This weekend i watched the 6 episodes of The Tick. I don’t watch a lot of TV because it’s usually so dark and dreary it’s painful to watch and makes you feel bad. I don’t want to get in that head space This followed a little bit of that trend as it’s MUCH darker than the original live action show, and needless to say a lot more than the cartoon or comic.
This story is really Arthur’s show, and probably should have been titled as such, but The Tick is a brand where we know what characters we’ll be getting.
Arthur is a mal-adjusted person, who sees things, gets really depressed, has OCD, probably some PTSD from watching his father get destroyed by The Terror. He’s lived in terror his whole life and has been trying to prove that The Terror is still around. The Tick shows up and brings Arthur his moth-bunny suit, which has lots of cool powers, and Arthur thinks he’s hallucinating the Tick at first. That first episode is pretty darn dark, and I recommend at least binging through 2 perhaps 3 to really get into the series because of that. I get why they did it but it needs more to get its legs.
The Tick also acts as narrator, saying some very over the top superhero things. The snark factor is extremely high, like most modern comedies. It makes it hard to have real laugh out loud moments in the first couple episodes because of the darkness and that.
I do enjoy the Terror’s look, the primary villain Ms. Lint and everything. It was cute, the characters were well done and had the spirit of their old iterations, which made them very easy to latch onto.
The filming was done in a very low-budget manner, which I found fits the Tick quite well. At least it looks low budget. There were some pretty big action scenes and effects in there for what this was. I love the Tick’s little commentary about everything, it’s very fun throughout.
Frankly, if you come at this with an open mind not expecting a series drama and not expecting the tick of yore, you’ll have fun with this series. There are great laughter moments, the plot progresses very well — and very seriously, maybe too much so but it worked. I love the scenes with Arthur’s family the best. Walter rules.
And it ends on a cliffhanger — very poignantly so. Definitely needs a season 2 and i hope we get one.
My only complaint is the Tick never once said “SPOON!”
9/10
Never will there be a Tick to match Patrick Warburton.
Just sayin’.
And I remember picking this up in 1986.
Don Simpson has never recovered.
Warburton IS a great actor, but not a very good match for the role. He kinda underplayed the character- lacking the self-bombasity. He was overall too mellow. I’m gonna try to watch all 6 today if I remember my password to Amazon prime (I hate logging in to get a freakin’ Coke outta the pop-machine
True in some ways. I thought he was fun though.
I’ve always loved THE TICK animated series, as well as the various comic book series of THE TICK (especially Leslie McClaine’s run).
On Youtube, I watched three scenes of Amazon Prime’s THE TICK. However, I hated the foul language and the use of God’s name as a curse word.
I’ll stick with THE TICK animated series and comics.
Yeah I was sad about the swearing too. Barring that — could almost watch this with my kids. It’s a little on the dark side but they didn’t need to put that in there 🙁 .