“The Drawn Together Movie: The Movie!” Blu-ray Review
Just when you thought it was gone for good, Paramount brought them back! After a final season on Comedy Central back in 2007, everyone who loved the raunchier-than-South Park (it’s true, look it up) show were lamenting that nothing like it would ever grace our TV screens again. Well guess what—you’re wrong. Something like it has come again and it’s called…Drawn Together. Yup, the original characters, the original voice actors, and the original crew behind the series returns for one more go-around in The Drawn Together Movie: The Movie!.
Synopsis
The incorrigible cast of the most offensive animated reality show ever to air is back, and they’re starring in their very own feature-length movie! When the mystery-solving musician Foxxy Love notices she and her fellow housemates can curse without being bleeped – something they’ve never been able to do before – she realizes their show has been canceled. Determined to get back on the air, the gang travels to Make-A-Point Land in order to get a point (and get back on the air). With more depravity than could have ever been shown on TV, this is the definitive Drawn Together experience.
My sense of humor is definitely on the outskirts of the norm; it ranges far and wide, past the potty humor into the darker regions, but I think I’ve met my match with Drawn Together. I always admired that the show even existed (kudos to Comedy Central for that), but man did it really push a lot of buttons. It was never popular enough to raise a stink with censors or anything, but the lengths that they went to on the show was really just…devastating at times. I questioned if I should even be laughing at some of the stuff and would even pass it off as truly “disgusting” if the wrong person was around me while watching it. It was just that type of show—embarrassing to admit you watched it, because the only way you could continue watching it was if you enjoyed it. It was almost like comedy masochism, as I tuned in each week to see how far I could be repulsed before I had to look away. Mind you it was most often Toot doing the more repulsive things, so I’d usually just try to ignore it whenever she went too far. But sometimes you can’t look away fast enough…and that’s when her and Xander at a camp with Jesus out the window vomiting profusely gets engrained into your head.
But enough about the disgusting nature of the series, how’s the film? Well…it’s a direct-to-video outing so that means that it was able to push even more buttons than the series did…so be prepared to laugh your ass off and question why you just spent $20 on it. The movie starts out with the characters becoming aware that their TV show was cancelled by the devious producer—The Jew. Yes, the movie went there. They went even further when The Jew attempts to destroy the Drawn Together cast by unleashing an animation killing robot named “I.S.R.A.E.L.” So…yup, the series continues to push buttons and chances are you may come across a joke you’re actually offended by…which, if so—congratulations! You have some kind of boundary left that this series hasn’t already destroyed by repeatedly offending it.
The key thing to take in about this movie (and series, really) is there’s no point to it. It’s only real purpose is to go as far as you possibly can with a joke until it becomes so lewd it’d cause your grandmother to not visit you for several years if she caught you watching it. It’s just that kind of show and I quite honestly love it because of that—it’s rude, crude, and lewd and entirely pointless. You may ask what the difference between that and South Park is…but the key thing to keep in mind about South Park is you tend to learn something from it. Drawn Together…not so much. In fact I’d say the whole intent would be to just make you dumber or help you learn new and offensive words and phrases.
Essentially the film is just more of the same as what we got from the series, except that it attempts to give it some finality (rather than some bullcrap clip show like they ended it with). Who knows, if this does well enough we might get another entry; it’s an entirely pointless show and if this is your first introduction to it then you really are in a good position if you enjoy it. With all of the series available on DVD, you can easily backtrack and re-watch all of the explicit goodness that it provides. Overall the film is really just more of the same but those who miss the series will find it enjoyable nonetheless. Recommended for fans.
The Blu-ray
Perhaps you read the review above and thought to yourself “That’s fantastic! I’m going to go to Amazon right now and buy it on Blu-ray!” You can certainly try to do that, but you’ll eventually find after a few minutes of searching that the Blu-ray version is actually a Best Buy exclusive. The DVD is (or will be) sold everywhere, but the Blu-ray is only at Best Buy (both online and in-store, it seems). Not terribly inconvenient, but still a bit of an annoyance for those that don’t like the story. The disc itself just arrives in a standard Elite Blu-ray case without any fancy inserts…which is kind of strange considering there are 3-D elements within the film that you need glasses for…and they don’t include any, so I hope you have some from some other releases.
The film arrives with an AVC encoded transfer and with it being an all-digital production, you’d expect it to look fantastic…and it does! Phew, dodged that bullet. Until the 3-D sequences come up anyway, which are really incredibly messy not only with the glasses on but also off. It’s as if they were encoded separately and shoehorned in because they just don’t look nearly as good as the rest of the transfer does. The audio, a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix, is considerably more appealing, however, with a lot of surround usage complimenting all of the various grotesquely violent acts that occur on screen. It’s a decent A/V package, but it’s nothing to really die for.
Extras are rather robust and include:
• Featurette: Drawn Together True Confessionals
• Featurette: Drawn Together: The Legacy
• Featurette: Anatomy of an Animated Sex Scene
• Featurette: Re-Animating Drawn Together: From the Small Screen to the Slightly Bigger Screen
• Featurette: D.I.Y. 3D Glasses
• Additional Scenes: Deleted Scenes
• Other: Drawn Together Minisodes
• Commentary: Audio Commentary with Matt Silverstein, Dave Jeser, Jordan Young & Kurt Vanzo
All of the individual extras make up over an hour’s worth of goodies, but they’re all pretty brief. It’s the audio commentary that you’ll enjoy the most as the participants are not only fully versed with the material (they created it, after all) but also are just flat out hilarious. There’s talk of future animated outings throughout the featurettes, so perhaps this isn’t the last we’ll see from this thoroughly disgusting show.
Overall a Recommended disc if you’re a fan of the series. Although I’m not sure you’ll get much out of this Blu-ray that you wouldn’t get from the DVD, aside from a boost in the A/V quality that is—all of the extras are the same.
The Drawn Together Movie: The Movie! arrives on DVD and Blu-ray on April 20th.