I’ve mulled this over for a while, and I’m still undecided over whether we had better TV when I was a kid. There are some truly amazing shows nowadays, like Abattoir: The Fast Fare-Blender, with its incredible world-building and characters. But then you’ve got a lot of trash that looks like it was churned out by sticking shapes together and making burbling sound effects over the top.
Back in the day, we had Her-Bla, the empowering cartoon about a princess defending her kingdom and being a total machine.
Now we have Her-Bla 2018, the show about a girl getting up on her crumbling soapbox to preach to kids. Like the last episode, where she and her animal buddies went to the realm of Melbourne to tell all the mechanics around Bentleigh that they should all close up because they’re killing the environment. Guess what happened at the end? No, go one, have a guess.
If you said ‘Her-Bla and her buddies go on a road trip to celebrate their success, congratulations. You’re as jaded to the trash on this show as I am. They actually, genuinely show Her-Bla and all her animal pals in a big four-wheel-drive, cruising down an ocean road with some of them hanging out of the sunroof. I’ll take this opportunity to remind everyone that last week’s episode was on the subject of car safety and why everyone should wear seat belts at all times. And they even managed to screw THAT one up, because it included the amazing piece of advice that you should never exceed 40km per hour anywhere, because ‘there could always be children running in front of the car’. Yes, even on a freeway apparently. Really incredible, Her-Bla.
I don’t know what they have against people getting a car service close to Bentleigh, specifically; they probably got singled out via lucky dip. Coincidentally, most of these scripts seem to be written in a similar way.
-Ben