When I first saw this show on One Saturday Morning, I thought it was just another Recess or Pepper Ann, the episodes were funny, but over-all not that exciting. Yet as I began to watch it on Disney Channel recently I realized how great the show is. The voice-acting, (Jason Marsden and Phil LaMarr as Tino and Carver in particular) is fantastic and the characters (with the possible exception of Tish) are extremely three-dimensional. The characters are more mature than the characters in most Disney cartoons, and the show is extremely funny. You can all kinds of humor with Tino's bitter sarcasm, Carver's over-the-top melodrama, Lor's random idiocy and Tish's ridiculously large vocabularly. They missed the mark by making Tish the quintessential "smart one" but other than that no one had a blatant stereotype. Tino's paranoid wise-ass is the show-stealer and makes quite a good main character, and the great character of "Tino's Mom" dares to make a non-corny parent in a cartoon (a huge rarity.) All in all, this is better than most sitcoms on TV, which is more than I could say for most cartoons (especially Disney ones.)
Review of The Weekenders
