BW Media Spotlight

We’re going to do something a bit different on tonight’s Showcase. I’m going to show you a pilot and then review it because it’s a good example of something I talk about a lot on this site. A show, movie, or whatever story can be good, but there can still be a reason you don’t like it. Something about it just doesn’t connect with you. You can see the quality and effort. They clearly wanted to make something good, and people rally behind it. And yet for you it doesn’t work. You don’t hate it, it’s not an insult, it’s not you wondering what people see in it. You know what they saw and understand it, and yet it doesn’t work for you, possibly for the same reasons others like it.

That’s me and Gameoverse.

With The Amazing Digital Circus coming to an end, Glitch needs a new series to rally audiences. No TV or streaming animation studio or distributor survived on one show. That’s another show everybody praises but just isn’t for me. I’ve never been interested in watching it. I’ve watched Film Theory episodes about it just for curiosity, but I just wasn’t interested in watching a comedic version of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. At least that’s what it looks like to me as an outsider. I only have so much time and my tastes are fully formed. It’s rare that something outside my usual interests works for me, but it has happened. So I watched the Gameoverse pilot an open minded try…and while I see the quality it just wasn’t for me. Why?

Well, let’s watch the pilot first so everyone has seen the same thing. Created by Ross O’Donovan of the Game Grumps, I’ve seen this show compared to Reboot, the Mainframe Entertainment series that on occasion had the heroes going into game worlds as the opponent characters, trying to stop the user from winning in order to keep part of their city of Mainframe (where the animation studio got its name, or maybe in honor of it) from being nullified in the area where a “game cube” fell into and around that section of the city.

This show has a similar premise, but from the pilot it appears to be the main plot instead of an occasional one. Kit is the survivor of such a place. She was her game world’s hero, and she won…so the planet blew up. Now she and her friends, including fellow survivor Kaboodle (a robot backpack), travel to other worlds to stop those heroes from beating the final boss and game overing their world (see what they did there?) However, a group called the Syntax wants the hero to win and the world destroyed…to save their worlds. No, it doesn’t make complete sense, but that’s the mystery surrounding this pilot. Enjoy…and I’ll explain why I didn’t.

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