Media Macaroni

We’ve been in a bit of a television rut without new episodes of… well, anything, so we decided to branch out with the DVR and pick up new shows. After some misses, we started watching WordGirl, and now the whole family is watching it like it’s going out of style. 

For those who haven’t see the show, WordGirl is a vocabulary-wielding superhero saving the day with her verbal skills with her trusty monkey sidekick, Captain Huggy Face. Despite this show being about a girl superhero (totally up my alley), I had avoided it for the same reasons Martha Speaks didn’t take hold in our household – I thought the curriculum of the show would overtake the show itself. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. We think it’s hilarious. The show is very tongue-in-cheek, and doesn’t take itself or its main character too seriously. Just as they’ll poke fun at WordGirl’s secret identity (Becky) and how obvious it is, they’ll poke fun at the use of vocabulary in the show, weaving it into the jokes. 

My two favorite villains so far are Lady Redundant Woman and the Butcher – he butchers the English language, get it? We’ve been watching an episode over and over where the Butcher gets a kitty cat whose adorableness distracts everyone while he loots and pillages. (Adorable was one of the episode words.) He also makes me laugh because he sounds quite a bit like Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and because he slings meat. PASTRAMI ATTACK!

Tonight we watched the origin story of Lady Redundant Woman. Beatrice, an committed copy shop clerk, discovers a new button on her beloved copier: Merge With Copier. With a wry “that’s weird,” she presses the button and is transformed. As Lady Redundant Woman she is able to copy herself, and talks like a walking thesaurus. 

In the episode, they cut to WordGirl’s secret spaceship hideaway, and Olive asked why they had a spaceship. I said I wasn’t sure, but maybe they were from outer space. Olive gave me the know-it-all-4-year-old tone and said, “Mommy, you know they’re from the Planet Lexicon.” (Duh!) I think the show is working. 

The cast is amazing, and the villains are played by some of the greats, like Tom “SpongeBob” Kenny as Dr. Two Brains, Jeffrey Tambor as Mr. Big, and Patton Oswalt as Tobey. At the heart of the show is the narrator, who the characters often converse with, and he’s played by Dr. Spaceman himself, Chris Parnell. 

In this house WordGirl joins the ranks of Phineas and Ferb for cartoon comedy, and she comes with more vitamins. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.