hates me.
A bunch of townsfolk stand in front of an appliance store watching the local news on the TV’s in the window. I thought that just happened in musicals set in the 1950’s or before? Hmm.
Anyways, some natural disaster happened to an island nation, and many rocks were left homeless. Is this a Katrina reset? Maybe, in any case people are requested to take some of the refugee rocks into their own homes, which I bet the band is going to do. Yup yup they take slips and get in line!
Oh wow, they don’t just get one rock, they get like a whole tribe apiece!!! Apparently Carb the lemon guy has a history with the tribe that he got, as he starts by getting sloppy kisses from one of the rock chicks he got.
Gem takes her tribe to the hair salon, despite the fact that her rocks really don’t have any hair. And the tribe tears up the place and runs amok and causes mayhem. Oh man, is this like a ‘Teach Christianity to the savages so they may be clean’ kind of deal? That would jerk my ire.
Chip takes his tribe to the grocery store, where he tries to explain fruit to them. And guess what? The tribe tears up the place and runs amok and causes mayhem. Didn’t see that coming!
Splinter calls to see how it is going with Chet. He again uses the word ‘Spikin’ to describe it and I still do not know what that means. Romans 12/13 and all that he says, I guess I gotta look it up or something, nahhh.
It is suggested that the gang gets the tribes together at the movies in an effort to relax and pass the day. Chief tribe guy overhears the band complaining about how much trouble the tribes are. So he rounds them up and takes off, cause he did not want to deal with the whining. That my friends is leadership. They replay the last scene that we just watched to remind us what just happened 20 seconds ago and it’s off to the zoo, cause, you know, that is where the savages would go.
The chief decides that group prayer is the answer to their problems. seems to me that if that actually worked, then they wouldn’t be in the situation they find themselves in in the first place. But I’m a jerky agnostic and such.
And with everyone making nice nice, they go back to the appliance store to watch TV. And it’s a miracle, the volcano which crushed the island erupted again and made everything normal…somehow.
The band is now back to live action, where they show the gifts they have bought for the tribe rocks from the previous cartoon. They all agree that the clothing Gem got is ‘Spikin’ OMG what the heck is up with the use of that word?!?!?!
And now a Devo rip off music video!!! Wow, they wear Devoesque outfits and do that robot jerky style of playing from the Whip It video, and sing in metallic robot sound effect voices. Who knew you could do so much with a Blue screen? The message of the song is ‘Share with God’s people’. I suppose then that one could assume that you do not need to share with people that you do not consider ‘God’s People’. Whew, that was a close one.
Looks like no more cartoons, but instead of that I get the joy of another music video! This one is a mostly decolorized video whose blue screen takes the form of a foggy forest. But then during the chorus the sun comes out and makes everything bright and shiny. That is just thought out God symbolism done to a tee. Message of this one; ‘Do not fear’.
Whoa, now ANOTHER music video, this one is somehow not set in front of a blue screen! It consists of the band walking through the neighborhood collecting kids and creating a mob scene. They must be off to protest an abortion clinic.
And there roll the credits! And this is when I discover that this show is Canadian, which makes perfect sense to me in hindsight.
Well, what can be said about this? Barbs and jabs aside, this was not the worst thing I have ever seen, I might even say that is was more entertaining than I was expecting. If you are the type of parent who loves the baby Jesus, and want your kids to love the baby Jesus too, this is probably a pretty decent show to have them watch. I would think that about the age of 9 they will outgrow it and want some Metallica in their lives, but as long as you are sheltering them, might as well shelter them with this show. Unlike Bibleman, this show did not insult my intelligence very much at all, and dare I say the songs were not horrible if you into religious pop songs.
Color me disappointed, I wanted to really crush this show. Maybe I’m getting soft in my ripe old age. This is not something I would push on my own kids if I had them, but I could totally see how good Christian folks would put this on and dance around to it with their 6 year old kids.
Blech, I need another beer to wash this joyous, positive taste from my mouth.
-Ray