Drawn Together: The Complete Collection - DVD Review

[Michael Scott]

Drawn Together: The Complete Collection

Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score: ​

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Movie

I had some fond memories of Drawn Together back when I was watching late night Comedy Central after working a mid shift in the early 2000s era. I would come home, heat up some leftover chicken from the fridge and flip the channels trying to find something interesting. About that time Drawn Together was just starting and I happened upon the pilot purely by accident. The sheer, over the top, shock style comedy was so different from the average Comedy Central cartoon at the time (not the most bizarre, but definitely the most shocking) so I watched the series each week and remember laughing myself silly for about the first year. After that my shift changed at work so I don’t remember watching the rest of the three seasons, so I was more than curious to check out the Complete Collection that Paramount was releasing. The series did get individual seasons back in 2005, 2007 and 2008 as well as a complete series release in 2009, but the powers that be brought the show back with a DTV movie in 2010, so this new complete collection is the first time that all three seasons AND the movie have been in the same box set together.

You know the world of reality television has gotten out of hand when the parodies of reality TV are better than the TV shows themselves. Survivor and Real World were OK shows in their times, but TV stations have gotten so enamored with a show that can be shot on a few grand budget and then make millions off the production rights. So much so that there was a HUGE gap during the 2000-2010 era where there wasn’t a whole of anything on TV besides all of these Houswives of.. or Survivor knockoffs and spinoffs running around. Thus comes Drawn Together, an animated parody of shows like The Real World where 8 different cartoon caricatures has to live together in the same house under the guise of being in a reality TV show.

We have Xandir the overtly gay video game adventurer, Toot the psychotic Betty Boop ripoff, Foxxy Brown (the resident Josie and the Pussycats knockoff), Princess Clara who reeks of 1990s Disney Princess, The perpetually self absorbed Captain Hero, with Ling Ling being the obligatory Pikachu reference, and Woldar Sockbat being a twisted version of Ren and Stimpy. The 8 cartoons are basically the punchline for each and every episode, with Ling Ling and Sockbat being the cartoon caricatures of their animate counterparts, while the rest of the cast is a walking personality disorder. Each of them has more hangups than a druggy going into rehab, and these hangups make up all of the “conflicts” that arise from different personalities living together

The premise of the show really was brilliant, with them lampooning the lunacy and stupidity that occurs in most of these “group home” reality shows. However, once you get past the reality show veneer the series is spectacularly slim on anything intelligent to say. Almost 15 years since its inception either the show hasn’t aged very well, or I’ve actually grown up a little bit. The humor is there for the first half of the first season, but then steeply falls off a cliff once you realize the that the show is nothing but one giant fart, genital, defecation or sex joke that is repeated ad nausea throughout the three seasons. In fact, the third season is so repetitious that even Comedy Central figured out that it wasn’t going anywhere, so they shuffled it off to the “forgotten shows” time slot on the channel and just let it fade out into obscurity.

Then along came the movie in 2010, which tried to revive the show by going back to the producers and asking them if they had any ideas. Well, even Matt Silverstein and Dave Jesser had no idea what to do, so they went COMPLETELY meta by having the characters in the show realize that they’ve been canceled and trying to do something about that problem. Unfortunately this brilliant little meta plot is well thought out in theory, but practically it was a dive bomb, with the characters just trying to one up themselves for 70 minutes, making the whole thing feel like just a 70 minute episode from the weak third season.





Rating:

Not Rated by the MPAA




Video:

The 1.33:1 Mpeg2 encode is the exact same discs as the previous single seasons, as well as the complete series from a few years back. The same goes for the DTV movie that was included. The movie looks a hair better than the show as it was product later, but not by a whole lot. The series does have a few problems with mild wavering of the image, as well as some blurriness here and there. Colors are natural and bright, and details are well done, it’s just those long shots that look like there’s some shimmering and wavering of the backgrounds. There doesn’t appear to be any major macroblocking or artifacting otherwise. Black levels are solid, and overall it’s a good looking transfer, but not one that’s going to stun and shock you ala modern CGI shows.






Audio:

Drawn Together comes with a rather pedestrian 2.0 Dolby Digital track, but while it’s rather bland, it’s not something I can blame on the encode. The Comedy Central show was produced on the cheap for a TV station, so we weren’t exactly expecting a wiz bang audio track. The dialog is clean and clear, which is the main focus, and the little bouts of music or action in the front of the room is more than legible. There’s no surround use or LFE, but everything is clean and I heard no distortions or imbalances in the basic 2.0 mix.








Extras:

• Audio Commentaries By Cast And Creators
• Behind-The-Scenes Interviews
• Karaoke Sing-Along
• Censored/Uncensored Game
• Deleted Scenes
• Anatomy Of An Animated Sex Scene
• Re-Animated Drawn Together: From The Small Screen To The Slightly Bigger Screen
• Drawn Together: The Legacy
• Drawn Together: True Confessionals

Final Score: ​

Drawn Together is….well….a bit of an acquired low brow taste. My young days when viewing this are much different than me 10 years later, so my tastes seem to find it less entertaining than when I was in my 20s. The crude humor and “shock jock” style of wit gets old fast and really is only humorous for an episode or so. The seasons got progressively less witty to the point where Comedy Central shuffled it off into the “forgotten” time slots before ending it in 2007. The movie didn’t really revive the show in any way, but was like an extended episode, so while the series had its charms and humorous moments, this complete collection boxset is for the fans as most people will find it just vulgarity without any real message.



Technical Specifications:

Starring: Adam Corolla, Jess Harnell, Abbey McBride
Created by: Dave Jeser, Matthew Silverstein, Jordan Young
Aspect Ratio: 1.33.1 MPEG 2
Audio: English: Dolby Digital 2.0
Studio: Paramount
Rated: NR
Runtime: 860 Minutes
DVD Release Date: October 17th, 2017

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• Michael Scott
• May 11, 2017

Recommendation: For the Fans​

 

[tripplej]

Thanks for the review. I never saw this when it aired originally. Will try and check this one out.

 

[Asere]

I have never heard of them before.

 

[Michael Scott]

It was an oddball show that got sidelined within the second season