November 2022 – Page 2 – Me Blog Write Good

No matter what you might think of Kevin Smith, whether you love his movies or despise them, there’s one thing about him that you have to admire at least in some small way: his relationship with his fan base. In the late 90s, as Clerks and Mallrats were finding their audience on videotape, Smith’s View Askew website and message board became a virtual hangout for the OG fans. They could interact with Smith directly, who used the platform to answer questions about his movies, and drop hints and advance news of what he was working on. None of Smith’s movies were ever huge financial hits, at least by Hollywood standards, but his loyal viewers have been incredibly devoted from the start, and by the turn of the millennium, Smith was well aware of this. He’s always been extremely grateful for his fans, and even this early into his career, he realized who his core audience was and how he could best cater to them. This is a creative ethos that would kick into high gear with the creation of his podcast network and the films that followed, but in 2001, we got a little taste of Smith’s gratitude with a special cinematic gift just for the hardcore View Askew-heads.

After the mini-shitstorm that Dogma generated, Kevin Smith wasn’t in the best mood to handle any big topics for his next movie, so instead he went the complete opposite direction: a big, dumb live-action cartoon, promoting his dimwitted dynamic duo from side characters to the main event. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is a $22 million in-joke, a movie filled to the brim with callbacks and references to Smith’s previous four films, a love letter to his fanbase to thank them for all the support they’ve given him in his career. It’s not so deep that I don’t think someone who hasn’t seen the other movies wouldn’t be able to follow the film, but I definitely consider it a bar for entry. I don’t see how someone completely unfamiliar the other View Askew movies could really get into this one. Even at the height of my Smith fandom in high school, I didn’t love this movie, but I still owned the DVD, and enjoyed it on the whole for the most part. There’s some degree of charm to something this self-indulgent, for a piece of art that aims this incredibly low. But as a comedy, I honestly can’t say it’s very good, and I found myself growing increasingly disinterested in it as it crawled along. Continue reading “ReView Askew: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)” →

It’s really strange to me how a Clerks cartoon ever came into being. After the initial success of the film, a pilot for a Clerks sitcom was produced by Disney/Touchstone, a woefully uninspired work that you can pretty much picture in your head: just take the character names and the setting of Clerks and mutate it into a putrid TV-PG 90s sitcom. Kevin Smith and his fellow cast and crew had no idea of its existence until it was already in production, and by the look of the finished product, they were probably pretty thankful of that fact. Perhaps inspired by this aborted pilot, Smith and Scott Mosier went on to pitch an animated Clerks project to any network that would speak with them, eventually getting series offers from UPN and ABC. They were convinced to choose ABC (considering Miramax, owned by Disney at the time, was producing the show), thinking the bigger network was the better choice, but sadly, that proved not to be the case. Clerks: The Animated Series (or Clerks: TAS, to be brief) is such a weird anomaly of a show. I can’t even say it was cut down in its prime, because it didn’t even get a chance to fully get there.

Animation on primetime network television outside of FOX basically came (and quickly went) in two waves. The first was in the early 90s following the massive success of The Simpsons, prompting other networks to swiftly green light their own animated shows to compete, but the likes of ABC’s Capital Critters and CBS’s Family Dog barely lasted a season. The second wave happened in the late 90s/early 2000s on the heels of South Park and King of the Hill, where we got brief glimpses of shows like Mission Hill and The Oblongs for the three weeks they were on the air before they were shot out back behind the studio. Around this time, before the days of Grey’s Anatomy and LOST, ABC didn’t really have many heavy-hitters on its hands, and when that’s the case as a network, you’re more likely to take a chance on more unconventional shows, like a cartoon based on that vulgar, indie black and white movie that barely anybody saw. But between the production of Clerks: TAS and it making it to air, a little show called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? premiered on ABC and became a gargantuan hit. I remember when that show took off, it was literally airing it five nights a week at one point, and they’d still get enormous ratings each night. People just couldn’t get enough of it. That being said, ABC was less inclined to give Clerks: TAS the time of day, dumping it not even during mid-season, but in the summer, premiering May 31, 2000. Despite six episodes having been produced, only two aired before the show was unceremoniously canceled, a mere blip in the history of network television. Continue reading “ReView Askew: Clerks – The Animated Series (2000)” →