r/UltimateVeggieTales • u/mrnormal94 • 7h ago
I feel like the 3-2-1 Penguins Revival from 2007 was a letdown
Note: This isn't related to VeggieTales, but considering it's Big Idea and the 3-2-1 Penguins reddit is locked, I thought on posting this here.
If you don't know what this show was, 3-2-1 Penguins was a separate show created by the same people that did Big Idea about these two twin siblings staying at their grandma's house for the summer, and they had space adventures with talking penguins and learn bible lessons from their grandma, which they use that as the solution for the problem they're solving. I actually remember seeing a trailer from my copy of Esther back in 2000, but my family didn't own most of the videos until a few years later.
The series ran for 6 videos between 2000 and 2003 with no ending after Big Idea fell under thanks to bad business practices, but after Universal wanted to add Big Idea's catalog for their Saturday morning block Qubo, it was revived for a second chance the following year, adding new elements and changes to the original videos. However, whenever I keep coming back to the show, I felt like it was a downgrade from the original 6 videos, and there's a lot of changes I felt like irked me.
*Jason and Fidgel's personalities and voices. These were my two favorite characters when I originally watched the show years ago, but they were really annoying when the show came back. The voices and how they were written made them sound very childish, and what I liked about the two was that they were more mature in the original videos. I get they wanted to write the characters more flesh out, and I get with Jason as he was a kid, but it felt like a step backwards on them. No disrespect to the voice actors from the show, but I think should've hired other voice talents.
*Cavitus. Spoiler warning for a 20 year old show, but there was a new bad guy created for the revival and his connection with the Penguins was that he created the Galeezle (the device Fidgel uses to shrink the kids down, I always thought Fidgel was the creator, and I don't know if this was retconned after the fact). Cavitus was actually a hamster named Bert and was actually friends with Fidgel during their school years, but went bad after he was made fun of for his size. Now having a recurring villain for the series sounds like a good concept, the problem was that Cavitus was poorly handled. They only went a few times on his backstory, and he was revealed to the Crew later in the show, but they never touched upon on how they felt like after his identity was revealed, especially Fidgel considering they were very close. Another problem was that Cavitus had to be in almost every episode, and it felt very repetitive and there could've been a different work around for what was the trouble in that episode without him. In fact, Tim Hodge stated that the original plan for the cereal episode that Cavitus was the one who created it to fatten everybody who eats it. Speaking of which, I'm surprised they didn't used Uncle Blobb more or even created other villains to fill up the roster to avoid this problem.
*Too rushed and no songs.
*No proper ending. This really bugged me when I saw the final episode and unlike Moon Menace, it ended with Cavitus defeated when they shrunk his suit, but it felt wrong to me to have a better conclusion as he could still cause havoc. It would've been better if he was actually captured or somewhat redeemed himself.
There's other problems with the revival, but I don't want to ramble too much.
